PenInfo Desk: Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors, has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.
Known as hibakusha, the survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been recognised by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Nobel Committee Chair Joergen Watne Frydnes said the group had “contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo”.
The Nobel committee expressed alarm that the international “nuclear taboo” that developed in response to the atomic bomb attacks of August 1945 was “under pressure”.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors pushing for a nuclear weapons ban, as states like Russia threaten to use them.
Nihon Hidankyo’s co-head expressed surprise.
Following Friday’s announcement, UN chief Antonio Guterres called on world leaders to eliminate all nuclear weapons, which he called “devices of death”.
The group, also known as Hibakusha and founded in 1956, received the honour “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” said Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.
The Nobel committee noted that next year will mark 80 years since two American atomic bombs killed an estimated 214,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II.
Setsuko Thurlow, a 92-year-old member of Nihon Hidankyo, was 13 years old when she was rescued from the ruins of Hiroshima.
When the International Campaign to Abolish nuclear weapons (ICAN) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, Thurlow accepted the award on its behalf together with ICAN head Beatrice Fihn.
Hiroshima “was like hell on Earth,” she told AFP at the time, describing survivors looking like “a procession of ghosts”, burned flesh hanging from their bones and some “carrying their eyeballs”.
Frydnes told AFP Friday’s Nobel was “a wake-up call to the world, but it’s also to recognize how individuals can stand up and create hope by telling their stories.”
Six hours after Friday’s announcement, no leader of a nuclear power had publicly reacted to the choice of Nobel laureate.
The Nobel Peace Prize has previously honoured disarmament efforts, including in 1985 to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and in 2005 to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Nobel Prizes consist of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1 million prize sum.
Peninfo/desk/12.10.24/01.45pm