File picture of Prize laureate and Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado on Wednesday (December 10, 2025) urged her compatriots to fight for freedom against “State terrorism”, as she said she was coming out of hiding to travel to Norway after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in her absence.

Ms. Machado, who won the Nobel for challenging President Nicolas Maduro’s grip on power, has not been seen in public for months after threats to her life.

Her daughter accepted the prize on her behalf in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, and delivered her blistering acceptance speech, slamming the country’s leader for crimes against the Venezuelan people.

“What we Venezuelans can offer the world is the lesson forged through this long and difficult journey: that to have democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom,” said Ana Corina Sosa Machado.

In a call with the chair of the Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, published just before the ceremony, Ms. Machado said she was “very sad and very sorry” that she would not make it in time but was on her way to Oslo.

Mr. Frydnes, for his part, urged Mr. Maduro to accept his 2024 election defeat and resign.

“Lay the foundation for a peaceful transition to democracy. Because that is the will of the Venezuelan people,” he added in a speech, to applause.

‘State terrorism’

Ms. Machado in her speech also denounced kidnappings and torture under Mr. Maduro’s rule, calling them “crimes against humanity” and “state terrorism, deployed to bury the will of the people”.

Despite her absence from the ceremony, Nobel officials said she was “safe” and would arrive in Oslo by Thursday (December 11) at the latest.

Venezuela has warned Ms. Machado that she would be labelled a “fugitive” if she left the country, putting her at risk of arrest when attempting to re-enter.

But her daughter assured the audience that her mother would return. “She wants to live in a free Venezuela, and she will never give up on that purpose,” Ana Corina Sosa Machado said.

Ms. Ana Corina Machado’s mother and three daughters, and some Latin American heads of state, including Argentine President Javier Milei, were at the prize-giving at Oslo’s City Hall.

While organisers said Ms. Machado had previously indicated she would attend, doubts had already been raised when a traditional press conference with the award winner on Tuesday (December 9) was first postponed and then cancelled.

Ms. Machado has accused Mr. Maduro of stealing Venezuela’s July 2024 election which she was banned from. Her claim is backed by much of the international community.

She has been hailed for her efforts in favour of democracy but also been criticised for aligning herself with U.S. President Donald Trump, to whom she has dedicated her Nobel.

The Oslo ceremony coincides with a large U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean in recent weeks and deadly strikes on what Washington says are drug smuggling boats.

Mr. Maduro insists that the goal of the U.S. operations — which Ms. Machado has said are justified — is to topple the government and seize Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Not seen since January

Since going into hiding, Ms. Machado’s only public appearance was on January 9, in Caracas where she protested against Mr. Maduro’s inauguration for his third term.

The opposition claimed its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, won the election. He now lives in exile and was also in Oslo on Wednesday (December 10).

Multiple other Nobel Peace Prize winners have been unable to collect their prizes in person. Family members usually do so on their behalf, Nobel Institute director Kristian Berg Harpviken explained this week.

Doubts had been raised about how Ms. Machado would return to Venezuela if she made the trip. Her refusal to leave the country has helped boost her political power there.

“She risks being arrested if she returns even if the authorities have shown more restraint with her than with many others, because arresting her would have a very strong symbolic value,” said Benedicte Bull, a professor specialising in Latin America at the University of Oslo.

On the other hand, “she is the undisputed leader of the opposition, but if she were to stay away in exile for a long time, I think that would change and she would gradually lose political influence”, she added.

The Nobel laureates in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics all received their prizes from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at a separate ceremony in Stockholm on Wednesday (December 10) before a lavish banquet.

The prize consists of a diploma, a gold medal and the sum of 11 million kronor ($1.2 million) — which is shared when several laureates are honoured in the same category.

Published – December 10, 2025 11:26 pm IST

Venezuelan Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

President Donald Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday (October 10, 2025) despite jockeying from his fellow Republicans, various world leaders and — most vocally — himself.

Opposition activist María Corina Machado of Venezuela was awarded the prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honouring her “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

Mr. Trump, who has long coveted the prestigious prize, has been outspoken about his desire for the honour during both of his presidential terms, particularly lately as he takes credit for ending conflicts around the world. He has expressed doubts that the Nobel committee would ever grant him the award.

“They’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday (October 9).

