PERPLEXED

Despite being shortlisted five times, Dame Beryl Bainbridge never won the Booker Prize, a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, or Zimbabwe. Mahatma Gandhi, neither, despite his pre-eminence, won the Nobel Peace Prize, though he had been nominated on five separate occasions between 1937 and 1948. In 1948 Gandhi was assassinated and no prize was awarded, a decree given that there was ‘no suitable living candidate’. It is, of course, up to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to ultimately choose whoever it sees fit to hold the prestigious award. The Norwegian parliament appoints the committee because, when Alfred Nobel died, Norway had been ruled by the same king as its Scandinavian neighbour, Sweden, since the war between the two nations in 1814. It is becoming increasingly difficult, though, to ignore the committee’s aberrant selections.

Two weeks into his first term as President, Barack Obama was nominated for the prize, simply on the basis that the committee had heard his speech in Cairo in which he delivered, at times, perplexing and enigmatic statements. Conjecture such as… ‘Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance’ [as seen] in ‘Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition’ was a presumptuous viewpoint based on little evidence.

The first U.S. presidential laureate had been Theodore Roosevelt, an award that surprised many because Roosevelt had led his own irregular cavalry in an invasion of Cuba. Other implausible laureates followed: Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Al Gore among them.

And what of this year’s award? Those in favour of chemical weapons are likely to be displeased with the choice of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Yet, of more concern, is the smoke-screen that has thickened in search of those chemical weapons that has created unabated slaughter in Syria’s ruthless and bloody civil war.