Arms group wins Nobel Peace Prize

LONDON - Urging the destruction of an “entire category” of unconventional weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2013 Peace Prize on Friday to a relatively modest and little-known U.N.-backed body that has drawn sudden attention with a mission to destroy Syria’s stocks of chemical arms under a deal brokered by Russia and the United States.

The award to the Organization for the Prohibition ofChemical Weapons, based in The Hague, took some Nobel watchers by surprise partly because of the unprecedented nature of its current task: overseeing the destruction of a previously secret chemical-weapons program quickly amid a raging civil war.

“We were aware that our work silently but surely was contributing to peace in the world,” Ahmet Uzumcu, the director general of the organization, told reporters in The Hague after the award was announced. “The last few weeks have brought this to the fore. The entire international community has been made aware of our work.”

Among diplomats, the prize was seen as the high point of a startling rise to prominence for an organization that has worked in relative obscurity. Some Syrians, however, took exception to the idea of lauding chemical-weapons watchdogs whenthe bulk of the more than 100,000 fatalities in Syria’s civil war have been caused by conventional weapons, like airstrikes, artillery and rocket fire.

Despite the urgency and danger of its task, the organization had not been tapped as a likely winner. In the days leading up to the award, much attention had focused on individual candidates, including Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani student who risked her life to campaign for girls’ education and would have been the youngest recipient of the award.

In its citation, the committee said the organization and the treaty under which it was founded in 1997 “have defined the use of chemical weapons as a taboo under international law.”

“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.”

It was the second successive year that the panel, based in Oslo, Norway, chose an organization for its accolade. The European Union won the 2012 prize.

Inspectors from the 189-member group began arriving in Syria early this month after a chemical-weapons attack that has been linked to the Syrian government killed hundreds of people on the outskirts of Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Aug. 21. Under the Russian-American agreement, Syria agreed to join the treaty banning chemical weapons and become the 190th member of the organization.

The chemical attack initially drew a U.S. threat of military reprisal before Moscow and Washington reached a compromise arrangement to destroy Syria’s chemical-weapons stocks under international supervision.

Thorbjorn Jagland, the former Norwegian prime minister who is chairman of the Nobel Committee, said chemical weapons had been used by Hitler’s armies in their campaign of mass extermination and on many other occasions by states and terrorists. He denied suggestions that the award to a body based in The Hague represented a Eurocentric shift after last year’s award to the European Union.

“It’s global,” he said.

The organization’s mission is to act as a watchdog in implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention, which went into force in 1997 with four aims: to destroy all chemical weapons under international verification; to prevent the creation of new chemical weapons; to help countries protect themselves against chemical attack; and to foster international cooperation in the peaceful use ofchemistry.

The body has a technical staff of around 500, according to its website, and an annual budget of around $100 million.

Since its creation, the organization has sent experts to carry out 5,000 inspections in 86 countries, working discreetly, almost shunning publicity, with the small number of signatory countries that acknowledge possessing chemical weapons. By far the biggest of these are Russia and the United States. Four countries besides Syria have not yet signed or ratified the treaty: Egypt, Angola, South Sudan and North Korea. Israel and Burma have signed the treaty, but their state governments have not ratified it.

Although it attracted some notice when it sent experts to tackle the chemical arms held by Moammar Gadhafi, the Libyan leader, nothing had prepared the organization for its mission in Syria.

The operation is unparalleled in both its urgency and its hazards. The U.N. Security Council has set extremely tight deadlines for the mission, calling for the destruction of Syria’s arsenal of dangerous toxins by mid-2014 in the middle of an intense and violent conflict.

The Nobel nominees are shrouded in secrecy. Apart from Yousafzai, another front-runner was said to have been Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who has treated rape victims in the long-running conflict in his native Democratic Republic of Congo.

The award of $1.25 million will be presented Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of its founder, the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who established the prize in 1895 in his will. It was the 94th to be awarded since his death.

