December 7, 2001	Friday	Ramazan 21, 1422

OSLO, Dec 6: Nobel Peace Prize laureates warned here Thursday that poverty, inequality and despair posed global threats to peace that must be addressed if the battles against terrorism and other conflicts are to be won.

“We cannot guarantee world peace in the 21st century unless there is a resolution of the gap between rich and poor,” declared South Korean President Kim Dae-jung as he opened a five-day gathering of some 30 fellow Nobel Peace Prize winners near Oslo.

The laureates were gathered at a luxury hotel overlooking Oslo for a three-day symposium on conflict avoidance to mark the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes.

Kim, addressing a gathering that included Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, East Timor independence campaigner Jose Ramos-Horta, former Polish president Lech Walesa and Northern Ireland Protestant leader David Trimble, warned that the “digital divide” between the developed and developing world was a key danger.

“We have witnessed anger caused by the gap between rich and poor in a worldwide digital divide,” he said, adding that “knowledge and information have emerged as the core elements of creating new wealth.”

“But behind this light there is a dark shadow: this is none other than the digital divide.”

The Dalai Lama echoed the same concerns, cautioning that “frustrations and jealousy” born of poverty “are causes of terrorism”.

The meeting came ahead of the awarding on Monday of the 2001 Peace Prize here to the United Nations and its current secretary-general, Kofi Annan.

The Nobel committee invited all 39 living Peace Prize laureates to the gathering, but several key figures failed to attend and the peace discussions were overshadowed by the crisis in the Middle East and the fighting in Afghanistan.

The Middle East conflict — following the rash of Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli retaliatory strikes — was felt directly in Oslo, the site of secret 1993 negotiations which led to the first Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.

Neither Shimon Peres, now Israel’s foreign minister, nor Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, attended the opening. They jointly won the peace prize in 1994 with the late Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

The turmoil sparked by the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war against Osama bin Laden’s suspected terrorist network and its protectors in Afghanistan cast another shadow.

Amnesty International, the 1977 prize-winner, warned that security measures taken by many governments in the name of combatting terrorism were undermining human rights.

“In response to the horrific human rights abuses of 11 September, governments are moving to restrict civil liberties and human rights, ostensibly to promote security,” said Amnesty chairman Colm O’Cuanachain.

He did not specify the actions he was criticizing, but his remarks came after the United States and several European governments adopted extraordinary measures to crack down on bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.

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