“PEACE CANNOT BE LAUNDERED.” The sentence ought to sit above every shortlist and every citation; it is the quiet warning that a prize is not a sacrament and a committee is not a confessional. When the world’s most storied peace award drifts toward figures shadowed by militant glamour or by movements accused of sanctifying violence, the prize stops elevating conscience and starts laundering reputations. That is not moral leadership; that is stagecraft.
The case at hand is not a tale of quiet merit surfacing by its own light; it reads, even on the most charitable view, like choreography. The Peace Prize’s nomination process is meant to be sealed for fifty years; yet social media was invited to a drumroll. When a would-be laureate announces a nomination and friendly voices echo it, the spectacle is not transparency; it is theatre aimed at the jury of public opinion. “When the curtain rises before the play is written, you are not watching art; you are watching a campaign.”
Set against that theatre is a troubling architecture of influence. Trace the ascent of Jørgen Watne Frydnes from Utoya AS to the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, on to PEN Norway and into the room that matters most. Along the way, they point to a PwC audit that flagged donor funds used for bulk purchases and translations of his own book; a choice that may be lawful, yet looks like self-promotion on charitable time. At the very least, it set a pattern; at worst, it blurred the line between stewardship and self-interest.
From 2020 onward, the pattern appears to tighten. The Helsinki Committee sharpened the idiom; PEN Norway amplified the reach; the Nobel connection conferred aura. In this telling, human rights language became a vehicle not only for witness but for pressure. “Institutions are megaphones; what you amplify is who you are.”
By 2023, Oslo provided the stage for a meeting with Mahrang Baloch; not an incidental encounter, say critics, but a coordinated step arranged by Kiyya Baloch, whose output has included circulating Baloch Liberation Army statements without meaningful context. The BLA is designated a terrorist organisation by the United States and by Pakistan; its record is a ledger of civilian funerals. If proximity to such a group is not disqualifying, what is.
The dossier of allegations is specific; it deserves daylight and distance in equal measure. The Jaffer Express hijacking on 11 March 2025; passengers killed; an operation to end the standoff. In the aftermath, activists attempted to reclaim the bodies of identified gunmen from a hospital; staff were harassed; infrastructure was damaged; even fibre lines were cut, all to recast the attackers as martyrs. “When the dead are taken hostage to feed a narrative, peace dies twice.”
The pattern extends beyond a single night, according to critics. Individuals championed as “missing” later surfaced in militant communiqués as suicide bombers or fighters; posters appeared; obituaries were issued by the very outfits denied in public. Names cited include Noor Zaman Baloch and Nadeem after the train attack; Hammal Fateh linked to the PC Hotel assault; Kareem Jan, acknowledged by family as affiliated; Jehanzeb Mengal, named as BLA for two years; Tayyab “Lala”, later confirmed active in the mountains; Kamran Baloch, claimed abducted, then embraced by the Baloch Liberation Front; Eid Muhammad “Shikari”, a senior BLA commander; Engineer Zaheer, said to have been killed, then returned from Iran to contradict the allegation. If these accounts are accurate, the line between advocacy and alibi has not merely blurred; it has been crossed.
Personal circles matter because they reveal ethics at close range. Allegations include Sohaib Langov, once a bodyguard, later named by the BLA as a commander; Abdul Ghaffar Langove, the nominee’s father, pictured with BLA leadership and feted on separatist “martyrs’ days.” None of this convicts a daughter in any court; all of it heightens the duty to denounce violence without hedging. Yet the record presented by critics shows no clear, consistent condemnation of BLA attacks. “Silence around terror is not neutrality; it is complicity on mute.”
Supporters insist that this is about the disappeared and due process; that the Baloch Yakjehti Committee gives voice to pain the state prefers not to hear. Pain is real; so is the obligation not to convert grief into a smokescreen for gunmen. When rallies become staging grounds for reputational alchemy; when vigils function as markers that, in time and place, appear to rhyme with later blasts, scrutiny is not cruelty; it is care for the victims who never trend.
