In just a month, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Too often, the five Norwegian politicians who decide the honor end up embarrassing themselves.
In 1991, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the honor. Years later, she would support ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. The committee, likewise, awarded Palestinian Liberation Organization Chief Yasser Arafat the 1994 prize, never mind that Arafat rejected the peace his own negotiators hashed out at Camp David in 2000 and supported terrorism until his 2004 death.
The committee was explicit that it awarded the prize to Yemeni al Islah party activist Tawakkol Karman in 2011 because it wanted to normalize the Muslim Brotherhood. Karman certainly advocated the human rights of her fellow Islamists but remained silent when Islamists turned their guns on Christians or Jews. Three years later, Malala Yousafzai won the prize. She, too, promoted moral inversion when she aligned herself with Hamas propaganda but remained largely silent on the group that perpetrated the Oct. 7 massacre. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed used his 2019 award to shield himself as he launched a genocide against Tigrayans.
Part of the reason why the Norwegian Nobel Committee fails so spectacularly is that, unlike its Swedish counterparts, it bases its awards on aspiration rather than lifetime achievement.
When the committee awards the Nobel Peace Prize to those with demonstrated achievement, however, the results can be spectacular, especially when the recipient continues to suffer against autocrats who would silence him or her. This was the case in 1983 when Lech Walesa, a Polish labor leader, won the prize. He was unable to accept it in person for fear that Poland’s communist government would prevent his return to the country. That was a small sacrifice by the man whose actions unleashed a cascade that ultimately freed hundreds of millions languishing behind the Iron Curtain.
The committee made the 1989 award to the Dalai Lama in the same spirit. The Chinese Communist Party might buy the greedy and co-opt the week. But four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Nobel Peace Prize confirmed that no amount of lipstick on the People’s Republic of China could change the reality of a regime that had killed tens of millions of people in a naked quest for power.
The Norwegians waste many prizes with empty or trendy virtue signaling, but when given to dissidents fighting dictatorships, the Nobel Peace Prize can be kryptonite for totalitarians.
This is why the Norwegian Nobel Committee should give its prize this year to Russian journalist and political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza. No one can doubt Kara-Murza’s bravery, and he has already done more in just over four decades than most people do in a lifetime. Russian President Vladimir Putin had him poisoned twice, which Kara-Murze miraculously recovered from. Putin had already had Kara-Murza’s mentor, Boris Nemtsov, murdered.
Kara-Murza could easily retire to London or his modest townhome outside Washington, D.C., but his goal was never simply to advocate Russia’s freedom but to achieve it. This is why, against the backdrop of Putin’s purges and the Ukraine invasion, Kara-Murza returned to Russia. For lawyer Alexei Navalny, this proved fatal. Kara-Murza survived, thanks in large part to the Biden-brokered multi-country prisoner swap.
The long arm of Putin’s transnational repression does not stop at Russia’s borders. Putin knows that while he represents the past and a KGB vision of Russia, Kara-Murza represents the future, one in which Russians prosper under freedom and democracy. Putin will stop at nothing to kill that vision. Awarding Kara-Murza the Nobel Peace Prize could both enable Kara-Murza’s vision to penetrate the Russian propaganda bubble from Kaliningrad to the Kamchatka Penninsula and give perhaps the boldest dissident on Earth a modicum of security by ensuring the consequences of his murder grow exponentially higher.
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More than two and a half years ago, Putin launched a war of annihilation against Ukraine. He brought ruin to Russia. A Nobel Peace Prize for Kara-Murza could just rescue it.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.