Odd Andersen

AFP photographer based in Berlin. Views my own.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[AFP News Agency @AFP]

#BREAKING South African Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay wins Nobel Peace Prize

[AFP News Agency @AFP]

Armed Israeli settlers on Tuesday beat an AFP photographer, leaving him requiring hospital treatment, as he covered ongoing violence by settlers against West Bank olive farmers. https://t.co/vJi0VZwEzI

[Odd Andersen @odd_andersen]

@EricLDaugh Do you think the "foreign actor" could be Steven Seagal? If so, it is indeed unfortunate that he has been bailed.

[AFP News Agency @AFP]

Agence France-Presse photographer Luis Tato on Saturday won the top prize at the prestigious Visa Pour l'Image photojournalism festival for his coverage of Generation Z protests in Madagascar.

https://t.co/9LGYtLRlF1

[AFP News Agency @AFP]

🇳🇴 Norway's new monarch, King Haakon VIII, attended a memorial service on Sunday as churches across the Scandinavian kingdom paid tribute to his father, King Harald, who died two days earlier ➡️ https://t.co/rXswNpHdPn

[AFP News Agency @AFP]

🇳🇴 Flags across Norway flew at half-mast on Saturday as the country opened a new chapter in its history under King Haakon VIII, a day after the death of his 89-year-old father Harald.
➡️ https://t.co/zVKgr74rLD

[Louis Massie @LouisMassie]

Enjoy some great eclipse images shot by
@AFP video journalists yesterday https://t.co/MWIEjh25Om

[Odd Andersen @odd_andersen]

He should be giving him the cold shoulder.

[Andrew Tate @Cobratate]

I am being held in SHU, the highest level of security which exists.

No commissary.
No visits.
No contact with the outside world.

My neighbor is a cannibal who screams throughout the night.

[AFP News Agency @AFP]

Erling Haaland said facing England, the land of his birth, in the World Cup quarterfinals is extra special as he aims to extend Norway's historic run into the last four.

https://t.co/1uzQq6zfxP

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

16 December 1932 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Max Gosschalk, was born in Deventer.

He was deported to #Auschwitz in October 1942. He was murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.
---

Learn about the fate of Jews deported from the German-occupied Netherlands to Auschwitz: https://t.co/riU3zxImqM

[Committee to Protect Journalists @pressfreedom]

“Getting back in the field, it’s been terrifying because you don’t know what’s safe anymore. You don’t know when you could become a target,” @collinsdyl, an @AFP video journalist who was targeted in an Israeli double-tap strike on a group of journalists in October 2023, told AFP.

Watch👇
https://t.co/FRzOh8vdK4

📷: Saul Loeb/AFP

[Odd Andersen @odd_andersen]

@Cambeezy_ Sorry but I don’t recognize him :-(

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

29 August 1929 | French Jewish boy, Marcel Hantkan, was born in Paris.

He was deported to #Auschwitz from #Drancy on 20 August 1942. He was murdered in a gas chamber after the arrival selection.

[MSF International @MSF]

Earlier today, two Israeli strikes hit Nasser hospital in Gaza, killing at least 20 people. Jerome Grimaud, our emergency coordinator in Gaza, shares his reaction:

“We denounce in the strongest possible terms Israel’s horrendous attacks on the Nasser medical complex today – the only partially functioning public hospital in the south of Gaza. Israeli forces killed at least 20 people and injured 50 more in consecutive strikes, including healthcare workers, rescuers, and journalists.

“Among them was Mariam Abu Dagga, a freelance photographer who frequently worked with MSF. We are heartbroken by her death. Mariam leaves behind a son who must now grow up without his mother. At least four other journalists were also killed today.

“Some MSF staff members were forced to shelter in the laboratory as Israel repeatedly struck the building amidst rescue efforts. We are outraged as the Israeli forces continue to attack healthcare workers and journalists with impunity.

“For the past 22 months, we have watched as healthcare facilities have been levelled, journalists silenced, and healthcare workers buried beneath the rubble by the Israeli forces. As Israel continues to shun international law, the only witnesses of their genocidal campaign are deliberately being targeted. It must stop now.”

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

One of the five journalists killed by Israeli forces today in Gaza is Mariam Dagga, a mother, who was often based at Nasser Hospital, most recently reporting on the hospital's doctors struggling to save children from starvation

[Financial Times @FT]

Israel has killed at least 20 people, including several journalists, in a double strike on Nasser Medical Complex, the largest health facility in southern Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Palestinian enclave. https://t.co/yw5sagr6ih

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

3 June 1935 | A French Jewish boy, Jacques Moncarz, was born in Paris.

He arrived at #Auschwitz on 13 February 1944 in a transport of 1,500 Jews deported from Drancy. He was among 1,229 of them murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

26 May 1939 | Dutch Jewish boy, Carel Gans, was born in Amsterdam.

He was deported to #Auschwitz from #Westerbork in February 1944. He was murdered in a gas chamber after arrival selection.

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

17 May 1935 | A Norwegian Jewish boy, Arvid Claes, was born in Oslo.

He was deported to #Auschwitz in November 1942. He arrived at the camp on 1 December 1942 and was murdered in a gas chamber after selection.