Although President Trump received a number of nominations for the prize, many of them occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award, which fell just a week and a half into his first term. His name was, however, put forth in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.

Nevertheless, Mr. Trump and his supporters are likely to view the decision to pass him over for the award as a deliberate affront to the U.S. leader, particularly after the president’s involvement in getting Israel and Hamas to initiate the first phase of ending their devastating two-year-old war.

The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “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.”

Three sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice-President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.

Mr. Obama, who was a focus of Mr. Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.

“He got the prize for doing nothing,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Obama on Thursday (October 9). “They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country.”

As one of his reasons for deserving the award, Mr. Trump often says he has ended seven wars, though some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were merely tensions, and his role in easing them is disputed.

But while there is hope for the end of Israel and Hamas’ war, much remains uncertain about the aspects of the broader ceasefire plan, including whether and how Hamas will disarm and who will govern Gaza. And little progress seems to have been made on the war between Russia and Ukraine, a conflict Mr. Trump claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could end in one day. (He later said he made that remark in jest.)

Mr. Trump invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Alaska in August — but not Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — for a summit aimed at reaching peace, but he left empty-handed, and the war started by Russia’s invasion in 2022 has since raged on.

As Mr. Trump pushes for peaceful resolutions to conflicts abroad, the country he governs remains deeply divided and politically fraught. Mr. Trump has kicked off what he hopes to be the largest deportation program in American history to remove immigrants in the U.S. illegally. He is using the levers of government, including the Justice Department, to go after his perceived political enemies. He has sent the military into U.S. cities over local opposition to stop crime and crack down on immigration enforcement.

He withdrew the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming. He touched off global trade wars with his on-again, off-again tariffs, which he wields as a threat to bend other countries and companies to his will. He asserted presidential war powers by declaring cartels to be unlawful combatants and launching lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that he alleged were carrying drugs.

The full list of people nominated is secret, but anyone who submits a nomination is free to talk about it. Mr. Trump’s detractors say supporters, foreign leaders and others are submitting Mr. Trump’s name for nomination for the prize — and, specifically, announcing it publicly — not because he deserves it but because they see it as a way to manipulate him and stay in his good graces.

Others who formally submitted a nomination for Mr. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — but after this year’s deadline — include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Pakistan’s government, all citing his work in helping end conflicts in their regions.

Published – October 10, 2025 08:01 pm IST

Much has been written about the universally loved Jane Goodall, primatologist and animal rights campaigner, on whom awards and honours far too numerous to list have been showered. She passed away on October 1 aged 91. One recognition, however, she did not but should have received is the Nobel Peace Prize. For all her life, Goodall worked for peace and harmony not just between humans but between Homo sapiens and all life on Earth.

Her own words best describe the start of her seven-decade-long journey to convince humanity to protect our magical planet: ‘If you are interested in animals,’ someone said to me about a month after my arrival in Africa, ‘then you should meet Dr. Leakey.’ I had already started on a somewhat dreary office job, since I had not wanted to overstay my welcome at my friend’s farm. I went to see Louis Leakey at what is now the National Museum of natural history in Nairobi, where at that same time he was Curator. Somehow he must have sensed that my interest in animals was not just a passing phase, but was rooted deep, for on the spot he gave me a job as an assistant secretary.

First encounter

I never got to meet Jane Goodall but she entered my life in 1966, six years after she began her work with the legendary Louis Leaky in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, when the National Geographic magazine placed her on their cover. Down the years, I could not help but compare her to the other Jane… Tarzan’s Jane, about whom she recently said with an impish smile: “Tarzan married the wrong Jane.” Her fascination for Africa and chimpanzees was undoubtedly influenced by her love for Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and Tarzan’s sidekick Cheeta the chimpanzee. Her version was a stuffed toy chimp named Mr. H. “[He] goes everywhere with me. We’ve been to 59 countries together and he’s probably been touched by about nearly 4 million people,” she once said.

In 1978, I bought a large format pictorial book, Savage Africa, authored by Hugo van Lawick, only to discover that Jane Goodall was Lawick’s former wife, and that they had jointly put together a book in 1971, Innocent Killers, with Goodall doing the writing and Hugo the photography. The detailed descriptions of hunts by carnivores such as hyenas, cheetahs and leopards were graphic and gory, but they conveyed an elemental truth: unlike humans, wild animals were not ‘cruel’ as judged by ethical human standards. Animals ate what they killed. Nothing went to waste.

