Earlier this week nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize closed, and amidst all the nominees, quite a controversial name emerged. Norway politician Snorre Valen, a member of the Socialist Left Party, announced that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange has been nominated for the prize.
WikiLeaks, Assange’s brainchild, seeks to declassify state documents in an effort to promote transparency and let citizens know what is going on. While this sounds great on paper, it has brought mixed results that make us question how Assange promotes world peace.
In late November, WikiLeaks released a heap of secret diplomatic cables, totaling more than a quarter million documents. This information dump managed to show what was being hidden from the average citizen, but it also angered leaders worldwide and strained foreign relations.
On one hand, the cables exposed serious dangers. One cable told of how close al-Qaeda is to making a nuclear weapon. The WikiLeaks documents showed that United States officials had been informed of terrorists attempting to get radioactive materials.
Another cable showed the intelligence faults that occurred in an effort to kidnap a terror operative. The CIA held Khaled, el-Masri, a German of Lebanese descent, in a jail in Afghanistan for five months where they tortured him. They eventually dropped him on the side of a road in Albania after realizing they wanted someone else with a similar name.
These are things the public deserves to know, and it is always important to hold government accountable for the mistakes it makes.
But many of the cables did little more than tattle on diplomats who spoke candidly, and often not so nicely, about world leaders.
One diplomat called North Korean leader Kim Jong II a “flabby old chap,” while another said French President Nicholas Sarkozy possesses a “thin-skinned and authoritarian style.” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was referred to as “feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader.”
These are trivial things, but they have a real impact on diplomats, who still must continue to work with world leaders. How are they supposed to get right back to work, promoting diplomacy, when the whole world now knows their impressions of the people they work with?
Assange may have enlightened citizens to some important world developments, but it ultimately made it harder for diplomats to do their jobs — and with questionable motives at that.
If someone so recklessly complicates foreign policy, as Assange did, they are not deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize. Doing so would degrade what the prize stands for.
Instead, it should go to someone who actively works to make the world a more peaceful place. While Assange may have been a good candidate for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, we are confident that when the full list of nominees comes out, it will contain names of many others who have done great work for “fraternity between nations,” as prize creator Alfred Nobel envisioned.