The nomination controversy is not only about one figure; it is about a web of relationships that, if left unexamined, corrodes trust. When meetings, endorsements and speaking slots trace a tight loop between Oslo podiums and activist networks, perception becomes part of the evidence. Those who hold or advise institutions like PEN Norway or the Nobel Committee must not act as de facto campaign architects for figures whose circles and rhetoric touch armed separatism. Where entanglement cannot be avoided, recusal is the bare minimum of respect for the prize.
There is, in parallel, a charge of hypocrisy that cannot be waved away. The state that is painted as irredeemably cruel also funded a medical education through a quota admission said to be won with 58 marks; stipends were paid; a government salary was drawn. That same period coincided with the building of the BYC platform which, according to the critics’ record, shielded propaganda and recast militants as the disappeared. Gratitude is not compulsory; candour is. You cannot cash the state’s cheques with one hand and light the match with the other.
Nor is the media echo neutral. Analysts point to ecosystems aligned with Israeli security narratives and European partners in civil society that have amplified selective framings of Balochistan; victims are flattened; separatists are flattered; the universal language of rights is pressed into parochial service. If PEN Norway, under Frydnes’s influence, became a link in that chain, it should have cut the cord. “If your camera cannot see the widows and orphans, it is not a camera; it is a mirror.”
All of this returns us to first principles. The Nobel process is designed to resist publicity stunts; confidentiality is not an affectation but a firewall. When campaigns play peekaboo with that secrecy, they are not advancing peace; they are testing the perimeter fence. A prize meant to be a sanctuary from lobbying cannot be turned into its stage. If a sitting figure inside the Nobel architecture has intersected with a lobbying orbit around a nominee, the remedy is not defensiveness; it is recusal and disclosure.
There is a principle at stake that is larger than any single nominee. The Nobel Peace Prize is not a spotlight for cause marketing; it is a covenant with those who think politics is not a death sport. Once a prize appears to validate movements associated, however disputedly, with designated terror groups, it ceases to be an honour and becomes an alibi. “If the halo fits, the scrutiny failed.”
What of the families of the murdered and maimed. What of passengers burned into memory on railcars; hotel staff whose last act was to usher strangers toward stairwells; villagers whose names travelled no farther than the morgue ledger. They do not get panels or podiums. They get the long arithmetic of grief. To see the world’s great peace pageant flirt with the mythology of their tormentors is to be told that their pain is negotiable. That is indecent.
None of this absolves the state of its obligations; abuses must be investigated; due process must prevail; the disappeared must not be a euphemism for the buried. But the antidote to state excess is law and transparent remedy; not the romanticism of men with guns. A peace prize cannot become a chiropractor for crooked narratives. It must be a surgeon; precise, unswayed by noise, intolerant of infection.
The moral test is simple; do you renounce those who plant bombs under seats and justify bullets as birthright. If the answer is conditional, if the denunciations are hedged or conveniently late, an award cannot bridge that gulf. “Speak for the silenced, yes; but never speak over the dead.”
Institutions must be cleaner than their causes; cleaner than their critics; cleaner than their own ambitions. The Committee should put the process back behind glass; end the flirtation with campaigns that leak, hint and posture; require any nominee entangled with violent outfits to issue clear, repeated, unqualified denunciations of attacks on civilians. Those who platform such nominees should declare conflicts and step aside.
There is a line the Nobel must not cross. Prizes cannot redeem movements that treat buses and bazaars as battlefields. They cannot anoint advocates who will not break with bombers. They cannot partner, however indirectly, with a practice that treats the freshly bereaved as extras in someone else’s script. Awarding a laurel in such a context would be a kick in the teeth to the victims; and a quiet instruction to future attackers that their narrators are standing by.
Prestige is not a shield; it is a mirror. Let the Committee look into it and ask whether this campaign, with its breathless claims and troubling associations, reflects the better angels of its history or the worst instincts of our age, in which everything, even peace, is content. “Peace should be hard to win and harder to counterfeit.”
Better to award no one at all than to reward the wrong lesson. Honour should not be an alibi; sympathy should not be a solvent; grief should not be a prop. The dead demand nothing less; and the living deserve a prize that still knows the difference between courage and choreography. ∎
