Global Race Equality Foundation commends Obama for winning Nobel Peace Prize

Accra, Dec. 13, GNA - The UK-based Global Race Equality Foundation, has congratulated US President Barack Obama for winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize, during the 61st anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

The foundation, which also doubles as Great Trust Foundation commended the Nobel Committee for the "justified and deserved award".

A statement issued by Dr Koku Adomdza, a representative of the foundation and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, said: " In our view, the award is well deserved and well thought through given the exceptional achievements of President Barack Obama in his short political life, including commitment to peace, bringing an end to the Iraqi and Afghan wars responsibly and nuclear disarmament."

" It is hard to come by any other global leader from a minority group that has achieved so much in so little time at national and international levels," the statement said.

The US President who received the award in Oslo, Norway, pledged the full purse of about $1 million to charity.

The foundation is an innovative race equality think- tank and human rights research centre.

The statement said prejudice, intolerance, diversity and hatred had underpinned some of the world's hostilities, theatres of war, divided societies and inflicted untold avoidable human misery and pain.

"Within a non-parochial context of peace, we believe that President Obama has contributed immeasurably to global peace by liberating global political leadership from a hitherto limited conscience and consciousness of the world in terms of what is possible.

"Further, we laud President Obama's pledge and commitment to nuclear disarmament and an end to nuclear proliferation."

The foundation expressed confidence that the Nobel Peace Prize will spur President Obama on to alternative value propositions to peace.

The citation that accompanied President Obama's award read: " The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples. The Committee has 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. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.

"Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

"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.

"For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses 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."

GNA