Oslo | Friday
MEMBERS of the panel that selects the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize said on Friday they regretted bestowing the prestigious honour on Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and would now revoke it from him if it were possible.
”Yes, I wish it was possible that we could recall the prize,” said Hanna Kvanmo.
Kvanmo is one of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that chose to award the prize in 1994 to Peres, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel’s late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
”What is happening today in Palestine is grotesque and unbelievable. Peres is responsible, as part of the government. He has expressed his agreement with what (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon is doing,” she said.
”If he had not agreed with Sharon, then he would have withdrawn from the government.”
Kvanmo said however that ”at the time, it was a correct decision” to honour Peres.
”He was the one of the three that really deserved the prize, because he took the initiative to the talks that led to the Oslo accords,” she said.
Israel’s military offensive has in one week brought nearly every major Palestinian town back under Israeli control. Fighting continued Friday in Nablus, one of the last major targets in their drive to crush Palestinian resistance on the West Bank.
Kvanmo, a former member of Norway’s parliament who will resign from the committee at the end of her second six-year term this year, said Sharon was fully to blame for the recent escalation of violence.
”It was a great disaster that Rabin was killed. We would never have had this development if he had been alive.”
Another Committee member, former prime minister Odvar Nordli, told Norwegian daily Dagsavisen Peres had not lived up to the ideals he expressed in 1994.
”I think of his unlimited support for peacemaking measures and his desire for co-existence and dignity of human life,” Nordli said.
”If we are going to find a way out of this crisis, there are only two actors: Israel and the US,” he said.
Oslo Bishop Gunnar Staalsett, who has been a member of the committee since 1994, agreed that Peres, a leading dove in right-wing Sharon’s government, must be held responsible for the current crisis.
”As foreign minister, Shimon Peres fully and wholly supports the warring that Ariel Sharon has initiated. I cannot hide my deep disappointment and despair,” Staalsett told Dagsavisen.
”In my opinion, he is violating the intention and spirit” of the prize, he added.
He said Israel’s actions were ”in breach of international law”. ”The entire international community has demanded that Israel withdraw. It is absurd that he is guilty of such crimes,” Staalsett said. – Sapa-AFP