Nobel Peace Prize awarded in Oslo to Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa | News from Germany about Europe | Dw

In Oslo on Friday, December 10, the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony was held for the laureates of 2021 – Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov and his Philippine colleague Maria Resse.

“I am fully aware that this award is intended for the entire journalistic community,” Muratov said at a press conference the day before. “We are going through difficult times.”

By tradition, all Nobel Prizes are awarded to laureates on December 10, the day of the death of the founder of the award, inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, as in 2020, only peace prize laureates were able to receive their medals and diplomas personally on this day – the Nobel Prizes in medicine / physiology, physics, chemistry, literature and economics were awarded a few days earlier at the homeland of the awardees. Due to antique restrictions, the event in the Norwegian capital’s town hall was held in an abbreviated format – only about 200 guests were invited to it, the evening gala banquet was canceled.

All the 2021 Nobel laureates will be honored on the evening of December 10 at another ceremony in Stockholm, which will be held in the presence of the Swedish royal family.

Award for Efforts to Protect Freedom of Expression

Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov became the first Russian citizen to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Previously, its laureates were citizens of the USSR – human rights activist Andrei Sakharov (1975) and President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev (1990). Academician Yevgeny Chazov (1985) received another award on behalf of the Doctors of the World for the Prevention of Nuclear War organization he founded.

Muratov shared the award with Philippine journalist Maria Ressa. The Nobel Committee’s rationale stated that the prize was awarded to them for “efforts to protect freedom of expression, which is a prerequisite for democracy and lasting peace.”

The report stressed that Muratov did not abandon the independent policy of Novaya Gazeta, despite repeated threats against the newspaper’s employees and the murder of several journalists.

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  Fertilizer and chemical weapons maker

  One of the most controversial Nobel Prize winners is Fritz Haber. The Chemistry Prize was awarded to him in 1918 for his invention of the method for synthesizing ammonia, a discovery that was crucial for the production of fertilizers. However, he is also known as the “father of chemical weapons” for his work in the field of chlorine poison gas used during the First World War.

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  Deadly discovery

  Another German scientist, Otto Han – pictured in the center – was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of nuclear fission. Although he never worked on the military application of this discovery, it led directly to the development of nuclear weapons. Gan received the award a few months after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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  Breakthrough banned

  Swiss chemist Paul Müller won the 1948 Medicine Prize for his discovery that DDT can effectively kill insects that spread diseases such as malaria. The use of the pesticide has saved millions of lives in its time. However, later environmentalists began to argue that DDT poses a threat to human health and harms nature. Today its use is banned all over the world.

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  Inconvenient reward

  Because of its overt and indirect political overtones, the Peace Prize is perhaps the most controversial of all Nobel prizes. In 1935, the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky received it for exposing Germany’s secret rearmament. Osetsky himself was in prison on charges of treason, and an outraged Hitler accused the committee of interfering in the internal affairs of Germany.

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  (Possible) Peace Prize

  The Norwegian committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho in 1973 met with harsh criticism. The Nobel Prize was supposed to be a symbol of recognition of merit in achieving a ceasefire during the Vietnam War, but Le Duc Tho refused to receive it. The Vietnam War continued for two more years.

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  Libertarian and dictator

  Free market advocate Milton Friedman is one of the most controversial recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in economics. The committee’s decision in 1976 sparked international protests over Friedman’s ties to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Friedman had indeed visited Chile a year earlier, and critics say his ideas inspired a regime that tortured and killed thousands.

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  Futile hopes

  The Peace Prize, which was shared in 1994 by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, was supposed to serve as an additional incentive for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in the Middle East. Instead, further negotiations fell through and Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli nationalist a year later.

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  Eerie memoirs

  Mayan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchu ​​won the 1992 Peace Prize “for the fight for social justice.” Subsequently, this decision caused a lot of controversy, since falsifications were allegedly discovered in her memoirs. The atrocities she described about the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala made her famous. However, many are convinced that she deserved the award anyway.

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  Premature reward

  When the 2009 Peace Prize was awarded to Barack Obama, many were surprised, including himself. Less than a year in office by then, he received the award for his “enormous effort to strengthen international diplomacy.” Critics and some of Obama’s supporters felt the award was premature, and he received it even before he had a chance to take real steps.

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  Posthumous award

  In 2011, Jules Hoffman, Bruce Boettler and Ralph Steinman were named laureates of medicine by the Nobel Committee for their discoveries in the study of the immune system. The problem was, Steinman had died of cancer a few days earlier. According to the rules, the prize is not awarded posthumously. But the committee nevertheless awarded it to Steinman, justifying it by the fact that it was not yet known about his death.

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  “The greatest omission”

  The Nobel Prize is controversial not only because of who it was awarded to, but also because someone never received it. In 2006, Nobel Committee member Geir Lundestad said that “undoubtedly the greatest omission in our 106-year history was that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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