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SPECIAL REPORT
PRIZE FOR PEACE
Aired December 10, 2002 - 11:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONATHAN MANN, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Evangelist for a better world, mediating to end war, mobilizing to fight disease, traveling the planet to promote democracy. Jimmy Carter, laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And now I call upon the Peace Prize laureate of 2002, Jimmy Carter.
(APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: From Oslo, Norway, CNN presents THE PRIZE FOR PEACE, a discussion with President Jimmy Carter, the laureate of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
Now, from the site of the annual awards ceremony, CNN's Jonathan Mann.
MANN: Hello and welcome.
Remarkable people are honored on this stage every year for achievement that is always historic, sometimes even astonishing.
But this year's laureate has several of them to his credit. Two decades of peace between Egypt and Israel, thousands of political prisoners freed because of his personal intervention, millions of people delivered from disease. And that's just the short list.
It's hard to know really where to begin, so why don't we start simply by congratulating and welcoming the laureate of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Peace, Jimmy Carter.
JIMMY CARTER, FMR. US PRESIDENT, NOBEL LAUREATE: Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
MANN: The applause could go on for an awfully long time and we have much to talk about in the hour ahead. Why don't we get right underway, though, by taking a quick look at some of the things that you've done and why you've been chosen for this prize.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(voice-over): Maybe he deserved the prize most for that day at the White House. Maybe for the days he spends building other houses, ex- president lending a hand to shelter the poor.
There was his decision during his term to end US control of the Panama Canal, his decision, when his term was over, to forego retirement and redouble his efforts instead.
Jimmy Carter could have won the Nobel Prize several ways, fitting for a man who's had several lives.
Carter was an up and coming officer in the US Navy, but left that career to save his family's troubled farm. The farm prospered and Carter began another career, politics.
He served in his home state of Georgia. He was elected governor of the state, and in 1976 he was elected president. Even after losing the White House after a single term, his ambitions only grew, to end war, fight disease and spread democracy worldwide.
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, CARTER BIOGRAPHER: Jimmy Carter is first and foremost a Baptist, Christian-loving person with a missionary zeal.
Another side of Jimmy Carter that sometimes people neglect is he had the second-longest military career of the 20th century, after Dwight Eisenhower.
So you bring this military disciplinarian meets somebody who's doing what he would consider the good works -- Christian good works. Take the two, and it's a very combustible combination.
MANN: Carter has had his share of successes, leading efforts against terrible diseases in the developing world.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By this past year, we were at the 98 percent level for eradication, which is a phenomenal achievement.
MANN: And some successes that dissipated in time.
CARTER: It has been a surprise to me that the North Koreans have announced that they do have an alternative method of developing nuclear capability.
MANN: Because of Korea, because of his recent trip to Castro's Cuba, because he publicly urges a cautious approach to war in Iraq, and for a lot of other reasons too, Carter does have his critics.
On the other hand, people sometimes use his example to criticize others.
The day the Nobel Prize was announced, this question from the Norwegian press, "Can you interpret this as a kick I the leg to the present administration in the United States or the other countries that are considering participating in a strike against Iraq?"
And this answer, "It's a kick in the leg to everyone who has taken the same position as the present administration in the United States of America."
And yet the committee as a whole put it this way, "In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must, as far as possible, be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
It has been a very full life, but let me ask you about the first, and to my mind, the most dramatic transformation.
You were in early adulthood a career military officer. You were a professional warrior, involved in the development of the first generation of nuclear submarines, and yet today you are something very close to a pacifist. What happened?
CARTER: Well, that's not exactly true.
You know, I was willing, when I was president and when I was a submarine officer, to give my life if necessary for the defense of my country and its principles. I was dedicated in my early life to be a career naval officer. I was serving in submarines. And it was only when my father died and I went and saw what his life meant in the civilian world and the admiration that people had for him and his involvement in the lives of others, I would say, in a benevolent way, in a constructive way, that I decided, to my own surprise, and certainly to the surprise and horror of my wife, to resign from a very successful naval career and go home.
And it was eight years later, really, before I decided to run for any public office. I was just going to be a businessman and grow peanuts and sell fertilizer and help around the community with the boy scouts and the hospital authority. But then I got into the state senate, and went from there to governor, and then to president. And so my life did change, all, I think, for the better.
MANN: Questions of war and peace never went away, though, and one is very much in front of all of us today. Right now, US President Bush is working slowly, cautiously, through the United Nations and its inspectors in Iraq, trying to rid that country of weapons of mass destruction.
