Bolivian President, Russian Lawmakers seek to appeal Obama Nobel Peace Prize after Libya attacks

Bolivian President Evo Morales and Russian political leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky have launched a joint effort to have President Barack Obama stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded in 2009…
Forbes reports that Russian Liberal Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky released a statement Monday saying that the prize, awarded to Obama in 2009 for his work on nuclear non-proliferation, was hypocritical in light of recent missile attacks in Libya.

“These developments in Libya are another outrageous act of aggression by NATO forces and, in particular, the United States,” Zhirinovsky’s stated.

He went on to call the strikes part of a “colonial policy” with the goal to control Libyan oil.

Bolivian President Evo Morales echoed those sentiments in an interview with the Digital Journal, saying “How is it possible that a Nobel Peace Prize winner leads a gang to attack and invade? This is not a defense of human rights or self-determination,” Morales, who is among a number of left-leaning Latin American leaders who have denounced the no-fly zone policy along with the attacks there.

The Nobel committee has been criticized both in the U.S. and abroad for its 2009 decision to award the prize to Obama for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” only a few months after his inauguration.

“The prize is coming a little bit early,” Guenther Oettinger stated for Bloomberg. “He’s at the beginning of his work, not the end.”