Arafat, Rabin and Peres Awarded U.N. Peace Prize

The leaders of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization Friday won the first of an expected string of international prizes for their landmark peace agreement.

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded its annual Felix Houphouet-Boigny peace prize to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.

It came just four days after Israel and the PLO signed an accord on Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho at a White House ceremony in Washington, raising the prospect of ending decades of Arab-Israeli bloodshed in the Middle East.

A panel chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger awarded the prize, worth $143,000 and named after the president of Ivory Coast.

Asked at UNESCO headquarters in Paris whether the agreement was as big a breakthrough for Middle East peace as the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, he said: “It can have the same importance but it is more complicated. Major issues have yet to be settled and the follow-up will be more difficult.”

The award by UNESCO came at a time when President Clinton is considering whether the United States should rejoin the organization after leaving it, along with Britain, in the mid-1980s in protest against its alleged anti-Western bias.

One of the issues which alienated conservative U.S. and British governments at the time was a perceived pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli bias by the U.N. agency.

The UNESCO prize was first awarded in 1991 to South African President F.W. de Klerk and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. Last year, it went to the Hague Academy for International Law.

The Israeli and PLO leaders, who announced mutual recognition last week after eight months of secret negotiations in Norway, may be too late to win this year’s Nobel Peace prize, to be announced in Oslo Oct. 15.

The director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, said Tuesday: “I expect that we shall see the most recent events in the Middle East reflected in the nominations for the Peace Prize.”

“But the deadline for nominations for the 1993 prize closed Feb. 1,” he told Reuters. “The nominations reflected the state of affairs at that time.”

Lundestad said there were 120 nominations for this year’s $850,000 award, of which 95 were individuals and 25 organizations.