Let me ask you this: if the president of the administration follows that process through to its conclusion, and Iraq falls short, would you support a preemptive war on Iraq to finally disarm it?
CARTER: Well, three months ago I was really concerned about voices coming out of Washington, primarily the secretary of defense and the vice president, who was saying let's bypass the United Nations, it's a waste of time to have inspections, let's go alone, and we are going to have regime change.
And President Bush wisely has ultimately decided to reverse all those fore-position and go to the United Nations, have inspections, work for weapons of mass destruction removal, and cooperate on a multi-national basis. I agree with that.
As I said in my speech earlier today, it is absolutely necessary that Iraq comply completely with a very strict resolution for removing the weapons of mass destruction and for cooperating with the inspection team.
If they do not do that, then the report would go back from the chairman, Mr. Blix, to the Security Council, that Iraq has defaulted on the mandate of the international community. In that case, I think it would not be a preemptive war. It would be a war forced upon the rest of the world by Iraq's recalcitrance, and my prayer is, my hope is, that Iraq will not be so foolish.
MANN: You also said, in remarks that were actually in a written peace in "The Washington Post" that was widely quoted, that you didn't think that Baghdad constituted a threat at that time, this was back in September, to the United States.
CARTER: Yes, that's correct.
MANN: Do you still feel that way?
CARTER: Yes. I don't think there's any direct threat now from Baghdad to the United States, unless they send some, you know, on-foot terrorists who might blow up a building or something like that, but that's possible from all the countries in the world.
My own belief is that we should concentrate first on the obvious threat from around the world with al Qaeda and the terrorist organization and, so far as I know, there has been no revelation that the attack, for instance, on the Trade Centers and the Pentagon, were in any way related to Iraq.
And I think to shift the attention to Iraq is taking away at least public pressure on and support for the global threat that the United States should be exerting in a concentrated fashion on the terrorists.
MANN: Let's go back to Iraq, though. If I understand you correctly, you would like the United Nations to make the final decision. In essence, the United Nations Security Council to decide on the basis of the evidence that's presented to it, whether there should be war.
CARTER: Yes, I would, and I hope and expect that that would be the policy of the United States.
MANN: Let me -- I don't have to remind you of this. The United Nations Security Council essentially means that any one of its permanent members would have a veto, and what may be the most important thing that the United States will have to face at the beginning of a new century will be subject to a thumbs up or a thumbs down from the government of China, or the government of Russia.
When you were president, would you have welcomed that kind of interference in a decision that important?
CARTER: Well, welcome is maybe not the right word. I would have accepted it.
I believe that when I was president that any decision for an attack on a sovereign nation would have been -- which had already been addressed for 11 or 12 years through the United Nations -- the decision would have been made by the United Nations, and the Security Council, and my understanding of the decision finally made between the United States and France and Russia primarily, with a quiescent China, was that the report will come back from Mr. Blix and the inspection team to the United Nations that Iraq has or has not complied with the mandate that they received.
If the report comes back that Iraq has not complied, then in my opinion there would be a concerted decision by the members of the Security Council, including the permanent members, that we will take military action. That's my presumption.
If Mr. Blix comes back and reports, based on his presented evidence, that Iraq has indeed complied with the United Nations, I think it would be highly unlikely for the United States to launch a unilateral attack on Iraq.
MANN: Mr. President, we're going to take several commercial breaks in the course of this hour. We're going to take our first one now.
When we come back, we're going to move to a subject that's very close to your heart, I know -- the peace at Camp David and all of the killing since.
We'll be back, from Oslo, in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Welcome back to Oslo.
There is a sad irony in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. It has been given out for many reasons for more than a century, but never more so than for efforts to end war in the Middle East, and yet the killing continues.
There is, though, the enduring peace between Egypt and Israel, the work of Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter, at Camp David.
CNN's Garrick Utley takes a look back.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GARRICK UTLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was the high point of Jimmy Carter's presidency, but those who were there remember how the negotiations came so close to failure.
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, FMR. US NATL. SECURITY ADVISOR: At one point, Sadat was packing his bags, and Carter talked to him directly on a very personal basis and convinced him that this would be a disaster for everybody concerned.
UTLEY: The road to Camp David began in war I 1973, when the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai, which had been occupied by Israel. When the fighting ended, Sect. of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a cease-fire and lay the foundation for negotiations between the two sides.
