Will Probe Rights Abuses, Other Problems Worldwide : Nobel Winners Plan Watchdog Groups

An unprecedented conference of 75 Nobel Prize winners announced Thursday that it plans to send committees of Nobel laureates to investigate violations of human rights and other urgent problems throughout the world.

Elie Wiesel, the 59-year-old Romanian-born American organizer of the conference who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, said the laureates will send out a small group whenever they feel that a problem is urgent enough to warrant their investigation.

Wiesel cited as examples the deadly leakage of methyl isocyanate gas from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 that killed 2,850 and the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union in 1986 that left 31 dead.

In private, he has talked about Nobel Prize winners visiting the Soviet Union to investigate the plight of dissidents and refuseniks and of the good that might have resulted if they had investigated the disappearance of people in Argentina in the 1970s.

The conferees, who included such well-known laureates as former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, British novelist William Golding, Nigerian playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka and French novelist Claude Simon, decided that they will meet again in two years.

Difficulty Acknowledged

Wiesel acknowledged the enormous difficulty of the writers, scientists, economists, former government officials and others trying to come to grips with some of the world’s problems.

“How could we resolve in three days the problems that humanity in 50 years or in the 5,000 years since Cain and Abel has failed to do more than ignore or just start discussing?” he said. “While giving the laureates worldwide glory, the Nobel Foundation has still not found the secret of bestowing universal wisdom on them as well.”

The conference came up with a long series of principles and recommendations, and President Francois Mitterrand of France, who was host for the conference, immediately endorsed one of them--a call for an international conference on the problems of foreign debt in the Third World.

In the view of many participants, the conference could be rated only a partial success.

“I haven’t worked so hard in years,” said 75-year-old Dr. Herbert C. Brown of Purdue University, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1979. “But I don’t know that we accomplished much. We know what the problems are. But it’s difficult to implement the solutions. We can’t help the Third World, for example, until it learns to help itself first.”

Closed to the Press

The conference was closed to the press, and it was difficult for an outsider to assess its accomplishments. But the conference seemed to lack focus. A bewildering number of mimeographed speeches on a bewildering number of subjects piled up on a table in the press center a block away from where the conference was taking place, at the presidential palace.

With 75 Nobel Prize winners advancing some of their pet ideas under the vague and sweeping categories of disarmament and peace, human rights, development, science and technology, culture and society, it was not surprising that the array might seem bewildering and, in fact, that some fresh ideas might get lost in all the talk.

A remarkable paper was delivered by Soyinka, the 53-year-old Nigerian playwright and novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. With elegance and bite, Soyinka excoriated the “religious fanaticism” in the world that “has once again attained prime position as the most implacable enemy of the basic rights of humanity.”

Soyinka, one of the few Nobel laureates from the Third World, did not hold back from denouncing such examples of Third World fanaticism as that of the Sikhs in India and the Tamils in Sri Lanka and religious extremists in his own Nigeria. And he lumped President Pieter W. Botha of South Africa and President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya together as two African leaders who deny the humanism of others.

Proposal for United Nations

Questioning whether fanatical states like Iran “actually qualify to be counted among a rational community of nations,” Soyinka proposed that the United Nations or the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization declare the 1990s a “Decade for Secular Options.”

Soyinka’s proposals seemed to get lost in all the rhetoric of the conference. Soyinka might have attracted more notice if he had been the only Nobel laureate speaking at a less stellar conference.