Blazing a trail

Down the decades, Goodall showed the world that it was possible to love animals (she likes dogs more than chimps!). She told us that chimps lived in societies akin to ours and used tools to access food, an ability thus far attributed only to humans. What’s more, they had distinct personalities. Some, like one individual she named David Greybeard, displayed likeable traits, while some were unlikeable, even cannibalistic. None of these field observations came easy. It took years to win the trust of the chimps, never hiding from them until she became a part of the non-threatening backdrop, a harmless pale-coloured ape. No naturalist had ever attempted this before. The most important of all her observations was the ability of apes to insert twigs into termite nests, pull them out repeatedly with ants attached and consume as food. When Louis Leaky saw evidence of this from images shot by a National Geographic photographer, he sent this now-famous telegram to his protégé: “NOW WE MUST REDEFINE TOOL STOP REDEFINE MAN STOP OR ACCEPT CHIMPANZEES AS HUMAN”.

Goodall faced considerable opposition over the years, largely by testosterone-driven males who questioned both her capability and ability to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of Africa’s jungle life. Her mother, nevertheless, travelled all the way to be with her young daughter as the attitude of men spurred her on to achieve more and discover more, and cut a trail not merely in Africa but clean through academia in England.

Misplaced criticism

She was also the target of misplaced criticism from human rights activists who accused her of protecting apes at the cost of local human communities. Working in a male-dominated sector in her early days, she was unfairly criticised for being an amateur with anthropomorphic biases that ended up superimposing human attributes and capabilities onto wild apes.

A decade ago, some academics pointed out that a manuscript of hers, for Seeds of Hope (2013), omitted crediting sources. Emily Brelage of DePauw University wrote, “It’s important to not ignore the flaws that make them [admired heroes] human, while we celebrate what makes them great.” With characteristic grace, Goodall responded that she would delay publication with added credits, saying, “I hope it is obvious that my only objective was to learn as much as I could so that I could provide straightforward factual information.”

She never needed to respond to the accusations of anthropomorphic biases because in 1965, Newnham College in Cambridge University settled the issue by accepting her deeply scientific doctoral thesis titled ‘The Behaviour of Free-living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve’. Valerie Jane Morris Goodall was now Dr. Jane Goodall.

To the human rights activists, she responded as saying that protecting the apes’ jungles was in the interests of the African people whose jungles were being brutally colonised by the industrial North.

Even today, the developed world continues to trot out arguments to justify deforestation, a primary cause of our current climate crisis. In my book, that amounts to intergenerational colonisation. In her last days, Goodall travelled the globe, met young and old, villagers, royalty and power brokers, urging them all to rein in carbon, protect the biosphere, and leave our children a climate-safe world.

She was met everywhere with what can only be called veneration. Jane Goodall did her job on Planet Earth by re-emphasising conclusively what Charles Darwin had posited on November 24, 1859, the day his controversial book On the Origin of Species was published. He said we were descended from apes. She revealed that chimps’ brains were capable of using tools, a fact that scientists of the day refused to accept.

Both suffered severe criticism from religious quarters that believed only humans had souls, and were given dominion over all other life by ‘the creator’. What is more, Jane Goodall sprinkled us with the magic of hope with the example of a life well lived.

The writer is editor of Sanctuary Asia and founder of Sanctuary Nature Foundation.

Published – October 09, 2025 06:16 pm IST

Islamabad, Pakistan:

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai said she was “overwhelmed” to be back in her native Pakistan Saturday, as she arrived for a global summit on girls’ education in the Islamic world. The education activist was shot by the Pakistan Taliban militants in 2012 when she was a schoolgirl, and has returned to the country only a handful of times since. 

“I’m truly honoured, overwhelmed and happy to be back in Pakistan,” she told AFP as she arrived at the conference in the capital Islamabad with her parents. 

The two-day summit brings together representatives from Muslim-majority countries, where tens of millions of girls are out of school. 

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was set Saturday morning to address attendees, including local schoolgirls and university students. 

“At last we have a good initiative on Muslim girls’ education,” said Zahra Tariq, a 23-year-old studying clinical psychology.