A major step forward came when Egypt's President Sadat flew to Israel in 1977 and called on the two countries to make peace.
In Washington, Jimmy Carter's presidency was facing steep inflation, a flat economy and a grumbling electorate. Plunging into the risks and hatred of the Middle East would bring little domestic political reward, but Carter did it anyway.
He invited Sadat and Israel's Prime Min. Menachem Begin to the seclusion of Camp David to negotiate a peace agreement, but Begin and Sadat clashed constantly.
To keep the two leaders at Camp David, Carter became the personal intermediary. After 12 days of arduous negotiations, a framework for a final agreement between Israel and Egypt was reached.
What made it work?
BRZEZINSKI: The determination, the deep personal involvement of Carter, in addition to the fact that there was an underlying strategic desire for a positive outcome on the part of all participants.
UTLEY: Israel pulled out of the Sinai peninsula, returning it to Egypt. The United States provided military observers in the demilitarized Sinai. Egypt and Israel established normal diplomatic relations. A precedent had been set. Israel and an Arab state could make peace.
BRZEZINSKI: And it created the preconditions for eventually dealing constructively with the Palestinian problem, by promising the Palestinians a homeland of their own, which means an independent state of their own.
UTLEY: Nearly 1/4-century later, that, of course, has not yet happened, but the agreement and peace between Israel and Egypt have held firm.
The Nobel committee quickly awarded its Peace Prize to Sadat and Begin for what they agreed to. Now the man who made it happen has his.
Garrick Utley, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: It's an anomaly that it's taken 20-some-odd years to correct.
The Camp David Accords, of course, 1978. You get your prize in 2002 because -- and we should let people know this -- you know this by now -- the nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize close in February of any given calendar year, and the Camp David meetings weren't held until the fall of that year. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin had been nominated earlier; you were not.
You have taken it in good stead. You've been very gracious about going 20 years without this prize. But in private, did you ever curse your fate, or stay up a night or two late, wondering how different life would have been, or just grousing about the injustice of it all?
CARTER: Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
CARTER: It was hard for me to understand, because I have to admit, I really wanted to earn the Nobel Peace Prize, and it was not until many years later that members of the committee announced and wrote a book about the fact that I had been voted to receive the prize by the committee members themselves, but when they searched to find if anyone had nominated me, they found that I had not been nominated.
But I am now at this moment today very glad that the decision was postponed.
MANN: Camp David was such a signal achievement. It was such an enormous achievement for Israel and for Egypt and not for the Palestinians. What went wrong, do you think?
CARTER: Well, in the Camp David Accords, we covered the prospects for the Palestinians thoroughly. Israel agreed to withdraw their military and political forces from the West Bank and Gaza. Israel agreed that the foundation for the Camp David Accords was United Nations Resolution 242, which prohibits the acquisition of territory by force and calls for the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories. And so all that was in the Camp David Accords.
Subsequently, though, leaders from within the Israeli government decided to forget or to ignore or to violate those commitments that they had made. And so Israel has since then continued to occupy or colonize the West Bank and Gaza, have now established hundreds of settlements all over the occupied territories, and are in violation of the United Nations resolution.
I think, as I said in my speech today, the only possible solution for Israel to live in peace with all its neighbors and for the Palestinians to have justice and peace and a homeland is for the United Nations resolution terms to be honored.
MANN: You are not, though, the only American president who has tried to help the Palestinian people. Bill Clinton believes he has tried, and has been very clear about suggesting -- his close aides have said it out loud -- that Yasser Arafat was an enormous disappointment. The current president, George W. Bush, will not talk to Arafat and regards him as a corrupt figure who is either soft on terrorism or complicit in it.
They are very disappointed with the Palestinian side. You sound like you're disappointed with the Israelis.
CARTER: Well, I'm disappointed with both sides. It takes two sides to negotiate and accept terms of a commitment. And this was done by the very heroic Israeli leaders, Rabin and Peres, in 1993. It was, on the other side, was Arafat. And the Oslo Agreements was a beautiful step forward, which was later disavowed.
You have to remember too that ever since Israel was founded as a state in 1948, and particularly since 1967, when this resolution was passed, every president, not just Bill Clinton and me, have tried to be, I would say, a balanced mediator between Israel and the Arab states and people who threaten Israel and whose own lives are threatened.
So it has always been a balanced effort, up until recently.
