Arafat deserved Nobel Peace prize: Peres

Shimon Peres (L), Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former US president Bill Clinton take part in Peres' 80th birthday festivities in Tel Aviv on Sunday.

Former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres said yesterday that beleaguered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat deserved to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The current Israeli government has deemed Arafat an obstacle to peace, and agreed in principle to remove the 74-year-old from his West Bank headquarters.

But Peres, speaking in Tel Aviv at a special conference to mark his 80th birthday, said that Arafat should be given credit for offering an unprecedented hand of peace to Israel.

"I believe it was right to give (Arafat) the Nobel peace prize because he did three things that no other Palestinian leader did," Peres told a round-table discussion which featured three other Nobel laureates here.

"He declared publicly that he recognised the state of Israel -- no other Palestinian leader dared do that so publicly.

"Second, he said he would abandon terrorism, and third he agreed that peace would be based on the borders of 1967 and not 1948."Peres, Arafat and the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin were awarded the Nobel prize in 1994 for their work towards the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, ex-South African leader FW de Klerk, and David Trimble, leader of Northern Ireland's Ulster Unionist party, were other Nobel prize winners who also took part in the debate.