Thaindian News

London, Oct 9 (IANS) US President Barack Obama gets the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, it was announced in Oslo Friday.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play,” the committee said on its website.

“Only 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. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” the committee said.

The committee said it endorsed Obama’s appeal that “now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges”.

Obama was elected the first African-American president of his country in November 2008.

DPA adds: The Nobel Peace Prize - worth 10 million kronor ($1.4 million dollars) - is scheduled to be presented in Oslo Dec 10.

There were a record 205 nominations for the 2009 peace prize, of which 33 were organisations.

Last year, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari won the peace prize for his mediation efforts.

The peace prize was the fifth of this year’s Nobel awards, which are also made for medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. The prizes were endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.