The thing that induced me to devote so much time to the Middle East peace process, and other presidents as well, is that this is like a -- I hate to use the word cancer -- it's like a festering sore in the world that not only creates violence on both sides, or innocent civilians being killed by suicide bombers and by Palestinians being killed, but it spreads its animosities almost throughout the world.
When I go to Indonesia, when I go to Bangladesh, I see the effects of the dissention that still hasn't been resolved between the Israelis and her neighbors.
So this is a tiny geographical place, but I think it is the most significant threat to world peace in the world.
There has only been one time in history when both the United States and the Soviet Union put their nuclear forces on alert, and that was over the Middle East.
MANN: I'm going to interrupt you, because you said something very important there. I wish we had more time to go over it -- but you're saying, this is the biggest threat to world peace, not Iraq. And I wish I could invite you to comment more fully on my brief summary of what you're telling us here, but that's an important point.
We have to take another break. When we come back, we're going to leave Camp David and go back to the White House for a look at Jimmy Carter as American president.
Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Welcome back to Oslo.
Mr. President, you are arguably the most respected American on the planet today, and.
(APPLAUSE)
MANN: This is a scientific sampling of world opinion, obviously.
CARTER: No -- and I can't wait for the rest of it.
MANN: But here's the flip side of the coin. It is for reasons that are only distantly related to your years in the White House, and you know full well those were very difficult years for many Americans.
We're going to talk about that in a moment, but Bruce Morton looks back.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CARTER: I'll never tell a lie. I'll never made a misleading statement.
BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): He campaigned as a truth-teller and voters, who had been lied to by other presidents about Vietnam and Watergate, elected him.
He had two great triumphs, the Camp David Accords, under which Israel agreed to return the Sinai to Egypt, and successfully negotiating a Panama Canal treaty. But he had many problems.
He turned down the White House thermostats and said the energy crisis was the moral equivalent of war, and voters remembered the gas lines, the long gas lines. And then the whole economy went south -- interest rates at 17 percent, inflation soaring.
His relations with the Democratic Congress turned sour. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The president said he was surprised; others were not.
And then, worst of all, Iranian rebels overthrew the US-backed shah and held Americans hostage in the embassy in Tehran. The hostage issue preoccupied the headlines, the country and the president.
CARTER: I think the American people understand what the situation is, that it's an unpredictable thing and that we're doing the best we can.
MORTON: It wasn't enough. A military rescue attempt failed. Carter's Sect. of State Cyrus Vance resigned in protest.
The hostages, the economy, set the stage for a telling question from the president's Republican opponent in their 1980 campaign debate.
RONALD REAGAN, FMR. US PRESIDENT: Are you better off then you were four years ago?
MORTON: The voters answered.
Ronald Reagan got 489 electoral votes in that fall's election. Jimmy Carter got 49.
Iran freed the hostages the day of Reagan's inauguration.
Bruce Morton, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: When people look back at your presidency, inevitably they are not particularly kind to it. Let me ask you.
CARTER: I would be much kinder than that announcement was. I think that was a very distorted picture of what happened during the four years.
But I think that that's obviously important things that people remember. One was that the hostages were held so long. They don't emphasize the fact that every hostage came back, safe, to freedom.
(APPLAUSE)
CARTER: I could have destroyed Iran with our massive military force; not a single Iranian died. And we have.
(APPLAUSE)
CARTER: The inflation that swept the United States was a deep embarrassment to me, but it was caused by the fact that Iraq invaded Iran, and all oil from both countries was shut off from the world, and there was a global inflation rate.
As a matter of fact, our inflation rate in America was less than it was in Europe or Japan.
But I realize that an incumbent president has to be responsible when the inflation rate goes up.
So there were some things that had happened. I think we also did some other -- addressed some other issues beneficially. For instance, we normalized relations with the People's Republic of China after 35 years. I think that has had a beneficial effect on the world.
We doubled the size of the Park's Service, the National Park System. We tripled the size of the wilderness areas. We developed a very good energy policy.
In dealing with the Congress, which was also mentioned negatively, we had the highest batting average with the Congress of any president since Eisenhower with two exceptions, the Johnson's and Kennedy's. And we came out of the White House with, I think, not ever having embarrassed our country.
So there were some good things as well as some disappointments.
(APPLAUSE)
MANN: On that note, we'll be back from Oslo in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Welcome back to Oslo.
Here are the basic facts: an unpredictable dictator, the technology of mass destruction, the United States on the brink of preemptive war. The country, though, was North Korea in the mid-90's. Jimmy Carter went there.
