Supporters of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party hold portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi as they celebrate in front of the party’s headquarters in Yangon, Myanmar on Monday. AFP
The reputation of Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been left in tatters with the country accused of the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingyas and trampling on the rights of other minorities.
The 1991 laureate, who won the prize for her heroic resistance to the country’s military, now rules in an uneasy power-sharing agreement with them.
Myanmar has been fighting several internal independence movements for decades in what is thought to be the world’s longest ongoing civil war.
Suu Kyi is far from the first peace prize laureate to later wage or support war.
Barack Obama
The first black US president got the prize only nine months after his inauguration in 2009.
But far from ending the US’ foreign wars, as he said he hoped to do, they continued for all eight years of his term, with airstrikes or military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
Abiy Ahmed
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed – who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize – has ordered a military offensive on the northern Tigray region of the country.
Ahmed won the prize for ending the 20-year conflict with Eritrea.
Henry Kissinger
Eyebrows were raised in 1973 when the Cold War warrior Secretary of State shared the prize with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho for negotiating ceasefires that didn’t hold. The war rumbled on for two more years.
Le Duc Tho refused his half of the prize while critics said the award “made political satire obsolete” given Kissinger’s role in the carpet bombing of Cambodia and Operation Condor killings to keep pro-US South American dictators in power.
Ernesto Moneta
The Italian pacifist supported Rome’s war with the Ottoman Empire in 1911 and its conquest of what is now Libya, only four years after winning the Nobel.
The former soldier, who also fought with nationalist general Giuseppe Garibaldi, went on to back Italy’s entry into World War I in 1915.
Theodore Roosevelt
The then-US president won in 1906 for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese war a year earlier.
But even at the time, the nomination of the “military mad” leader of the “Rough Riders” volunteer cavalry regiment in the Spanish-American war, was disputed, with Swedish newspapers saying Alfred Nobel would be spinning in his grave.