“Those in rural areas are still facing problems. In some cases their families are the first barrier,” she told AFP. 

Yousafzai is due to address the summit on Sunday, and said she would focus on Afghanistan — the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from going to school and university.

“I will speak about protecting rights for all girls to go to school, and why leaders must hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes against Afghan women & girls,” she posted on social media platform X on Friday. 

Pakistan’s education minister, Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, told AFP the Taliban government in Afghanistan had been invited to attend, but Islamabad had not received a response. 

Since returning to power in 2021, the Afghan Taliban government has imposed an austere version of Islamic law that the United Nations has called “gender apartheid”. 

Pakistan is facing its own severe education crisis with more than 26 million children out of school — one of the highest figures in the world — mostly as a result of poverty, according to official government figures.

Yousafzai became a household name after she was attacked by Pakistan Taliban militants on a school bus in the remote Swat valley in 2012.

Militancy was widespread in the region at the time as the war between the Afghan Taliban and NATO forces raged across the border in Afghanistan. The Pakistan and Afghan Taliban are separate groups but share close links and similar ideologies, including a strong disbelief in educating girls.

Yousafzai was evacuated to the United Kingdom after her attack and went on to become a global advocate for girls’ education and, at the age of 17, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Oslo:

Japan’s atomic bomb survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo accepted its Nobel Peace Prize on Tuesday, pleading for the abolition of nuclear weapons that are resurging as a threat 80 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

One of the three Nihon Hidankyo co-chairs, 92-year-old Nagasaki survivor Terumi Tanaka, demanded “action from governments to achieve” a nuclear-free world.

The prize was presented at a time when countries like Russia — which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — increasingly brandish the atomic threat.

“I am infinitely saddened and angered that the ‘nuclear taboo’ threatens to be broken,” Tanaka told dignitaries at Oslo’s City Hall, some clad in traditional Norwegian bunads or Japanese kimonos.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made nuclear threats as he presses the war in Ukraine. He signed a decree in November lowering the threshold for using atomic weapons.

In a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro a few days later, the Russian army fired a new hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, although in this instance it had a regular payload.

Nihon Hidankyo works to rid the planet of the weapons of mass destruction, relying on testimonies from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as “hibakusha”.

The US bombings of the Japanese cities on August 6 and 9, 1945 killed 214,000 people, leading to Japan’s surrender in World War II.

Burnt bodies

Tanaka was 13 years old when Nagasaki was bombed, the epicentre just three kilometres (1.8 miles) west of his home. Five members of his family were killed.

He was upstairs reading a book when the A-bomb was dropped.

“I heard the explosion and all of a sudden saw a bright white light, which surrounded everything and everything became silent,” he recalled.

“I was really surprised. I felt my life in danger.”

Rushing to the ground floor, he lost consciousness when two glass doors, blown out by the detonation, fell on him, though the glass did not break.

Three days later, he and his mother went searching for their relatives. That was when they realised the scope of the disaster.

“When we reached a ridge over the hills, we could look down over the city and that was when, for the first time, we saw that there was absolutely nothing left. Everything was black and charred.”

He saw gravely wounded people fleeing the city, burnt bodies on the roadside. He and his mother cremated his aunt’s body “with our own hands”.

“I was numb, not able to feel anything.”

Nihon Hidankyo’s ranks are dwindling with every passing year. The Japanese government lists around 106,800 “hibakusha” still alive today. Their average age is 85.

‘Uphold nuclear taboo’

For the West, the nuclear threat also comes from North Korea, which has increased its ballistic missile tests, and Iran, which is suspected of seeking to develop nuclear weapons though it denies this.

Nine countries now have nuclear weapons: Britain, China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United States, and, unofficially, Israel.

“Our movement has undoubtedly played a major role in creating the ‘nuclear taboo’,” Tanaka said.

“However, there still remain 12,000 nuclear warheads on Earth today, 4,000 of which are operationally deployed, ready for immediate launch.”

In 2017, 122 governments negotiated and adopted a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), but the text is considered largely symbolic as no nuclear power has signed it.

While all ambassadors stationed in Oslo were invited to Tuesday’s ceremony, the only nuclear powers in attendance were Britain, France, India, Pakistan and the United States. Russia, China, Israel and Iran were not present, the Nobel Institute said.

