SYDNEY: The row over the awarding of the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize to Palestinian Hanan Ashrawi has brought to Australia a conflict that some migrants left the Middle East to get away from.

Previous recipients of an annual prize awarded by the Sydney Peace Foundation and paid for by the taxpayers of Sydney have been South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson, the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

It’s the first time the award has been controversial. Australia demands immigrants ditch old ethnic and religious grudges on their arrival. The trading of barbs over Ashrawi and her fitness for the prize is seen as a new and worrying departure.

Dr Ashrawi will receive the prize from New South Wales premier Bob Carr, but Mayor of Sydney Lucy Turnbull is boycotting the ceremony and has ordered City of Sydney employees to do likewise.

Turnbull’s beef is that Ashrawi is not a peacemaker but a hardliner who criticised the Oslo peace process in 1993 and who has condemned Washington’s “roadmap to peace” initiative.

Prime Minister John Howard, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and other members of the cabinet have also said Ashrawi’s record makes her underserving of a peace prize.

But Carr is standing firm. “I’ve never been more resolved to attend a function in my life,” the leader of Australia’s biggest state said.

Sydney Peace Foundation director Stuart Reed is also adamant that Ashrawi should be honoured, alleging that the city’s powerful Jewish community had “campaigned to vilify her, to ridicule the status of the prize, to pressure the companies that are partners of the foundation to cease their public and financial support and to petition the premier not to give the award”.

Reed has his supporters. The Sydney-based Jewish Democratic Society describes Ashrawi as a “convincing advocate of a two-state solution to the conflict”. Jews Against the Occupation spokeswoman Angela Budai characterized Ashrawi as a “Palestinian moderate who has fought for democracy and human rights”.

The row has even generated ripples in Israel. Professor Baruch Kimmerling, a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, chided Sydney’s Jewish community for lobbying against Ashrawi.

“There are few international figures in the present who deserve a peace prize more than the outstanding Palestinian leader, intellectual and peace activist Dr Hanan Ashrawi,” Kimmerling said.

The forces ranged against Ashrawi are potent.

Former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld said Ashrawi, on her last visit to Australia, had “let forth an unreconstructed form of Israel-bashing” and since then had “increased her anti-Israel rhetoric, coloured it with an anti-Jewish flavour and so dealt herself out of serious dialogue”.

The most surprising thumbs-down for Ashrawi came from Colonel Mike Kelly, a senior army officer serving in Baghdad, in a letter imploring Carr to think again about Thursday’s prize giving.

Kelly, a military lawyer who has served in Bosnia and Somalia, wrote that awarding Ashrawi was tantamount to betraying soldiers in the field.

“It is precisely these kinds of legitimizing actions that have encouraged the terrorism that I and my colleagues in the coalition forces are engaged in fighting,” he said.—dpa