Jimmy Carter: Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian and former US president dies at 100 | Obituary News

Among the maize, yam and groundnut farms of Savelugu-Nanto, a remote district in northern Ghana heritage Jimmy Carter’s case is less complicated than the former US president’s home country.

Thanks to the work of his charity, The Carter Center, local residents are out of trouble these days. Guinea worm disease – a parasite that emerges from the skin before multiplying in the human stomach and laying larvae in stagnant pools to await its next victim.

Carter’s job is to fight corruption and track votes in poor countries he earned it Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He comes after a presidency that achieved a landmark Middle East peace deal but was plagued by economic woes and the Iran hostage crisis.

He died Sunday at the age of 100, according to the Carter Center. He had entered hospice care In February 2023, after a series of brief hospital stays, he chose to stay at home. The former president was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but responded well to treatment. At the age of 100, he became the longest-lived president of the United States.

During six decades of politics, aid work and diplomacy, Carter was “committed to the ideals of human rights, peace and the betterment of human life,” Carter Center research director Steven Hochman told Al Jazeera.

“He didn’t just want to talk, he wanted to act,” Hochman said. “It’s monitoring elections in Latin America, or witnessing the horrendous suffering of Guinea worm disease in Asia and Africa and working to eradicate it.”

Southern peanuts

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

He married family friend Rosalyn Smith 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 his cautious administration brought him national attention as the state’s Democratic governor and earned him a spot on the cover of Time magazine as an icon of the “New South.” “.

Running for president, Carter portrayed himself as an outsider to Washington politics, tarnished by the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. His “Peanut Brigade,” a group of friends from Georgia, swept across the U.S. and panned their candidate as a straight-talking man of principle.

“Carter’s election in 1976 promised to rid the nation of the sins of Vietnam and Watergate,” historian and author Randall Balmer told Al Jazeera. “He was eager to restore faith in government, but under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, betrayal had already given way to cynicism.”

In the White House, Carter’s trademark candor did not always translate into political victories. Many of his progressive social and economic plans caused gridlock in Congress; his inability to translate ideals into legislative reality undermined his popularity.

The United States was mired in the woes of stagflation, such as low economic growth, unemployment, and high inflation brought on by the energy crisis of the early 1970s. Carter’s solution was to combat US dependence on foreign oil through taxes and green energyRepealed in the Senate.

Better abroad

Carter fared better overseas. He negotiated treaties that saw the Panama Canal brought under local control; established full diplomatic relations with China; and brokered a nuclear arms limitation agreement with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

His masterpiece was bringing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the presidency in Camp David, Maryland in 1978 and brokering a peace agreement between the enemies over 13 tense days.

“He was credible as a peace negotiator because he listened to both sides. He could think on his feet; and talk on your feet,” Hochman said. “He was a skilled negotiator who proposed and tested ideas for conflict resolution. “Even if he failed, he took a chance.”

The Camp David Accords led to full diplomatic and economic relations between the neighbors on the condition that Israel return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. They did not resolve the Palestinian issue, but saved the region from a repeat of the 1948 and multi-state Arab-Israeli wars. 1967.

“When Carter was considering the summit and even after he announced it, almost every foreign policy guru advised against it, including Henry Kissinger,” Gerald Rafshoon, the White House communications director for Carter, told Al Jazeera.

“The sages warned that the head of state should never enter into negotiations without knowing the outcome in advance. Carter rejected this advice and did more to secure Israel than any US president before or since.

Middle East turmoil

The Middle East offered Carter a diplomatic victory, but it was also his downfall. In 1979, Iranian students stormed the building US Embassy He took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran, sparking a 444-day crisis that did not end until Carter was fired from the White House.

Carter’s efforts to secure the release of captives through the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a political liability covered nightly on US television news. A failed US rescue mission in April 1980 epitomized Carter’s misfortunes.

At the end of that year, the Americans gave the Republican presidential candidate, former actor and governor of California, Ronald Reagan a landslide victory over Carter. Carter’s talk of America’s “crisis of spirit” and national “discontent” may have been true, but it did not win the vote.

“People say they want honest leaders, but when you give it to them, they say that’s not what a leader should do,” Gary Sick, a White House official under Carter and other presidents, told Al Jazeera. “They expect their leaders to be a bit more sly and make things sound better than they are.”

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

Despite losing office, Carter’s diplomatic skills remained in demand. He has mediated in Nicaragua, Panama and Ethiopia, facilitated the transfer of power in Haiti, and fought North Korea’s nuclear weapons scheme. He has written several books mainly on Middle East peace.

He also retained the candor that made him political enemies while he was president. He said it was occupied in 2003 Iraq was “unfair”; and that the US is “in bed with the Israelis to the detriment” of the Palestinians. An evangelical Christian, he also criticized abortion.

In 2006, Carter published Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. In a 2007 interview with the US television channel NPR, he defended the use of the word apartheid, calling it “an accurate description of what is happening in the West Bank”.

He also said he hoped the book would make Americans “aware of the terrible oppression and persecution of the Palestinian people and for the first time lead to any meaningful discussion about these issues.”

More than a decade later, including major human rights organizations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty InternationalHe will back up his assessment by accusing Israel of imposing apartheid on the Palestinians.

Charity: The Carter Center

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

When Carter declared war on the meter-long parasites in 1986, there were 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm disease in 21 African and Asian countries. The Savelugu-Nanton district and the rest of Ghana were freed from the disease in 2015 and were virtually free of the disease. deleted elsewhere.

Late in life, the former president continued to volunteer with the home-building organization Habitat for Humanity, hosting an annual event attended by thousands of volunteers in the United States and abroad.

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

outside the white house heritage The father of 4 children and the grandfather of 22 children were provided.

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