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| Home Front: WoT |
| A Capital Alternative To Terror |
| 2006-10-22 |
| Groucho Marx is famously said to have turned down the membership of a club with a characteristic putdown, "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Last week, Muhammad Yunus and his creation the Grameen Bank must have felt the same way after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Snide remarks apart, the prize recognizes that to win any war on terror, the focus must be on nipping the sources of terrorism in the bud. The war is far from won for Bangladesh, with forthcoming elections presenting a keen battle between modernist forces and regressive forces that wish to radicalize the population and produce more cannon-fodder for battling the West. It is my keen hope that countries around the world, and particularly around South Asia, learn from the Grameen experience and perhaps even make the experience self-sustainable. A prize not worth having? For the first time in a long while, I believe that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to an entity that actually prevents the creation of new violence, rather than rewarding photogenic politicians for work that is quickly forgotten or even reversed. Unlike in the case of prizes in various subjects including the sciences, the Nobel Peace Prize does not examine either the sustainability or stability of achievements that lead to the awards. That is no vile characterization, as a select list of recent winners shows us: |
| Posted by:tipper |