NOTHING precious should be within reach of a vandal. In February 1845, the Portland Vase — a rare Roman cameo glass, dateable to the 1st century AD — was smashed into over 200 pieces by a drunken student.
On May 21, 1972, in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Michelangelo’s priceless statue — the Pietà — was damaged by a deranged geologist, Laszlo Toth. It took Toth minutes to vandalise what had taken Michelangelo two years to sculpt. Specialists spent 10 months restoring 100 fragments to the statue, using marble removed from the back of the sculpture. Cruelly, the original tip of Mary’s nose could not be recovered as it had been pocketed by some unfeeling tourist.
It has taken President Donald Trump less than two years to trivialise the Nobel Peace Prize, to lower it from distinction to ridicule.
Alfred Nobel instituted his Peace Prize in 1901 in a belated act of contrition for having invented dynamite and ballistite. His ingenuity converted his Bofors manufactory into an arms producer. That brainchild, however, proved to be the undoing of the Congress party and its leader Rajiv Gandhi. The party lost the November 1989 general elections after the revelation that key Indian politicians and uniformed personnel had received over $6.5 million in bribes from Bofors.
It has taken Trump less than two years to trivialise the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is said that peace activist Bertha von Suttner, a friend of Nobel’s, persuaded him to institute a Peace Prize. Nobel died in 1896. Nine years later, Bertha received her friend’s Peace Prize “for her audacity to oppose the horrors of war”. Clearly, the politicisation of the prize began early.
Over the past 125 years, the Peace Prize committee has deviated from Nobel’s intention — to honour those who had “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.
Individual awardees have outrun institutions. The Peace Prize committee has recognised more than 110 individuals and almost 30 organisations. The International Committee of the Red Cross has won three times (the last in 1963), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees twice (in 1954 and 1981). Neither in this war-torn world has won since.
Individuals include adversaries rewarded for signing blood-stained peace accords (Menachem Begin/Anwar Sadat in 1978, and in 1994 Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin). In 1973, Henry Kissinger got it for halting his bombing of North Vietnam; his victim, the Vietcong leader Le Duc Tho, declined to accept the award or share the podium with his American nemesis.
In 1993, a jailer, South African president F.W. de Klerk, was placed on a par with his former prisoner Nelson Mandela for “the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime”. Three leaders have received the award for “non-violent struggles” — Albert Luthuli in 1960; Martin Luther King Jr in 1964; and Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991.
This year, again, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has refused to oblige Trump. It is galling for him to know that three of his predecessors received the Peace Prize — Woodrow Wilson in 1920 for ending World War I; Jimmy Carter in 2002 for finding “peaceful solutions to international conflicts”; and Barack Obama in 2009 for strengthening “international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. Trump, if he is to be awarded anything, should be given an inverted prize for starting wars.
Most Nobel Laureates donate their prize money to charities or noble causes. Our own Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai has put her prize money of $500,000 to beneficial use. She and her enterprising father Ziauddin Yousafzai founded the Malala Fund in 2013 to champion “every girl’s right to 12 years of education”. The latest report of the Malala US Fund and Malala Fund Nigeria for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, reveals an amount of $53.6 million (up from $8m in 2025), with investments of another $30.6m (up from $28.4m the previous year). Additionally, she and her father have earned over $2m from their autobiographies.
By comparison, the Edhi Foundation in Pakistan announced its annual surplus in 2024 at Rs5.1 billion and its net assets at Rs42bn. The Edhi Foundation in the US has about $30m in net assets and in the UK another £40m.
For Trump, charity begins at home. Even though he is worth over $7bn, he remains infused with “self and vain conceit”, craving that “hollow crown/ That rounds the mortal temples” of Nobel winners. He is obviously not satisfied with the FIFA Peace Prize given to him in 2025 by the kowtowing FIFA President Gianni Infantino. That leaves Trump with only one option: he must persuade President Vladimir Putin to award him the Order of Lenin.
The writer is an author.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk
Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2026
