Reported by Al Jazeera
The former German foreign minister is no proponent of peace and justice. No award can wipe out her disastrous record.
When, in late August, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation announced that former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was its 2026 medallist, we were stunned. The cognitive dissonance was striking, even if we had become used to this after years of unabashed hypocrisy within the world’s most powerful institutions.
According to the foundation’s homepage , the medal is given to a person who “contributes to a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable world through valuable achievements in politics or research”.
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As this year’s medallist, Baerbock was invited to visit Uppsala University and deliver a lecture. Here was an event claiming to celebrate “ compassion, humanism and commitment to international solidarity ” while honouring the foreign minister of a government that approved 94 million euros ($102m) in arms exports to Israel in the span of three months in 2024.
The motivation provided for Baerbock’s selection as the 2026 Dag Hammarskjold medallist sounded like satire to us. She is described as a “strong proponent of a rules-based international order” even though her actions illustrate perfectly how she is the opposite of that.
As soon as Uppsala University started promoting the ceremony on campus, we decided to plan a protest. Baerbock needed to know that she was not welcome, that the university’s stance did not reflect the position of its students.
We entered the event split into groups and interrupted Baerbock’s seminar four times. She was increasingly frustrated with each interruption. She tried to respond to the argument of the first group with an incoherent ramble about an alleged misfired Palestinian rocket. But we were not arguing over a single rocket; we were criticising her unapologetic support for horrific violations of international law.
As foreign minister, Baerbock repeatedly expressed her strong support for the state of Israel as an occupying power, declaring that Israel’s security also is “ in the interest of the German state ”. As Germany’s foreign minister, she called it her responsibility to always defend Israel’s “security” – something she deemed “…