When the announcement came, this morning, that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had won the Nobel Peace Prize, not all of the group’s members were home in their beds, or near their homes at all. Some inspectors are in Syria, trying to translate the recent diplomatic openings regarding that country’s chemical weapons into some sort of reality. “We are conscious of the enormous trust that the international community has bestowed on us,” Ahmet Üzümcü, the group’s director general, said. The award, for which he said he was grateful, “will spur us to undying effort.”
Arms control is almost always a slog, its promises as easily characterized by disingenuousness as by hope. There was no Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 1915, 1916, or 1918, years when phosgene and chlorine were killing young soldiers in trenches in France and Belgium. The International Committee of the Red Cross got it in 1917, the year when mustard gas, which had the battlefield nickname “yellow cross,” was first used on a large scale at Ypres. This award, coming in a year when children died from gas in the streets of Ghouta, seems to be made in the same spirit: the weapons in Syria aren’t destroyed yet, and even if they are, the war may not end—and so, for some, this award will seem premature. But stubborn commitment, in the face of lying and disaster, that these weapons can and should be destroyed, and by means other than more war, is well worth recognizing.
The O.P.C.W. is relatively new—it dates to 1997, when the Chemical Weapons Convention came into effect, and is a creation of that agreement, which has now been signed by a hundred and eighty-nine countries. The latest, Somalia, signed on just this past year; Syria hasn’t yet. It is not strongly identified with a single personality. (The Nobel committee had followed up its announcement with a tweet: "@OPCW Please contact us @Nobelprize_org we are trying get through to your office." They eventually did.) The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize, said in its press release that it was recognizing the group’s (that is, not just Syria) and noted that “disarmament figures prominently in Alfred Nobel’s will,” as indeed it does. This is the passage in which Nobel, the conflicted inventor of dynamite, asked that the Peace Prize go to
the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
It might, in the end, be in the interest of that last cause—peace congresses—as much as in the actual reduction of armies, that the O.P.C.W. has its most lasting achievements. And that will be something: affirming the idea that an entire kind of weapon can be banished; the conviction that it can be done so through long diplomacy, inspections and lab work, meetings and dialogues and all the hard and often tedious efforts that it is easy to dismiss and be cynical about. Because how else does it get done?
Nobel’s reference to “fraternity” has been relied on, properly, to construe the prize broadly—this is why so many people hoped that the prize might go to Malala Yousafzai, the sixteen-year-old who, after the Taliban targeted her and shot her in the head, has become a powerful voice for girls’ education, as well as for non-violent resistance. (Americans got a glimpse of that second agenda item when she described, to Jon Stewart, on “The Daily Show,” her conclusion that she wouldn’t even throw a shoe at a Talib. He asked if he could adopt her.) That would have been an appropriate and emotionally rich award—but this is not the only year for it. Watching Malala speak—at the United Nations, for example—one grasps that she is not merely a survivor bearing witness, but a natural leader whose work has just started, and will take many forms. She has laredy started, with the Malala Fund. One shouldn’t assume that she’s already done the only sort of thing she ever will to merit this prize, or that she will only be honored as a child. It’s not hard to imagine her leading some future peace congress. The Taliban didn’t want her to grow up; the world will get to watch her do so.
Meanwhile, in Syria, have the combatants on both sides congratulated the inspectors yet?
Above: Weapons inspectors in Syria. Photograph: United Media office of Arbeen/AP.
