Chemical-arms watchdog group wins peace prize

Associated Press

BEIRUT

The watchdog agency working to eliminate the world’s chemical weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a powerful endorsement of the inspectors now on the ground in Syria on a perilous mission to destroy the regime’s stockpile of poison gas.

In honoring the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, “Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons.”

The prize came 10 days after OPCW inspectors started arriving in war-torn Syria to oversee the dismantling of President Bashar Assad’s chemical arsenal.

While world leaders and former Nobel laureates praised the group’s selection, some in Syria lamented that the prize would do nothing to end the bloodshed, most of which is being inflicted with conventional weapons.

“The killing is continuing, the shelling is continuing and the dead continue to fall,” said Mohammed al-Tayeb, an activist who helped film casualties after the deadly chemical attack in August that the rebels and the government have blamed on each other.

The peace prize, he added, should have gone to “whoever helps the Syrian people get rid of Bashar Assad.”

After focusing on such themes as human rights and European unity in recent years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee this time returned to the core purpose of the 112-year-old Nobel Peace Prize — disarming the world.

Founded in 1997, the OPCW had worked largely out of the limelight until this year, when the United Nations called upon its expertise.

The OPCW’s selection caught many by surprise. It was widely expected that the peace prize would go to Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban last October for championing education for girls.

“She is an outstanding woman and I think she has a bright future, and she will probably be a nominee next year or the year after that,” said Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland.

The peace prize committee has a tradition of not just honoring past achievements, but encouraging causes or movements that still are unfolding.