No Peace For This Prize

For a peace prize, the Nobel sure can generate fury.

The committee that awards the century-old prize has a tradition of never second-guessing itself in public. Now it is engulfed in controversy because some of its five members are saying the 1994 prize shouldn't have gone to Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

To the anger of Israel's supporters, the dissenters didn't extend their criticism to Peres' co-laureate, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Arafat shared the prize with Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for the peace efforts, now collapsed, that included the 1993 Oslo Agreement negotiated in the Norwegian capital. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an ultra-nationalist Israeli who opposed his peace moves.

The 1994 prize, worth a shared $933,000, was controversial from the outset, with committee member Kaare Kristiansen quitting rather than condone a prize to Arafat, a man he branded a "terrorist."

Now, with Israelis and Palestinians again killing each other, emotions are back on the boil.

The trigger was committee member Hanna Kvanmo, a retired left-wing politician who broke with the tradition of silence in early April.

Replying to a newspaper's questions, she said she wished Peres' prize could be revoked because as a member of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's coalition government, he was party to the Israeli military offensive.

"If it had been now, he would not have gotten the prize," Kvanmo said.

Another member, Lutheran Bishop Gunnar Staalsett, said Peres was violating the "intention and spirit" of the prize.

Committee chairman Gunnar Berge criticized the current Israeli government, but added that "I am completely sure the situation would have been difference if Shimon Peres had been Israel's prime minister."

Another committee member, Sissel Roenbeck, held the current Israeli government largely responsible for the conflict, and urged Peres to return to a policy of peace and dialogue.

And Arafat? Kvanmo didn't think he had forfeited his prize because, she said, he had tried to carry out the Oslo accords and couldn't be blamed for the violence since Israel had him under virtual arrest.

Israel maintains Arafat has orchestrated the violence that began long before it besieged his West Bank headquarters, and its supporters were quick to protest the committee members' remarks.

"We have had 200 to 300 contacts a week, which is extraordinary," said Olav Njoelstad, acting director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which assists the committee. He said most defended Peres and wanted Arafat's prize revoked.

The California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote to Norway's prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, calling Arafat "the godfather of terrorism."

"We heard nothing from Norway or the Nobel Committee when Israeli civilians were butchered," it said.

The prime minister, who is considered generally pro-Israel, said the committee was facing an unusual situation: two former enemies who were honored for making peace were at war again. "It is a very strange situation," he said.

Anger and even ridicule are a tradition of the world's most coveted prize, funded by a bequest from Alfred Nobel, the Swede who invented dynamite.

But Nobel statutes say that once the prize is awarded, it cannot be withdrawn or returned, and even the rare winners who decline it, such as Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, remain listed on the laureates' roll.

The awards committee is independent but is appointed by the Norwegian parliament. The government has no say in the prize. While the peace prize is awarded in Oslo, the others — for literature, physics, medicine, chemistry and economics — are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.

Among the more controversial awards was the 1990 Peace Prize to Mikhail Gorbachev for liberalizing the Soviet Union. Shortly after the prize was announced, Gorbachev ordered troops to crack down on the Baltic republics.

The committee was denounced for sharing the 1973 prize between Le Duc Tho and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with critics saying America started the Vietnam War and shouldn't be rewarded for ending it.

The sharing of the prize — Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin in 1978, for instance, or South Africa's Nelson Mandela and F.W. De Klerk in 1993 — is often controversial because each laureate's admirers think the other's contribution to peace was less significant.