ElBaradei among Nobel nominees
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Ebadi receives the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize during a ceremony in Oslo.
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OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- Jailed Israeli atomic whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, the head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei and former Czech President Vaclav Havel are among a record 173 nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Norwegian Nobel Institute said on Friday that the number of nominees -- 129 individuals and 44 organizations -- beat a former record of 165 for 2003 when the award went to Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman laureate.
"We have received nominations from around the world, the prize has become ever more global," Geir Lundestad, director of the Institute, told Reuters.
The deadline for mailing nominations for the award, named after Sweden's Alfred Nobel, passed on February 1. The list of names is secret but some people publicize their choices. The winner will be announced in October.
Lundestad said he had received thousands of e-mails protesting news last month that U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were on the list despite failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason they had cited for invading the country.
"I'm speculating about Vanunu (winning), although I don't think that the Nobel Committee will be sufficiently daring to provoke Israel," said Stein Toennesson , director of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo.
Vanunu will be freed in April after an 18-year jail term for treason for leaking details of Israel's secret nuclear program.
Other nominees included former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and ElBaradei, the head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency. The two worked together on inspections in Iraq before the U.S.-led war in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.
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ElBaradei has been nominated for his work at head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog.
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Nobel watchers say that work seems too long ago to win in 2004 -- especially when the 2002 prize went to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in what the head of the Nobel committee called a "kick in the legs" to Bush's policies on Iraq.
Even so, ElBaradei has kept a high profile with nuclear safety worries from Pakistan to Libya. French President Jacques Chirac, who opposed the war, is among politicians on the list.
The European Union and Havel, a perennial favorite for leading Czechoslovakia's 1989 "Velvet Revolution" from communism, have been nominated to mark the eastwards expansion of the EU to 25 states from 15 from May 1.
Pope John Paul II was again nominated but the secretive five-member awards committee is widely believed to object to his conservative moral teachings, like opposing birth control.
Other nominees range from Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya to U.S. Senator Richard Lugar and former Senator Sam Nunn for a campaign to dismantle aging Soviet nuclear weapons.
Copyright 2004
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
