The Globe and Mail — Anger Erupts Over Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Even though he is being lauded for his diplomatic prowess, former Finnish president and ‘peace broker’ Martti Ahtisaari has managed to rack up an impressive list of enemies, says columnist Doug Saunders. Ahtisaari was most recently credited for playing a key role in the interminable talks with Serbia that resulted in the Albanian-majority Kosovo becoming an independent nation earlier this year. This did not win him any popularity prizes with the Serbs who “saw him as an advocate of European interests” and bitterly resented the loss of Kosovo. Saunders cites instances of Serbians calling Ahtisaari a “Nazi” and his winning the prize a “sick joke”. Nonetheless, his efforts ended years of violence and allowed Serbia to move towards stability. Ahtisaari’s much-criticised “lack of neutrality” says Saunders, is what makes him so effective. “He has not always pretended to be guided by high principles...he is simply interested in getting the conflict to end....” Behind his “bland Scandinavian facade”, Ahtisaari knows how to “dangle very solid carrots and sticks at the bargaining table”.

Forbes — A Prize Tarnished

According to Stanford professor of medicine Abraham Verghese, the most startling fact about the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine is not who got the award, but who didn’t. The committee’s choice of French scientists Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi to share half the prize for ‘discovering’ HIV, was a “slap in the face for American virologist Robert Gallo, “dismissing his role in the saga of scientific discovery around AIDS”. Gallo first described retroviruses and his lab identified HIV in 1984 around the same time that the French scientists did. However, since the virus he studied came from a sample sent by Luc Montagnier, Gallo was largely discredited in Europe but did fight back. This did not help him win friends there. According to Verghese, “not to give Gallo the Nobel Prize when rewarding other breakthroughs in AIDS winds up diminishing the prize’s lustre”. Claiming that the Nobel judges are unduly influenced by “politics and personalities”, Verghese says the solution would be for the “US (recession and all) to institute a prize that eclipses the Nobel, at least in monetary value and eventually in prestige”.

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