Obama wins Peace Prize for good intentions
09 Oct 2009
United States president Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 on Friday for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples", as well as his calls to reduce the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
"Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said in its citation.
The decision to award one of the world's top accolades to a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, came as a big surprise to virtually all observers.
The five-member Peace Prize committee is deeply secretive; and it is difficult to guess which way it will go. From a record shortlist of 205 people, most bets were on Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, Colombian senator Piedad Cordoba, and Chinese dissident Hu Jia.
French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan, and Afghan woman's rights activist Simi Samar were also considered possible candidates.
British bookmaker Ladbrokes and its Irish counterpart, PaddyPower, gave the best odds to imprisoned Hu, Cordoba, and Samar.
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