CNN's Mike Chinoy went along.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MIKE CHINOY, CNN SR. ASIA CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was June 1994. Air raid drills in the capital of South Korea. The United States and North Korea on a collision course over nuclear weapons.
Then Jimmy Carter arrived. The former president, the most senior American ever to visit North Korea. His trip, a last ditch effort to avoid war.
For North Korea's reclusive leader Kim Il Sung, a visit by someone of Mr. Carter's stature was a gesture of American respect, opening the door to a solution.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What was absolutely necessary at the time was to have some very senior American to go and talk directly with Kim Il Sung who, as the dictator of North Korea, would be the person who would decide whether or not there would be war.
CHINOY: In their first meeting, Kim Il Sung agreed to freeze his nuclear program in return for high-level talks with Washington. The outlines of a deal which Mr. Carter then announced on CNN.
CARTER: It's a pleasure to join you. It's a happy occasion, I think, for our country.
CHINOY: The CNN broadcast interrupted a council of war on Korea at the White House. The initial reaction was anger as the former president had exceeded his mandate by repudiating Bill Clinton's strategy of confrontation.
But as it became clear that Kim Il Sung was serious, annoyance turned to grudging acceptance. Despite criticism from some quarters that the North Koreans couldn't be trusted, four months later a formal deal freezing the nuclear program, the agreed framework, was signed in Geneva. Clouds of war began to dissipate.
HAN SUNG-JOO, FMR. S. KOREAN FOR. MINISTER: What would have happened if we didn't have President Carter's help, if we didn't have the agreed framework? Things would have been, of course, much more dangerous and unstable.
CHINOY (on camera): 8-1/2 years after Jimmy Carter walked across the demarkation line behind me, the legacy of his visit is mixed.
The 1994 nuclear agreement froze one suspect program and paved the way for other subsequent diplomatic breakthroughs.
But revelations of a new secret North Korean nuclear program have raised serious questions about whether any deal with the regime in Pyongyang can stick.
Mike Chinoy, CNN, on the Korean demilitarized zone.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: The people who know the subject and know the region say that if you hadn't succeeded in North Korea, there would have been a war, and we have learned recently that the Pentagon, planning for that war, had contemplated up to 1 million deaths.
Did you know what was at stake then? And was that pressure crushing as you tried to do that work?
CARTER: I knew what was at stake, not clearly, of course, but the Chinese friends of mine had said that if the United States was successful in getting a declaration of censorship and an embargo against North Korea that the North Koreans could not accept this in good faith -- declaring their government to be an outlaw government and their revered leader, Kim Il Sung, the dictator, to be a criminal, that they would have to attack South Korea.
Gen. Luc (ph), he was the commanding general of a military forces in South Korean, both American and South Korean, told me that the devastation and casualties would be much greater than had been the case in the first Korean War.
And so I was very grateful to have a chance to meet with Kim Il Sung and to get his assurance that there would be no war, that he would in the future have a summit meeting with the president of South Korea, that he would permit international inspectors t come back and observe the spent fuel that came out of his old graphite-type reactor that could be made into plutonium, and I turned all of this agreement over to President Clinton and his staff, who followed up on it.
MANN: Would have been worse than the first Korean War. 50,000 dead in that war.
CARTER: Yes.
MANN: That's what you spared the peninsula, and what the subsequent agreed framework.
CARTER: Nobody knows for sure.
MANN: But let me ask you in retrospect about the things we have learned since. Because of your good offices, they abandoned a plutonium program. We have learned since, or the United States government has learned since, and the Koreans have essentially confirmed, that they are now embarked on a uranium program.
To a lay person, it seems like one is as terrifying as the other, and it raises a question that other people are asking, and I'm going to ask you now: were you had in North Korea? They have gone on with this terrifying weapons program that you and the Carter administration, I'm sorry, the Clinton administration, thought that they had dealt with.
CARTER: Well, I have to say that I have been disappointed at what has been done in North Korea.
I met with the secretary of state within the last few days about the North Korean issue, and the spent fuel that can be made very rapidly into plutonium, and therefore explosives, I estimate between two and seven bombs, is still under international inspection today, including representatives from the US Dept. of Energy. That is frozen, as I worked out with Kim Il Sung.
MANN: That (UNINTELLIGIBLE) is untouched.