Expressing concern about the world entering “a new, more unstable nuclear age”, Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Jorgen Watne Frydnes warned that “a nuclear war could destroy our civilisation”.

“Today’s nuclear weapons … have far greater destructive power than the two bombs used against Japan in 1945. They could kill millions of us in an instant, injure even more, and disrupt the climate catastrophically,” he warned.

Later, the Nobel laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics received their prizes from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at a separate ceremony in Stockholm, followed by a banquet for some 1,250 guests.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Atomic bomb survivors and members of Nihon Hidankyo, a country-wide organisation of atomic and hydrogen bomb sufferers, including Assistant Secretary General Toshiko Hamanaka, Co-chairperson Terumi Tanaka, Assistant Secretary General Masako Wada, Assistant Secretary General Jiro Hamasumi attend a press conference on the following day of Nihon Hidankyo winning the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, in Tokyo, on October 12, 2023
| Photo Credit: Reuters

It has been 79 years since the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pulverised by two atom bombs, ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, dropped by the U.S. Army Air Forces. This remains the only direct attacks on civilian population using nuclear weapons and the after-effects are a horrifying reminder of their destructive and long-lasting effects. The victims of the attacks, in which an estimated 1,50,000 to 2,46,000 people were killed immediately or due to radiation effects by the end of 1945, include survivors who went on to be known as the ‘hibakusha’ (bomb-affected people). Today, the combined number of ‘hibakusha’ who are alive is officially 1,06,825, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Their average age is 85.6 years.

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to Nihon Hidankyo or the Japan Confederation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Sufferers Organizations, a group formed by hibakusha in 1956, the Norwegian Nobel Committee finally recognised the yeoman efforts taken by the group to improve health and provide medical support to the hibakusha and to strive for the abolition of nuclear weapons, emphasised in their slogan, ‘No more hibakusha’.

Pinching his cheek and holding back tears, Hidankyo co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki said in a press conference in Hiroshima that the award would give a major boost to the efforts to abolish nuclear weapons and also said that it was governments that waged wars and not citizens who yearned for peace. Speaking to presspersons, he said, “Please abolish nuclear weapons while we are still alive. That is the wish of 1,14,000 hibakusha”. Hidankyo has been nominated for the Peace Prize quite a few times and clearly their humane emphasis on banning nuclear weapons on virtue of being the sufferers of the use of these had catapulted their cause to international attention.

In the first decade since August 1945, many survivors had to go through ordeals such as unknown sickness, fatal illness and penury. There was little scope for organisation during the U.S. occupation following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, as the occupying force censored publications that focused on the suffering of the hibakusha. The end of the occupation provided the impetus to organise but the ‘Lucky Dragon 5’ incident — in which a Japanese tuna-fishing vessel got exposed to radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean — and its aftermath acted as a catalyst for the formation of Hidankyo. Public outrage at the incident spurred the anti-bomb/ ban-the-bomb movement leading to Hidankyo.

Two demands

At the very outset, Hidankyo was able to crystallise two fundamental demands — “the elimination of nuclear weapons” and “relief for the hibakusha”. Demands for relief for the hibakusha were directed at the Japanese government, rather than the aggressors, the U.S. because Japanese rights to damages during the war were waived by the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed between Japan and the Allied forces in 1951. Hidankyo also zeroed on the Japanese government for relief as it considered its members’ sufferings to be a consequence of war pursued by the Imperial Japanese state.

The Japanese government’s response was to enact an ‘Atomic Bomb Medical Law’ in 1957, aimed at improving the “hibakusha’s health with state-sponsored check-ups and medical assistance”, but it stopped short of alleviating their health concerns or living conditions. Okinawan and Korean hibakusha were excluded from this assistance. Hidankyo was also part of the progressive organisation called Gensuikyo that led the ban-the-bomb movement, but Cold War politics and differences between right and left-wing sections of the Gensuikyo led to Hidankyo distancing from it in the mid-1960s.

Hidankyo made several trips across the world — including to India as part of the World Social Forum in 2004 — to inform the people about the horror of nuclear weapons and the damage it caused on the hibakusha besides the fact that it was concealed from the public for more than a decade since August 1945.

