Leading Article: Mandela dignifies the peace prize

THE FOUNDING of a fat and now very famous peace prize by the inventor of dynamite and owner of the Bofors armaments firm, Alfred Nobel, is among the world's best-known paradoxes. Presumably it was an attempt posthumously to sanitise and keep alive his reputation. In his will of 1895, Nobel bequeathed his entire wealth to a fund whose interest should be paid out annually to those who had 'conferred the greatest benefit on mankind' in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and, more vaguely, in promoting 'the fraternity of nations, the abolition or diminution of standing armies, and the formation and propagation of a Peace Congress'. An economics prize was added in 1969.

Unlike the other five prizes, which were entrusted to learned Swedish institutions, the Peace Prize was placed in the hands of a committee to be appointed by the Norwegian parliament. Sweden and Norway had been united under a single sovereign since 1814. Nobel's gesture may have been intended to mollify Norwegians chafing at Swedish domination: the union was dissolved 10 years later.

It seems particularly apt that this year the Peace Prize should be in Norway's gift, since the country's own Foreign Minister, Johan Jorgen Holst, brokered the recent historic Middle East peace agreement. He might have been a candidate, had the closing date for nominations not been in February.

The first Peace Prize went jointly in 1901 to the Swiss founder of the Red Cross, Jean Henri Dunant, and the founder of the first French peace society, Frederic Passy. The committee first showed real courage in 1935, when, to Hitler's fury, it chose Carl von Ossietzky, an incarcerated anti-Nazi journalist and pacifist. It is healthy that the prize's award should periodically arouse fierce controversy. But its reputation would be compromised if the decision were too often judged eccentric or, worse, wrong-headed. By general consent, the 1973 award to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, leader of North Vietnam's delegation to the Paris Peace Talks of the previous five years, represented the nadir. Le Duc Tho had the good grace to decline his share. Dr Kissinger would have been well advised to do the same. However skilful his negotiating may have been, his association with a ruthless American bombing strategy during the Vietnam War was too recent to make the the decision acceptable.

Egypt's president Anwar Sadat and Israel's prime minister Menachem Begin had by contrast shown enormous political and personal courage in ending their countries' enmity at Camp David. They shared the prize in 1978.

The case of Mikhail Gorbachev, the 1990 winner, was rather different. True, his contribution to peace was outstanding. But arguably he belongs among those who made a virtue of necessity. The Soviet Union was collapsing internally from its own contradictions. He hoped to save it by reducing its burdens through disarmament and disengagement and bringing in Western expertise.

The same could be said of this year's joint winner, Frederik Willem de Klerk. South Africa's economy was crumbling. The writing was on the wall for apartheid in all its forms. Moreover, after his big gesture in releasing Nelson Mandela, Mr de Klerk appeared to have little control over the country's security services. Doubts remain about his awareness of a 'third force' fomenting violence and commissioning killings in black townships. That he has risked his life is, however, beyond question.

The same is even truer of Mr Mandela, and few people outside South Africa are likely to dispute his qualifications. From the moment of his release after a quarter century of imprisonment, he has pleaded for a peaceful path to majority black rule in South Africa. His own dignity and lack of bitterness have helped to keep political negotiations going. A more convincing human embodiment of the cause of peace it would be hard to imagine.