The decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama has caused controversy and surprise around the world.

At home, some Republicans and conservative hardliners portrayed Obama as the darling of “European leftist elites.” Some political pundits even said that he should turn down the prize from what they described as an “anti-American committee.”

“This is not Obama's fault,” said Ari Fleischer, a former Bush spokesman, noting that the president did not seek out the Nobel Prize.

Fleischer then argued that it is fair game for Republicans to question an award for a president who so far appears to be “all show and no substance.”

Obama admitted that he was also taken by surprise after learning he won the Nobel Peace Prize but said he was “deeply humbled.”

The US president said he did not see the Nobel Prize “as recognition of my own accomplishments,” but rather as an acknowledgment of the objectives he and his administration have set for the US and the world.

“I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize,” Obama said.

Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel committee that chose Obama for the Peace Prize, defended the decision and praised the president’s efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down the anti-missile shield in Europe. “All these things contributed to—I wouldn’t say a safer world—but a world with less tension,” he said.

Obama plans to go to Oslo to accept the award. Well, it’s a relief that at least this Nobel laureate is not under house arrest.

In 1991, when the Nobel Peace Prize committee announced the award of that year’s Peace Prize to detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi people in Rangoon listened to the news on the BBC’s Burmese service with jubilation. They saw the award as a resounding reproof to the Burmese regime.

Suu Kyi also learned the news from her radio at home and told visiting US congressman Bill Richardson and New York Times reporter Philip Shenon in February 1994 that she had felt humbled.

Suu Kyi’s son Alexander Aris accepted the award in Oslo on her behalf in December 1991, and said in an acceptance speech: “Firstly, I know that she would begin by saying that she accepts the Nobel Prize for Peace not in her own name but in the name of all the people of Burma.

“She would say that this prize belongs not to her but to all those men, women and children who, even as I speak, continue to sacrifice their wellbeing, their freedom and their lives in pursuit of a democratic Burma. Theirs is the prize and theirs will be the eventual victory in Burma's long struggle for peace, freedom and democracy.”

The prize came at a high price for the Burmese people, as a frustrated regime that same year brutally crushed a peaceful demonstration by Rangoon students who were celebrating the award to Suu Kyi. Many of the arrested students were thrown into prison to serve sentences of up to 12 years.

The regime denounced the decision of the Nobel Committee to honor Suu Kyi. The state-run media even went so far as to suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency had played a role in the decision. The regime’s twisted logic saw the award as Western interference in Burmese affairs and Suu Kyi was described as “the darling of the West.”

Francis Sejersted, who headed the Nobel Award Committee, said Suu Kyi had been chosen for the award because she was “one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.” Nevertheless, the award had its critics, within and outside Burma.

Suu Kyi entered politics after returning to Burma from London in 1988 to nurse her ailing mother Khin Kyi. She was drawn into the tumultuous events of that year, and in 1989 the regime placed her under house arrest.

In just a few months she had become a figurehead. Her first public speech at Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda drew hundreds of thousands of people who know her only as the daughter of Burma’s independence hero Aung San.

Three years after that first venture into Burmese politics, Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Prize. It is fair to ask what she had done to deserve it.

One prominent European statesman played a key role in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s decision. Former Czech President Vaclav Havel, a staunch supporter of the Burmese democracy movement, nominated Suu Kyi for the award.

In an interview in 2001 with The Irrawaddy’s correspondent Min Zin, Havel described Suu Kyi as a friend and said she deserved the prize because of her non-violent struggle for democracy.