Sweden: Johan Galtung Receives the People’s Nobel Prize

Human Wrongs Watch

By Fredrik S. Heffermehl | The Nobel Peace Prize Watch*

4 December 2017 – TRANSCEND Media Service – On Sat 2 Dec 2017, Johan Galtung Received the People’s Nobel Prize 2017.

The Norwegian founder of peace research, Johan Galtung, received the People´s Nobel Prize in conformity with the testament of Alfred Nobel that is awarded annually by the Swedish peace group at Orust.

A seminar connected with the award ceremony reacted with consternation to the present infighting in the Norwegian parliament and to hear that the Stortinget selects the Nobel Committee members based on party interests not on knowledge of peace thinking and belief in cooperation among nations and the abolition of armaments that was the roadmap for global peace that Nobel intended to support with his prize.

“Norway should have left the task to others in 1949,” Galtung said, while at the same time offering recognition for committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen for this year´s prize against nuclear weapons.

The People´s Peace Prize came about after the Norwegian awards lost all contact with the Nobel method for durable Peace, stated Tomas Magnusson, a former President of the IPB and now a leader of Nobel Peace Prize Watch.

He informed that Johan Galtung for years has been on the NPPW short list of persons who are nominated and qualified to win the official Nobel Prize.

Magnusson thought that the struggle for seats in the Nobel committee this fall has made it apparent to everyone that the official Nobel Prize today is about self-centered Norwegian parliamentarians lusting for the coveted seats and how little the prize now has to do with the original peace vision Nobel wished to stimulate.

“An increasing number of people around the world, and also in Norway, find the Norwegian management of the prize embarrassing,” said Magnusson.

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Tahir learned to work on marble plaster and stone after his family fled to Iran. ” ©UNHCR/ C. Tolis[/caption]

After coming to Athens, I built my family’s home almost from scratch. Everywhere under the meandering moulding, my wife Sardor has hung up pictures of our three sons. Our leafy back yard is our favourite refuge. Sipping juice from our lemon tree and listening to our birds sing, we gather, chat and host the good neighbours with whom we have been blessed.

That’s my family’s sanctuary, so dear to my wife! ‘We have been running all our lives,’ she used to say, ‘we need a place where we belong; a place from which they cannot chase us- a place to say, this is where we come from’.

I did my best to give that to her and that’s my dream for every Afghan family that arrives in Greece. At the Afghan community centre, where I spend all my spare time, I provide guidance and practical support to newcomers. Crisis-ridden Greece is a not an easy place to establish roots. But I keep trying for the rapprochement of my Greek and Afghan homelands.”

” data-medium-file=”" data-large-file=”" class=” size-thumbnail wp-image-37487 alignleft” src=”https://www.transcend.org/tms/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Fredrik-S.-Heffermehl-150×150.jpg” alt=”" width=”150″ height=”150″ />*Fredrik S. Heffermehl, cand. jur, LLM NYU, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and ex-Vice President of the International Peace Bureau.

He is the author of The Nobel Peace Prize, What Nobel Really Wanted (Praeger, 2010 – expanded versions in Chinese, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish and [2014] Russian). [email protected] – http://www.nobelwill.org.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 2017-12-04: TMS: Sweden: Johan Galtung Receives the People’s Nobel Prize.

2017 Human Wrongs Watch