This December, the world is going to celebrate a hero of peace, as a certain Mr. Hussein goes to Oslo to pick up this year’s Noble peace prize. However, at Independent World Report, we are tempted to use this occasion to remember a few other heroes of peace. We doubt if any of them will ever have a chance of going to Oslo, unlike the president of the United States – Barak Hussein Obama.

According to the will of Alfred Noble, the inventor of dynamite and owner of Bofors, the peace prize would be awarded to those “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

We believe that the four heroes we would like to mention in this editorial fit that criteria, but for varying reasons, none of them will be honoured by the Norwegian Noble Committee in the near or the distant future. We skip explaining those reasons here, hoping that a little probing on their own will be an interesting exercise for our readers.

Irom Sharmila Chanu: Poet and peace activist from Manipur, India. This November she completed ten years of a hunger strike, demanding an end to military repression – extrajudicial execution, torture, arbitrary detention, rape – in her homeland.

Mordechai Vanunu: Whistleblower on Israel’s nuclear weapons program. In 1986, he exposed details about the Dimona nuclear power plant to the Sunday Times, London.

Cindy Sheehan: American anti-war activist, whose son was killed during his service in the Iraq war in 2004. Since then, she has been relentlessly campaigning against war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Aminatou Haidar: Peace activist from Western Sahara – a key leader in the Sahrawi liberation movement against Moroccan occupation and military repression.

This November, we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Again, an event that inspires us to mention some of the walls that remain standing: The apartheid wall of Israel; The Moroccan berm that divides the beautiful desert of Western Sahara; India-Pakistan border fence; the great Firewall of China; and the invisible anti-immigration wall that is now being built around the European Union.♦