By Medea Benjamin  and Ariel Gold
Common Dreams

In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial.

While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like a group that is well deserving of this honor, Ukrainian peace leader Yurii Sheliazhenko wrote a stinging critique.

Sheliazhenko, who heads up the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and is a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, accused the Center for Civil Liberties of embracing the agendas of such problematic international donors as the U.S. Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy.

The National Endowment for Democracy supports NATO membership for Ukraine; insists that no negotiations with Russia are possible and shames those who seek compromise; wants the West to impose a dangerous no-fly zone; says that only Russian President Vladimir Putin violates human rights in Ukraine; never criticizes the Ukrainian government for suppressing pro-Russian media, parties, and public figures; never criticizes the Ukrainian army for war crimes and human rights violations, and refuses to stand up for the human right, recognized under international law, to conscientious objection to military service.

[Related: Nobel Committee Gets Peace Prize Wrong Yet Again]

Supporting conscientious objectors is the role of Sheliazhenko and his organization, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement (UPM). While we hear a lot about Russian war resisters, as Sheliazhenko points out even inside Ukraine, which is portrayed in Western media as a country entirely united in its war with Russia, there are men who don’t want to fight.

The Ukrainian Pacifist Movement was founded in 2019 when fighting in the separatist-ruled Donbas region was at a peak and Ukraine was forcing its citizens to participate in the civil war. According to Sheliazhenko, Ukrainian men were “being given military summonses off of the streets, out of night clubs and dormitories, or snatched for military service for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public drunkenness, or casual rudeness to police officers.” 

To make matters worse, when Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine suspended its citizens’ right to conscientious objection and forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country; nevertheless, since February, over 100,000 Ukrainian draft-eligible men managed to flee instead of fight. It’s estimated that several thousand more have been detained while trying to escape.

International human rights law affirms peoples’ right, due to principled conviction, to refuse to participate in military conflict and conscientious objection has a long and rich history. In 1914, a group of Christians in Europe, hoping to avert the impending war, formed the International Fellowship of Reconciliation to support conscientious objectors. When the U.S. joined WWI, social reformer and women’s rights activist Jane Addams protested. 

She was harshly criticized at the time but, in 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. 

In Russia, hundreds of thousands of young men are refusing to fight. According to a source inside Russia’s Federal Security Service, within three days of Russia’s announcement that it was calling up 300,000 reservists, 261,000 men fled the country. Those who could booked flights; others drove, bicycled, and walked across the border.

Belarusians have also joined the exodus. According to estimates by Connection e.V., a European organization that supports conscientious objectors and deserters, an estimated 22,000 draft-eligible Belarusians have fled their country since the war began.

The Russian organization Kovcheg, or The Ark, helps Russians fleeing because of anti-war positions, condemnation of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, and/or persecution they are experiencing in Russia. 

In Belarus, the organization Nash Dom runs a “NO means NO” campaign to encourage draft-eligible Belarusians not to fight.

Despite refusing to fight being a noble and courageous act for peace — the penalty in Russia for refusing the draft is up to 10 years in prison and in Ukraine, it is at least up to three years, and likely much higher, with hearings and verdicts closed to the public — neither Kovcheg, Nash Dom nor the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, were announced as Nobel Peace Prize winners.

The U.S. government nominally supports Russia’s war resisters. On Sept. 27, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared that Russians fleeing Putin’s call up were “welcome” in the U.S. and encouraged them to apply for asylum.

But as far back as last October, before Russia invaded Ukraine, amid tit-for-tat U.S.-Russia tensions, Washington announced it would henceforth only issue visas to Russians through the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, 750 miles away from Moscow.

To put a further damper on Russian hopes of refuge in the U.S., on the same day as the White House held its press conference where it encouraged draft-eligible Russians to seek U.S. asylum, the Biden administration announced that it would be continuing into fiscal year 2023 its FY2022 global refugee cap of 125,000. 

You would think that those resisting this war would be able to find refuge in European countries, as Americans fleeing the Vietnam war did in Canada.

Indeed, when the Ukraine war was in its early stages, European Council President Charles Michel called on Russian soldiers to desert, promising them protection under EU refugee law. But in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked his Western allies to reject all Russian emigres. Currently, all non-visa travel from Russia to E.U. countries is suspended. 

As Russian men fled after Putin’s announcement, Latvia closed its border with Russia and Finland said it was likely going to be tightening its visa policy for Russians. 

Had the Nobel Peace Prize awardees been the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian organizations that are supporting war resisters and peacemakers, it would have drawn global attention to the courageous young men taking this stand and perhaps opened more avenues for them to get asylum abroad.

It could have also initiated a much-needed conversation about how the U.S. is supplying Ukraine with an endless flow of weapons but not pushing for negotiations to end a war so dangerous that President Joe Biden is warning of “nuclear Armageddon.”

