The Nobel Peace Prize is among the elite of international awards, as high in profile as an Oscar or a Wimbledon singles trophy. For that reason, when scandal strikes - as it has with 2000 winner, former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung - questions are asked, and loudly.
The allegation is that South Korean taxpayers unwittingly bought Mr Kim's award. The claim was seemingly proven on Monday when the chairman of the North Korean investment arm of Hyundai committed suicide. In notes written before he jumped from the window of his 12th-floor office in central Seoul, Chung Mong-hun apologised for his role in transferring hundreds of millions of dollars illegally from a state bank to North Korea.
When the scandal broke in February, the company, Hyundai Asan, claimed the US$500 million in payments were for its monopoly rights to tourism and other investments. Opposition politicians claimed at least US$100 million was a bribe to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il so he would meet then-president Kim Dae-jung, who was pushing for a breakthrough in his cherished 'sunshine policy' of engagement with the North. The transfers were made, apparently with Hyundai Asan as the go-between, weeks before the historic talks in June 2000. Within six months, Kim Dae-jung was the Norwegian Nobel Committee's peace laureate for the year.
Unlike other prizes given annually by the committee, the peace prize is often political in nature and as a result, controversial. Human rights, conflict resolution and disarmament are, after all, matters of interpretation. But another difference is its frequent tying to news events. Among such winners were, in 1973, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, who negotiated the Vietnam war peace accord earlier that year; Polish union leader and democracy fighter Lech Walesa in 1983; the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama, in 1989; and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, the year after her National League for Democracy party was stopped from taking power by the ruling junta after winning elections.
American academic Ghada Talhami, a professor of political science at Lake Forest College in Illinois, said that the 1994 peace prize, given to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli politicians Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for broking Middle East peace, meant little. The prize had been political, coming a year after the signing of the Oslo accords, and history had shown their efforts to have failed.
'I am one of those Palestinians who felt from the start that the road to Oslo was not the road to take,' Dr Talhami said. 'It was a moment of extreme weakness, where the alignment of forces was so uneven that Arafat shouldn't have even ventured in that direction.'