CARTER: The other nuclear capability is a different system entirely. It is a centrifuge system that is very slow and tedious and will develop enriched uranium which can be made into bombs.
My guess is, and many experts agree with this, is that they don't have enough enriched uranium to make an explosive. I don't know for sure.
At the time I was there, the agreement was, as President Clinton's administration confirmed, they would close down their old reactor in return for which the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European community would build them, without delay, two modern reactors, much safer in character, and would give them enough fuel oil to make up for the electricity they no longer produced in the old reactor.
We have not done that. We have not built the two new reactors. We are five years behind schedule, partially because of attitudes in Washington, partly because of the recalcitrance and difficulty in dealing with North Korea -- some very strange people, in my opinion.
So there's blame on both sides, and my hope is now that someone, not me this time, would go to North Korea and work out a simple deal, which has already been defined. They will close down their new reactor program and put everything that they have in the whole country under international inspections in return for which the United States will guarantee them officially we will not make a preemptive attack on North Korea.
That's a basic element for a future agreement.
MANN: This is still very much -- still very much at issue in Washington and Pyongyang and other countries.
(APPLAUSE)
MANN: Another one of those issues that we could talk about for a long time, that's on the front pages every day.
We're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about something that's not on the front page, and achievement that's been overlooked but that's changed millions of lives.
We'll be back from Oslo in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Welcome back to Oslo.
A lot of people look forward to retirement as a time when they can do less, or maybe even do nothing. Jimmy Carter's been doing everything.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(voice-over): Think of the leaders who've made history in our time. A few remain influential, but most make their mark and then see their moment pass.
Jimmy Carter is a special case. No leader in our era has been so active or so effective since leaving office.
HENRY KISSINGER, FMR. US SECY. OF STATE: He's a very special type of American, and Americans like to think they have an obligation to solve the world's problems. And I think if you look at his performance and the respect in which he's held around the world, he has -- that contribution is significant.
MANN: Carter has traveled to more than 120 countries, the vast majority of them not as president but as chairman of the Carter Center.
He founded the center 20 years ago in Atlanta, not long after leaving Washington. It's not quite a one-man United Nations. 150 people work at his headquarters and at projects worldwide. But it's close.
The Carter Center has taken on disease, delivering medicine to protect millions of people against liver blindness, leading efforts that have nearly eradicated the scourge of Guinea worm.
It sent observers to more than 40 elections in emerging democracies from Latin America to East Timor. It also mediates some of the world's most difficult conflicts. In Sudan alone, Carter and the center have been involved for more than a decade, the concerns today the same ones Carter had as president years ago.
BRINKLEY: Carter constantly throws human rights, human rights, human rights, into the international fray. He refused to allow that term to disappear. He's not a practitioner of real politick, he's somebody who is an idealistic peacemaker, and I think we need people like that in the world.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: Not just an idealistic peacemaker, but an extraordinary fighter against disease. Small pox is the only infectious disease in human history that humans have eradicated. It was a global effort, a lot of people deserve credit for that. You work with some of them.
Guinea worm may soon be number two, and the experts I talked to say Jimmy Carter deserves the credit for that. It's an extraordinary thing.
CARTER: Well, I don't really deserve the credit. A lot of the credit is due to a couple of men here. One is Bill Faghae (ph), who was responsible for the eradication of small pox. The other one is Dr. Don Hopkins (ph), who is in charge of our program for eradicating Guinea worm.
(APPLAUSE)
CARTER: But it has been the Carter Center organization that has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and has targeted this horrible disease, nauseating disease, of Guinea worm.
MANN: We won't go into the details, but it -- worms literally are in people's bodies. They cripple them. It's extraordinarily painful and debilitating. Millions of people used to get it.
CARTE: Yes, we had -- when we searched the world to find out where this disease was, we found it in 23,000 villages, 3-1/2 million people had these worms coming out of their body. And we now have been to all 23,000 of those villages and we have reduced the incidence of Guinea worm more than 98 percent, almost 99 percent. And they.
(APPLAUSE)
CARTER: And the remaining cases are in southern Sudan, 3/4 of the remaining cases, where there are some villages now in the war zone that we can't reach. So we've made good progress against that disease.
MANN: It's important work, and good luck with it.
Let me ask you about something that is much less well-known even than your work on Guinea worm, and that's partially, I gather, because of your choices. I'm told by your biographer, Douglas Brinkley, that you have a cache of letters that you write privately, long-hand, in your own time, with no one else really knowing much about it, to leaders around the world, appealing to them to free political prisoners in their countries.
