Peace And Understanding

There's something especially satisfying about the Nobels awarded this year, the 100th anniversary of the prize. The science is comprehensible; the literature is crisp and relevant; and the Peace Prize was given to the organization--and its plain-spoken director--that may have the best chance of bringing some to our fractious world.

Peace Kofi Annan and the U.N.

One day last summer, as Kofi Annan sipped a beer and watched the sun set over Ghana, the land of his birth, he began reflecting on the men he had encountered in the palaces, fortresses and official homes that hold the leaders of the world. On the whole, he observed, they weren't particularly nice people. There were exceptions, of course--and he listed a few favorites--but by and large the act of rising to a position of high political power, he said, demanded a willingness to put ambition before humanity. Annan stopped for a moment and stared off into the pink sky. "Perhaps," he said, "this explains an awful lot about the world we're in."

The United Nations has always been an ambitious organization, and Annan, in a quiet way, an ambitious man. But in the decade since the end of the cold war, it has been an organization that has time and again put humanity ahead of ambition. Instead of pursuing the path of diplomatic agreement--a path where much gets discussed and nothing really changes--the organization has tried to stop some of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the day. Generally, it has failed. In Rwanda, Srebrenica, East Timor, Kosovo and elsewhere, its influence was not great enough to stop genocide, ethnic cleansing and other horrors. Too much at odds to act in concert, the nations of the world were content to let the founding ideal of the U.N.--universal social justice--shatter.

Increasingly, the U.N. has been there to pick up the pieces. And when the organization and Annan won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, it was as much an acknowledgment of what they have done to repair the mistakes of the past decade as a recognition of how they had tried--and failed--to prevent those mistakes from unfolding. In Kosovo and East Timor, the U.N. has begun to turn nation building into a science, learning how to construct functioning governments and societies in countries torn apart by hate. It is a skill the U.N. may soon be called on to apply in Afghanistan, a land where its efforts have been repeatedly--and sometimes brutally--thwarted by the Taliban.

Even before the announcement last Friday, preparations were under way at U.N. headquarters for the possibility of a Nobel. Annan had been in the running once before, in 1998, but U.N. officials had been worried that an award then, while Annan was still in his first term as Secretary-General, would have made him too "saintly" to stand a chance at a second. But this year the stars seemed perfectly aligned.