While much attention is focused on Syria’s chemical-weapons stocks, the Nobel Committee noted pointedly that other countries - including the United States and Russia - had not dismantled their chemical arsenals.

“Certain states have not observed the deadline, which was April 2012, for destroying their chemical weapons,” the committee said. “This applies especially to the USA and Russia.

“Disarmament figures prominently in Alfred Nobel’s will. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has through numerous prizes underlined the need to do away with nuclear weapons,” the committee said. “By means of the present award to the [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons], the committee is seeking to contribute to the elimination of chemical weapons.”

Jagland said the award would remind nations holding major stocks of chemical weapons to destroy them “especially because they are demanding that others do the same, like Syria.”

U.N. inspectors who examined the Aug. 21 attack site outside Damascus did not specify which side in the civil war had carried it out.Many Western experts and governments, citing forensic details in the weapons inspector report on Sept. 16, have blamed Syrian forces, while President Bashar Assad has maintained that the rebels trying to overthrow him must have been responsible.

The official Syrian state news agency offered no immediate comment on the award. But the online reaction from many Syrians and others following the Syrian conflict was swift and full of anger.

At best, many compared the motivations behind the award to those behind the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama in 2009 when he had only recently taken office: as an expression of hope for future success rather than a reward for solid achievements. At worst, critics said the decision was a travesty, given that Syrians across thepolitical spectrum consider the chemical-weapons issue a sideshow in a war that has killed more than 100,000 people, almost all with conventional weapons, since it began as a civilian revolt in March 2011.

Anti-government protesters in the northern Syrian town of Kafranbel, who havemade a name for themselves with their witty, English-captioned posters and slogans, posted a quick response.

Young men held up a drawing that showed bombs falling, smoke rising over towns and corpses lying in blood, and, in the center of it all, a blue-helmeted U.N. worker triumphantly holding a wrench over a dismantled chemical warhead. Off to the side, an arm labeled “USA” gives the thumbs-up signal.

Speaking in Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia, Assad’s biggest international sponsor, insisted that the transfer of Syria’s chemical weapons to international control take place according to schedule. Buthe accused other countries, some neighboring Syria, of trying to derail the initiative.

The responsibility for the process is held, he said, “not only by the Syrian government, but by all the other sides in Syria, by the entire opposition, and also by other countries. Above all, those countries that neighbor Syria, and which are forbidden to use their territory for any games with chemical weapons.”

Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, now dean and executive professor of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, said he was puzzled bythe award, even given what he described as the “pretty checkered history” of the Nobel Prize committee’s choices.

“The [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons], wherever it goes in the chemical-weapons effort in Syria, is not going to bring peace to Syria, because chemical weapons are simply not a major factor in Assad’s ability to wage war, which in my view is why he’s willing to cooperate,” Crocker said.

“Getting rid of chemical weapons anywhere is a good thing,” he said, “but to make this worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, I just don’t get it.”

In other developmentsFriday, Human Rights Watch gave its most detailed account of purported war crimes committed by those fighting the Damascus regime.

Syrian villagers described watching rebels advance on their homes, as mortars thudded around them. By the end of the August attack, 190 civilians had been killed, including children, the elderly and the handicapped, the human-rights group said.

Human Rights Watch said the offensive against 14 pro-regime villages in the province of Latakia was planned and led by five Islamic extremist groups, including two linked to al-Qaida. Other rebel groups, including those belonging to the Free Syrian Army, a Western-backed alliance, participated in the campaign, but there is no evidence linking them to war crimes, the105-page report said.

The new allegations are likely to heighten Western unease about those trying to topple Assad and about who would take over if they were to succeed.

Human-rights groups have said both sides in the civil war, now in its third year, have violated the rules of war, but U.N. investigators have said the scale and intensity of rebel abuses hasn’t reached that of the regime.

Information for this article was contributed by Alan Cowell, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Anne Barnard, Andrew Roth, Andrew Higgins and Rick Gladstone of The New York Times and by Karin Laub and Bassem Mroue of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/12/2013

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