It certainly would have been more in line with Alfred Nobel’s desire to bring global recognition to those who have “done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies.”

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the 2018 book, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her previous books include: Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection(2016); Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control” (2013); Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide) (2005). 

Ariel Gold is the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation – USA, the oldest peace and justice organization in the U.S. Previously, she was the national co-director of CODEPINK, where she helped manage the Peace in Ukraine coalition. 

This article is from Common Dreams.

The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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By Fredrik S. Heffermehl
in Oslo
Special to Consortium News

This week one hundred years have passed since the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the peace prize for 1922 to Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian polar explorer, scientist and thinker who was later named Norwegian of the Century.

Norwegians were jubilant to see him receive Nobel honors, but the world had every reason to regret it as a farewell to Alfred Nobel´s great donation for global peace.

According to the Nobel Committee it was Nansen’s “work for prisoners of war and starving people that secured Nansen the Peace Prize.” Great humanitarian work to alleviate the consequences of war is a worthy cause, but Nobel had higher ambitions: a prize to end war by global co-operation on peace and disarmament.

Prevention is much better than repair. In his will, Nobel described the type of recipients and the type of peace work he had in mind for his “prize for champions of peace.” It is filled with language about the community of nations, disarmament and peace congresses.

The committee had never done its first and most basic duty.  It had never checked what Nobel himself wanted for his prize as described in his will. 

Instead, it handed out its own prize, based on its own interpretation of a word — peace —  a word that, over the years, it has imbued with an increasingly free and limitless content.

Could the executors of a will have committed a more egregious failure?

In countless articles and speeches by laureates, the committee was constantly reminded of Nobel’s vision of peace through global demilitarization but it has ignored it. 

I found this out when I studied the committee’s internal archives for my latest book, A Farewell to War (as yet only available in Norwegian).

Thus, we may fairly assume that the committee in 1922 chose Nansen with full knowledge that it did not respect Nobel’s will.

A new mentality took hold. From now on, Nobel’s intention expressed in his will would have little influence on the awards. Despite the occasional polite nod to the name Nobel, the committee has never, as it should, made known his ideas for peace.

I rediscovered the wording of the will in 2007. After 110 years, it was high time to make this known, but neither the Storting (Norwegian Parliament) nor the Nobel Committee showed the slightest interest.

In 2008 I published the book Nobel’s Will, the first known, professional interpretation of the document.  

[Related: 2021 Nobel Peace Prize: Freedom for the Press or the US?]

Nobel himself called it the “prize for champions of peace.” But when he died in 1896 the political winds had turned. Norway then feared that war might be necessary to break free from the union with Sweden.

In my latest book I surmise that the presidents of Norway’s Parliament in chambers quietly decided to disregard the clear words of the will on “reduction or abolition of standing armies.” Instead, they called it the “Peace Prize” and elected themselves to form a majority in the five-member award committee to give out the prize as they saw fit.

Worst Decade in Prize’s History

The award fell to the U.S. president, Teddy Roosevelt, in 1906 but not for the  kind of popular peace work Nobel would have supported. The award to Nansen in 1922 then ushered in the worst decade in the history of the peace prize.

The First World War had weakened the belief that militarism could be reined in. Awards to hawkish politicians became common.

In 1929 the award, with every reason, paid tribute to the Briand-Kellogg Pact, a ground-breaking treaty against war. Tucked away in the Nobel Committee’s archives, I found that the nominees who should have received the honor that year, Salmon O. Levinsohn, Charles C. Morrison and John Dewey, were denied.

These intellectual giants had mobilized a major movement in the United States to end war with a total ban.

Instead, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, led by Norway’s combined prime minister and foreign minister, Johan Ludwig Mowinckel, awarded the prize to statesman Frank Kellogg, the U.S. secretary of state.

With this, it became very clear that a committee controlled by parliament was not the best suited to strengthen popular pressure for world peace on political leaders.

“War cannot be regulated or controlled, it creates its own merciless laws; the whole system of war, with its web of power and its portent of death, must be uprooted, rejected, declared illegal – abolished.” That was how the Outlawry movement of Levinsohn, Morrison and Dewey formulated their views at the time.

Many have said the same over the years, expressing ideas very far from the political culture that dominates today. The demand for the demilitarization of international politics may seem to be a political idea threatened with extinction.

A main task for the Nobel Committee should be to stimulate an open debate about creating a global order of peace. Unfortunately, all too often, as with the latest prize shared between dissidents in Russia and Belarus, and a supporter of President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine, the committee has returned to its Cold War line.

The prize becomes a participant, taking sides in a war, rather than against it. It may be time to take awarding of this prize out of the hands of politicians.

Fredrik S. Heffermehl is a lawyer and author. His latest book is The Reverse of the Medal.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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