If Vladimir Putin persuaded Bashar Al-Assad to agree to give up his chemical weapons and subsequently persuaded Barack Obama not to attack Syria, much of the credit for averting a war has to go to not just the Russian leader but to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the body currently overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical arsenal, and which has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. It is the organization's track record in eliminating chemical weapons that Putin and Obama depended on. Since its founding in 1997, the OPCW has arguably carried out the most successful disarmament efforts of our times, ridding the earth of 80 percent of its chemical weapons. That is a success rate the two world leaders have put their money on and hope that it will extend to Syria. They seem to have made the right choice. The OPCW has been working to rid the world of chemical weapons for the past 16 years. But it is only in recent weeks, following the use of chemical weapons in Syria, that the OPCW has become a household name. For the most part, its task has been unheralded. A staff of about 500 is charged with making sure that the 189 signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention are abiding by its terms by monitoring and destroying all existing chemical weapons.
The CWC is one of the most comprehensive international agreements for the control of armaments. It requires signatories to agree that they will never manufacture or use chemical weapons, nor will they support others in this endeavor. Syria is the latest country, the 190th, to sign the treaty. It was also the most recent country to use chemical weapons, spraying sarin nerve gas in the Aug. 21 attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, killing at least 1,000 people. The world knows it was sarin thanks to the OPCW which, on behalf of the UN secretary-general, sent in inspectors to take lab samples which confirmed that sarin had been used. While the Nobel Committee has generally done a good job on scientific, economic and literary awards, its choice of peace candidates has often been controversial. It is never easy to pick a winner, especially from this year's record 259 nominees, so many of whom were worthy candidates. Malala Yousafzai was the sentimental favorite for continuing to campaign for women's education in Pakistan even after being shot in the head for it. However, Malala's selection might have been divisive. No doubt Malala wants peace, but her focus - education and equality in the face of intimidation - while a worthy cause, is not peace. The same argument can be made of Syria. There has been no progress toward peace in Syria that would warrant the world's most famous peace prize. Coupled with the fact that the OPCW's work has just begun, the award might have been premature. But in the citation read out in Oslo, the committee made it clear that this was overdue recognition for more than 16 years of difficult, dangerous and below the radar work in multilateral disarmament, on a relatively tiny budget. The Nobel committee's decision was meant in part as a gesture of support for what will be the most dangerous mission in the agency's history – dismantling some of the world's most lethal non-nuclear weapons, in a very short time frame, while trying to avoid getting shot in the middle of a war zone. Individuals putting their lives on the line to help others and defuse conflicts is what the Nobel Peace Prize is all about.