In the 1970s, Hidankyo also engaged in oppositional politics and agitations that increased solidarity and support for it from the public. Over time in Japan, several laws were passed that were focussed on healthcare for the hibakusha that went beyond treatment for radiation wounds and illnesses, thanks to the activism of Hidankyo. Scholars have averred that the group’s long struggle helped pressure the Japan government “to admit its war responsibility” and helped turn the country’s political culture towards greater democracy and justice. Yet, despite turning public opinion on nuclear weapons and steadily increasing relief for the hibakusha, Hidankyo could not mould the Japanese government’s position on the U.S.’s “nuclear umbrella”, which continues to this day.

The Peace Prize, by highlighting the struggle of the ageing hibakusha, should hopefully provide the impetus for the world to work further on abolishing nuclear weapons and the strategies that foster their presence.

Oslo / Tokyo:

Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, in a warning to countries that have nuclear weapons not to use them.

Many survivors of the only two nuclear bombs ever to be used in conflict, who are known in Japanese as “hibakusha”, have dedicated their lives to the struggle for a nuclear-free world.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its citation the group was receiving the Peace Prize for “its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.

“The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” the committee said.

“I can’t believe it’s real,” Nihon Hidankyo co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki told a press conference in Hiroshima, site of the Aug. 6, 1945 atomic bombing during the closing stages of World War Two, as he held back tears and pinched his cheek.

Mimaki, a survivor himself, said the award would give a major boost to its efforts to demonstrate that the abolition of nuclear weapons was necessary and possible and faulted governments for waging wars even as their citizens yearned for peace.

“(The win) will be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons and everlasting peace can be achieved,” he said. “Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished.”

In Japan, hibakusha, many of whom carried visible wounds from radiation burns or developed radiation-related diseases such as leukaemia, were often forcibly segregated from society and faced discrimination when seeking employment or marriage in the years following the war.

“They are a group of people delivering the message to the world, so as a Japanese I think this is truly wonderful,” Tokyo resident Yoshiko Watanabe told Reuters, as she wept openly in the street.

There were 106,825 atomic bomb survivors registered in Japan as of March this year, data from the country’s health ministry showed, with an average age of 85.6 years.

WARNING TO NUCLEAR NATIONS

Without naming specific countries, Joergen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, warned that nuclear nations should not contemplate using atomic weapons.

“In a world ridden (with) conflicts, where nuclear weapons is definitely part of it, we wanted to highlight the importance of strengthening the nuclear taboo, the international norm, against the use of nuclear weapons,” Frydnes told Reuters.

“We see it as very alarming that the nuclear taboo … is being reduced by threatening, but also how the situation in the world where the nuclear powers are modernising and upgrading their arsenals.”

Frydnes said the world should listen to the “painful and dramatic stories of the hibakusha”.

“These weapons should never be used again anywhere in the world … Nuclear war could mean the end of humanity, (the) end of our civilisation,” he said in an interview.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned the West of potential nuclear consequences since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

He declared last month that Russia could use nuclear weapons if it was struck with conventional missiles, and that Moscow would consider any assault on it supported by a nuclear power to be a joint attack.

This month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would speed up steps towards becoming a military superpower with nuclear weapons and would not rule out using them if it came under enemy attack, while widening conflict in the Middle East has prompted some experts to speculate Iran may restart its efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb.    

SECOND JAPANESE WINNER

Next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 that forced Japan’s surrender.

With the award, the committee was drawing attention to a “very dangerous situation” in the world, according to Dan Smith, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

“If there is a military conflict, there is a risk of it escalating to nuclear weapons … They (Nihon Hidankyo) are really an important voice to remind us about the destructive nature of nuclear weapons,” he told Reuters.  

Smith said the Committee had achieved “a triple strike”: drawing attention to the human suffering of nuclear bomb survivors; the danger of nuclear weapons; and that the world has survived without their use for nearly 80 years.

The award body has regularly put focus on the issue of nuclear weapons, most recently with its award to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, who won the award in 2017.

This year’s award also echoes those to Elie Wiesel in 1986 and Russia’s Memorial in 2022 by highlighting the importance of keeping the memory of horrific events alive as a warning to the future.

It is the second Nobel Peace Prize for a Japanese recipient in the prize’s 123-year history, 50 years after former Prime Minister Eisaku Sato won it in 1974.

The Nobel Peace Prize, worth 11 million Swedish crowns, or about $1 million, is due to be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)