People marched in Oslo late Thursday after US President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with a speech justifying war, urging him to live up to the accolade. More than 6,000 people marched in a peaceful, torchlight procession aimed at denouncing nuclear weapons and which ended up outside Obama's hotel in the Norwegian capital, police and organisers said.
Obama - who in his acceptance speech earlier Thursday said "war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human feelings" - waved to the crowd from his hotel balcony for several minutes with his wife Michelle, protected by bullet-proof glass.
Some of the demonstrators carried banners reading "No to Nuclear Weapons" or bearing peace symbols. Another 3,000 protesters took part in a demonstration organised by the Norwegian Peace Initiative, calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan, controlled arms trade, a halt to nuclear weapons and the end of Israeli settlements.
"Yes, Yes, Yes We Can, Stop the War in Afghanistan," they chanted. "We are here to give Obama a push so that he acts in the spirit of the Peace Prize, that he takes concrete measures to stop the war in Afghanistan," one of the organisers for the Norwegian Peace Initiative, Benjamin Endre Larsen, told AFP.
He also urged Obama to implement rules "to control the arms trade," pursue nuclear disarmament "at a quick pace," and pressure the Israeli government "so that the settlements stop on the West Bank." Thousands of curious onlookers thronged the streets around the hotel in the hopes of catching a glimpse - and maybe a photograph - of the US president, many of them families with young children, amid Norway's biggest ever security clampdown.
"We reject the ideology of the governments and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee that gave the award to somebody who actually is escalating the violence in the Middle East," American peace activist Cindy Sheehan, who was invited to Oslo by the Norwegian Peace Initiative, told Norwegian television earlier Thursday.
"The speeches were telling us that the only way to peace is through war, and we have to reject that," she said, referring to Obama's and Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland's prize ceremony speeches at Oslo City Hall earlier in the day.
"This (demonstration) is to encourage him to act," said Alyn Ware, an activist from New Zealand who was awarded this year's Right Livelihood Award, often dubbed the alternative Nobel, for his work towards nuclear disarmament.
"It is not to criticise Obama completely, but just to say, live up to the vision. You're being given this Nobel peace award, you've talked about non-violence, yet you are still involved in a war in Afghanistan," he told Norwegian television.
Earlier Thursday, Greenpeace activists pushed Obama on a climate deal and Italian protesters also contested a US base being built outside Venice. Earlier, The United States must uphold moral standards when waging wars that are necessary and justified, President Barack Obama said as he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace.
In a speech at the award ceremony in Oslo, Obama said violent conflict would not be eradicated "in our lifetimes", there would be times when nations would need to fight just wars and he would not stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.
"Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war," he declared. He said America's adherence to moral standards, even in war, was what made it different from its enemies.
"That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions," he said.
By pledging to close the Guantanamo camp for foreign terrorist suspects on Cuba, and moving to bring inmates to trial on US soil, Obama has attempted to recover the moral high ground that critics of the United States accused his predecessor George W. Bush of surrendering by waging a no-holds-barred "war on terror".
"We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honour those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard," Obama said.
Acknowledging "a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower", he said his country could not act alone in confronting global challenges in Afghanistan, Somalia or other troubled regions. In seeking alternatives to force, it was necessary to be tough.
"Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must enact a real price," Obama said in a passage that addressed North Korea's nuclear arsenal and US suspicions that Iran, too, seeks to acquire the bomb. "It is...incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system," Obama said. "Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war."
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