Jimmy Carter urges peace 'in a more dangerous world'

Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter today urged people everywhere to work for peace in a world that has become “a more dangerous place”.

“It is with a deep sense of gratitude that I accept this prize,” said Carter.

“I am grateful to my wife Rosalyn, to my colleagues at the Carter Centre and to the many others who continue to seek an end to violence and suffering throughout the world.”

The 78-year-old former US president was honoured for his pursuit of peace, health and human rights that began with the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

Carter was accepting his prize in a world overshadowed by the threat of terrorism, and uneasy that a new war in Iraq may erupt if it fails to obey UN Security Council resolutions on weapons of mass destruction.

“Instead of entering a millennium of peace, the world is now, in many ways, a more dangerous place. The greater ease of travel and communication has not been matched by equal understanding and mutual respect,” he said.

Carter, a Democrat, has repeatedly urged US President George Bush to avoid a war in Iraq by working through the United Nations, and to support weapons inspections in Iraq.

In his Nobel speech, before Norway’s King Harald V, and hundreds of others including Carter’s own children and grandchildren, the former president took a broader view.

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”

He urged respect for the United Nations as the international forum for solving disputes, and said the United States, as the last superpower, has “not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom”.

In the solemn ceremony, with music and flowers, Carter was accepting a Nobel gold medal and diploma. The prize also includes a £650,000 (€1m) cash prize.

Gunnar Berge, the chairman of the five-member Norwegian awards committee, caused a stir when he announced the prize in October by saying it was a “kick in the leg” to the Bush administration for its threats against Iraq.

In his speech yesterday, Berge called it “one of the real sins of omission” in the peace prize that Carter was not included in the 1978 peace prize to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for signing the Camp David accords that Carter brokered.

“Jimmy Carter should, of course, have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a long time ago,” said Berge. Carter was not nominated for the award in time.

Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan when the former Georgia governor and peanut farmer sought re-election in 1980.

“Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president,” said Berge. “But he is certainly the best ex-president the country has ever had.”

Carter recalled Begin and Sadat as vivid reminders of personal courage, as well as other laureates, including 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr from his home state of Georgia as “the greatest leader my native state has ever produced”.

The Nobel prizes, first awarded in 1901, were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in his will and are always presented on December 10, the anniversary of his death in 1896.

The peace prize is awarded in Oslo, while prizes in economics, medicine, physics, chemistry and literature are presented in Sweden.