From the Archives: African scholars bemoan Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama’s foreign policy

African scholars bemoan Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama’s foreign policy
November 21, 2011 2:16 PM MST

Although the annual meeting of the African Studies Association rotates among various American cities, this year it was the turn of Washington, D.C., to host it. Hundreds of academic experts on Africa – anthropologists, economists, linguists, political scientists, and others – gathered at the Wardman Park Marriott Hotel from November 17 through November 20 for lectures, panel discussions, and networking.

One panel discussion was entitled “Obama’s Noble Ancestors: Nobel Prize Laureates of African Descent.” There were papers presented on earlier Nobel Peace Prize winners such as Ralph Bunche, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King, Jr., but the focus was very much on 2009 laureate Barack Obama, who won the prize only nine months after taking office as the 44th U.S. president.

Two of the panelists were highly critical of Obama’s performance in office, saying that he did not live up to the ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize and that his foreign policy before and after winning the prize leaves much to be desired.

In a paper called “Obama’s Nobel Ancestors,” Adekeye Adebajo, executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, South Africa, noted that the announcement of Obama’s Nobel Prize came as he was preparing to send more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan.

‘Bush with a smile’

“Some of his foreign policy actions,” Adebajo said, “unfortunately have followed in the hawkish footsteps of his predecessor, George W. Bush. According to The Economist, in his first three years in office, Obama ordered targeted assassinations of terror suspects for an average of one drone attack every four days, compared to George Bush’s one every forty days."

These drone attacks, he pointed out, "have been mostly in the border area of Pakistan and Afghanistan, killing hundreds of innocent women and children. As a result of these actions, some of us have been forced to ask whether Obama’s foreign policy could come to represent ‘Bush with a smile.’”

Adebajo, author of UN Peacekeeping in Africa, also found Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech “disappointing.”

It was, he explained, “quite a belligerent speech” in which Obama “was effectively explaining why force had to be used to bring about peace. A celebration of peace thus turned into a justification of war.”

Although he called Obama the “most cosmopolitan and urbane individual to occupy the White House,” Adebajo compared him unfavorably to Bill Clinton, saying Obama is “very much a dyed-in-the-wool politician cut from the same pragmatic cloth as his Democratic predecessor” as president.

Both presidents, he said, “have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice core principles on the altar of political survival.”

In fact, Adebajo concluded, “Barack’s instincts to be a force for good in the world have often been diverted by his country’s imperial temptations, as we saw recently in Libya.”

On the same panel, Ali A. Mazrui, director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at Binghamton University in New York, recalled that he “shed tears when Obama was elected president” and that he “was deeply moved even when he won the Nobel Prize for Peace,” but today he feels “upset that [Obama] has let us down so badly in foreign policy.”

‘Israeli-style assassinations’

In his paper on "Barack Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize," Mazrui also pointed to the targeted assassinations that the Obama administration has employed in the war on terror in the Middle East and South Asia, which he referred to as “Israeli-style assassinations.”

Obama, he said, “has orchestrated more political assassinations, either by sending troops to kill somebody or by the drones, if I’m not mistaken, than any U.S. president in the last 100 years. “

On Obama’s record in office since winning the Nobel Prize, Mazrui, author of The Politics of War and the Culture of Violence, conceded that on domestic policy, Obama still “looks hopeful.”

On the other hand, with regard to Obama’s foreign policy, Mazrui quipped, “I’m sure whoever voted for that prize, says ‘what were we smoking that day?’”

One reason, he pointed out, is that “Obama is one of the very few U.S. presidents in history who managed three wars at the same time -- since winning the Nobel Prize.”

Mazrui also cast suspicion on the motivations that led to Obama’s award of the Nobel Prize in the first place.

Racial obsession

“For some people,” he said, “it’s easier to understand how Obama became President than why he won the Nobel Prize so soon after being elected.”

Noting that the stated reason by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for giving the prize to Obama was for his “diplomatic efforts,” Mazrui added that “I suspect the hidden agenda among those who nominated Obama was almost entirely in the domain of race relations. The issue of race and the prospect of peace has obsessed the Nobel Foundation in Oslo for more than a half a century.”

He pointed out that four out of the seven Nobel Peace Prize recipients from sub-Saharan Africa were all from South Africa and suggested that “the obsession with defining peace too narrowly in terms of race relations” has infected the deliberations of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 21, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.