Jimmy Carter: Former US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate dies at the age of 100 | News of deaths

Among the farms of maize, yams and groundnuts in Savelgo-Nanton, a remote area in northern Ghana, legacy Jimmy Carter’s life is less complicated than it was in the former US president’s home country.

Thanks to the work of his charity, the Carter Center, local residents are now spared misery Guinea worm disease – A parasite that reproduces in the human abdomen and emerges through the skin before placing its larvae in stagnant pools waiting for the next victim.

Carter worked to combat the disease and track votes in poor countries He won it He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. This came on the heels of a presidency that achieved a historic peace agreement in the Middle East, but it faltered due to economic problems and the Iranian hostage crisis.

The Carter Center announced that he died on Sunday at the age of 100. He entered Elderly care In February 2023, he chose to stay home after a series of short hospital stays. The former president was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but responded well to treatment. At 100 years old, he was the longest-living president of the United States.

Stephen Hochman, director of research at the Carter Center, told Al Jazeera that during six decades of politics, relief work and diplomacy, Carter was “committed to principles such as human rights, peace and improving human life.”

“He didn’t just want to talk, he wanted to work,” Hochman said. “Whether it is observing elections in Latin America or witnessing the terrible suffering of Guinea worm disease in Asia and Africa, and working to eliminate it.”

Southern peanut

Carter grew up on the red clay soil of rural Georgia during the Great Depression. He sold boiled peanuts on the streets of his hometown and plowed the land with his family. His father, James “Earl” Carter, was a peanut farmer and warehouse keeper. His mother, Lillian, was a nurse.

He married Rosalyn Smith, a family friend, in 1946. The couple celebrated their 76th wedding anniversary in July 2022, a year before the former first lady’s death in November 2023.

After a seven-year career in the U.S. Navy, Carter returned to his home state of Georgia, where he gained national attention as a Democratic state governor for his visionary management, earning a place on the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of the “New South.” “.

While running for president, Carter described himself as an outsider in Washington politics, which had been tainted by the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. The Peanut Brigade, a group of friends from Georgia, crisscrossed the United States promoting their candidate as an outspoken, principled man.

“Carter’s election in 1976 promised to rid the nation of the sins of Vietnam and Watergate,” Randall Palmer, a historian and author, told Al Jazeera. “He aspired to restore confidence in government, but betrayal during the years of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had already given way to cynicism.”

In the White House, Carter’s characteristic candor did not always translate into political victories. Many of his progressive social and economic plans ran into deadlock in Congress. The inability to translate ideals into legislative reality exhausted his popularity.

The United States has been mired in the stagflationary ravages of low economic growth, unemployment, and high inflation, caused by the energy crisis since the early 1970s. Carter’s solution was to address US dependence on foreign oil through taxes Green energywas repealed in the Senate.

Better abroad

Carter fared better abroad. He concluded treaties that brought the Panama Canal under local control; He established full diplomatic relations with China; She brokered a nuclear arms control agreement with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

His remarkable feat was to bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to his presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, in 1978, and hammer out a peace agreement between the two rivals over 13 tense days.

He had credibility as a peace negotiator because he listened to both sides. He could think on his feet; “And he talks on his feet,” Hochman said. He was a skilled negotiator and came up with ideas for overcoming conflicts and tried them out. He took chances, even if it meant he might fail.

The Camp David Accords led to the establishment of full diplomatic and economic relations between the two neighbors, on the condition that Israel returns the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. It did not solve the Palestinian issue, but it spared the region a repeat of the multi-state Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967.

Gerald Rafshoon, White House communications director under Carter, told Al Jazeera: “When Carter was thinking about holding the summit, and even after it was announced, all foreign policy experts, including Henry Kissinger, advised against holding it.”

The wise men have warned that a head of state should not enter into negotiations without knowing the outcome in advance. Carter rejected this advice, and made more efforts to strengthen Israel’s security than any American president before or after him.

Middle East unrest

The Middle East provided Carter with a diplomatic victory, but it also led to his downfall. In 1979, Iranian students stormed the school American Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage – leading to a crisis that lasted 444 days and did not end until Carter was expelled from the White House.

Carter’s efforts to secure the release of prisoners through the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were a political liability highlighted nightly on American television news. The failed American rescue mission of April 1980 summed up Carter’s misfortunes.

Later that year, American Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, won a landslide victory over Carter. Carter’s talk about the “crisis of the soul” in the United States and the “national malaise” may have been true, but it did not win him votes.

“People say they want honest leaders, but when you give them that, they say that’s not what a leader is supposed to do,” Gary Sick, a White House official under Carter and other presidents, told Al Jazeera. “They expect their leaders to be somewhat deceitful and to make things seem better than they really are.

“Jimmy Carter called a spade a spade, and people weren’t ready for that honesty.”

Although he lost his position, Carter’s diplomatic skills remained in demand. He mediated in Nicaragua, Panama, and Ethiopia, and helped broker a handover in Haiti and address North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. He wrote several books, most of them on peace in the Middle East.

He also retained the candor that created political enemies when he was president. He said the 2003 invasion Iraq He was “unjust”; And that the United States was “allied with the Israelis at the expense” of the Palestinians. He is an evangelical Christian, as he criticized miscarriage.

In 2006, Carter published his book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.” He defended the use of the word apartheid in a 2007 interview with US radio station NPR, calling it “an accurate description of what is going on in the West Bank.”

He also said he hoped the writers would make Americans aware of “the horrific oppression and persecution of the Palestinian people and precipitate for the first time any substantive debate on these issues.”

More than a decade later, major human rights organizations, incl Human Rights Watch and Amnesty InternationalHe will support his assessment and accuse Israel of imposing apartheid on the Palestinians.

Philanthropy: The Carter Center

Founded in 1982 by the former president and his wife, the Carter Center has monitored 113 elections in 39 countries and treated diseases such as river blindness, trachoma and malaria, often by bringing doctors to less populated and less traveled areas.

There were 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm disease in 21 African and Asian countries when Carter declared war on the meter-long parasite in 1986. The Savelgo-Nanton region and the rest of Ghana were declared free of the disease in 2015, and have already been eradicated. It was erased elsewhere.

Late in life, the former president continued to volunteer for the homebuilding organization Habitat for Humanity, hosting an annual event that attracted thousands of volunteers in the United States and abroad.

Carter’s supporters say history will judge his presidency better than American voters did in 1980.

outside the white house, legacy The father of four and grandfather of 22 confirmed.

In his own words: “I cannot deny that I am a better former president than I was president.”