Pope to Win Nobel Peace Prize?
The pope, the former Czech president and Brazil’s new leftist leader all figured heavily in speculation about who will win the Nobel Peace Prize being announced Friday in the Norwegian capital.
The secretive five-member awards committee, which is appointed by but does not answer to Norway’s parliament, gives no hints about its choice. It also keeps the names of candidates, a record 165 this year, secret for 50 years, although those who make nominations often reveal them.
This year’s prize is worth $1.3 million.
Pope John Paul II has been repeatedly mentioned in speculation for the 2003 prize because of his worsening health, 25 years in the post and his outspoken opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which was widely unpopular in Europe.
The frail, 83-year-old pontiff also sought to build bridges between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
But the committee from this liberal, and overwhelmingly Lutheran, country of 4.5 million, could find his conservative Catholicism, including a ban on contraception, a strong argument against him.
Norwegian foreign affairs expert Espen Barth Eide found it unthinkable for the committee to honor the head of a Christian religion without including a Muslim at a time when many in Islamic countries feel they are facing a Western crusade in the U.S. led-war on terror.
Stein Toennesson, head of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo – which has no links to the prize – originally favored the pope, but as the announcement approached found former Czech President Vaclav Havel more likely.
Havel, 67, became widely known after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring reforms attempted by liberally minded Communists in what was then Czechoslovakia.
When communism fell in 1989, Havel founded a broad opposition movement and helped end communist rule in his country. He was elected president on Dec. 29, 1989, and served until 2003.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also was seen as a possibility, if the committee chooses to encourage his efforts bring social justice to his country.
Other known and presumed nominees included: Russian anti-war group Mothers in Black; jailed Iranian dissident Hashem Aghajari; Russian human rights activist Sergei Kovalyev; Italian charity The Community of Sant’ Egidio; the Salvation Army; U.S. Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar for their Cooperative Threat Reduction Programm Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and U2 singer and social activist Bono. Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan was nominated after he removed 167 prisoners from death row.
President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and French President Jacques Chirac were all nominated, but were seen as having no chance.
The prize was to be announced in Oslo at 5 a.m. EDT Friday.
Last year’s prize went to former President Jimmy Carter, who also opposed an Iraq war.
The announcements of this year’s Nobel awards started last week with the literature prize going to South African novelist J.M. Coetzee.
Earlier this week, American Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield were selected for the 2003 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discoveries leading to a technique that reveals images of the body’s inner organs.
The physics prize went to Alexei A. Abrikosov, Anthony J. Leggett and Vitaly L. Ginzburg for their work on strange behavior of matter at very low temperatures. Americans Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of tiny transportation tunnels in cell walls, work that illuminates diseases of the heart, kidneys and nervous system.
And American Robert F. Engle and Briton Clive W.J. Granger shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for developing statistical tools that have improved the forecasting of economic growth, interest rates and stock prices.
The prizes are presented to the winners on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896 in the Swedish capital, Stockholm. The Peace Prize is presented in Oslo.
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