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Nobel Peace Prize for chemical watchdog is an ‘award to Assad’

By C. J. Refsland on October 11, 2013 • ( 1 )

Chemical weapons watchdog the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that the Peace Prize had been awarded to the OPCW for its extensive efforts to eliminate ch (Photo credit: junaidrao)

My Comment: I was surprised to hear this, I thought it would go to Malala Yousafzai. I really don’t understand, but then I didn’t understand why obama received the Nobel Peace Prize before he ever did anything to deserve it. But I sure thought Malala would get it.

(Telegraph) Opponents of the Syrian dictator said the award of the prize to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons supported the deal by which the Syrian regime avoided US military intervention by agreeing to surrender its chemical stockpile.

The Nobel Prize committee said Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had won the award for its past work, not just because of its recently embarked project to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons programme.

However, its chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland, added: “Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons.”

Inspectors were allowed in after Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and John Kerry, the US secretary of state, struck a deal as a way of warding off American military intervention.

At the time Syrian opposition activists and rebels, including in Ghouta, the scene of the chemical weapons attack in August that killed hundreds of people, said that it allowed Mr Assad to consolidate his grip on power.