No one really knows about this work. No one really keeps track of it. The documents are essentially private. They're secret to all extent. And his estimate is, admittedly a very round one, he says that you have freed 50,000 political prisoners single-handedly with your letters.
CARTER: No one knows what the results have been, but we have a team at the Carter Center who deal exclusively with human rights, and they work with more than 20 other very famous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Lawyers for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, American Watch, Mideast Watch, and so forth.
And so a lot of times, the most serious cases, they send to the Carter Center. My staff does an analysis on them. Sometimes the Emory University Law School does a legal analysis of them. And then I write a personal letter to the leaders of the nation involved, telling them that I have a very serious concern about this particular case, that I am gratified at some of the commitments they have made publicly and verbally, and I would like for them to be sure that they carry out their commitments and let me know the results of the answer to my letter.
So, you never know how many cases are decided positively. We fail a lot of times, but I think we do make an impact.
MANN: You do such good work, and you do it with such loathsome people, and I choose that word very carefully, because you consort with dictators. You have broken bread and generously praised and gently cajoled men who are accused of murder, some of the world's most ruthless tyrants.
And let me ask you a question. When you, for example, invite Gen. Raoul Cedras, the exiled Panamanian -- I'm sorry, the exiled Haitian strongman, forgive me -- he's exiled in Panama. But when you invite a man like that to come teach your church Sunday school, do you do something that brings dishonor on you and on your presidency and on the good people of your church?
CARTER: No, I don't think so.
You have to remember that when we went to Haiti, I went with Colin Powell and Sen. Sam Nunn. When he United States was prepared to invade Haiti with 30,000 troops, and at the last minute we met with Gen. Cedras and I induced him to leave Haiti and to go to Panama in exile, and to welcome back the elected President Aristide -- Cedras was respected by the American military commanders.
In fact, when the United States troops landed peacefully, Cedras was standing by the side of Gen. Shelton (ph), the American commander, and only after the entire threat to peace was resolved did Cedras and his family leave and go to Panama.
So I don't feel guilty for praising Cedras for complying with international law, agreeing to let democratically elected president come back, leaving his country in exile, and when I do single out some good things about him, that he's a deeply committed Christian, which I don't have any reason to doubt, and invite him some day to come to my Sunday school, that's fine.
MANN: I'm told we have to go to break, or I would have asked you more about that.
CARTER: But I do have to deal with some very unsavory people, because they're generally the ones who cause the problems, and they're the only ones who can resolve them.
(APPLAUSE)
MANN: On that note, we have just a few moments left. We'll be back with some final thoughts in just a moment.
Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Welcome back to Oslo.
We have just a few moments left, for the question that really in most people's minds is the question of a Nobel laureate: $1 million, what are you going to do with the money?
CARTER: Well, the award, which I don't know an exact figure or anything, I haven't received yet, I've asked them to deliver the check not to me, but to the Carter Center, because that's where it can be useful.
(APPLAUSE)
MANN: Beyond that, it will just go into the good works of the center.
Let me ask you then a personal question about you. You are 78 years young. You are incredibly energetic and vibrant and by all appearances in extraordinary health, but you are a man of advancing age. What are your thoughts? Do you ever think about slowing down, scaling back, or stepping back entirely and letting someone else take on the work that you've done?
CARTER: Well, Rosalyn and I have stepped back considerably in the last 10 years or so. We don't go to every election now.
(LAUGHTER)
CARTER: We have a wonderful staff at the Carter Center who does things in our absence. We try to go to crisis and when we are specially needed. We have outstanding administrators who run the Carter Center. I used to have to run it out of my hip pocket, so it's a much better organization now that lets us go bird watching and fly fishing and skiing and biking and mountain climbing and do all the things that we enjoy and be with our family as well. We have a very good life.
MANN: On that note, our thanks at this point go to our colleagues at NRK NORWEGIAN TELEVISION for their production cooperation and to SVT SWEDISH TELEVISION as well. Our thanks every year go to the Norwegian Nobel committee, our hosts here, and to our audience here in Oslo, and watching around the world.
But above all, our thanks and congratulations go to the laureate of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Peace, Jimmy Carter. Thank you very much.
CARTER: My pleasure.
(APPLAUSE)
CARTER: Should we stay here for a while?
MANN: We will stay here until they finish applauding, then we'll run some music and then they'll let you go.
END
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