OSLO, Sept 26: Pope John Paul, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and dissidents from Iran to China are among those tipped to win the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize in a year with no clear favourites.

The five-member committee meets on Monday to try to pick the winner of the $1.3 million prize, which will be announced on October 10. Experts say the committee faces a hard choice from 165 candidates after a year overshadowed by war in Iraq.

“Pope John Paul is at the top of my list,” said Stein Toennesson, director of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, who has predicted some of the previous winners.

He said the Pope’s frailty meant 2003 might be the Norwegian committee’s last chance to reward a lifetime of preaching reconciliation among religions, despite widespread opposition to the Pope’s stand against to birth control.

Toennesson also said he favoured Brazil’s Lula, who has championed a world campaign against hunger, followed by Russian human rights activist Sergei Kovalev and Hashem Aghajari, a jailed Iranian dissident.

Irwin Abrams, an expert on the prize’s history and author of “The Nobel Peace Prize and the Laureates”, doubted the Pope would win, saying the committee did not want to be pro-Christian amid conflicts in Muslim nations from Iraq to Afghanistan.

But he said the committee might focus on trying to end conflicts in the Middle East. Experts have long said that the committee would like to give the award to a moderate Muslim.

“It’s very difficult to predict,” Abrams said. “The committee is fairly new and so you can’t make any speculation on the basis of what they have done before.”

Three of the five members, chosen by Norway’s parliament for six-year terms, are new to the panel this year.

US President George W. Bush has been proposed for ousting Iraq’s Saddam Hussein but has no real chance because the committee’s chairman said last year that the 2002 award to ex-US President Jimmy Carter was a “kick in the legs” to Bush’s Iraq policies.

The prize to Carter makes any US laureate unlikely because the committee likes to shift focus around the globe.

Toennesson said Pope John Paul had preached reconciliation between religions during the Iraq war. And during his pontificate, he played a big role in prompting reform in his native Poland, bringing pressure to end the Cold War.

But a former member of the committee, Bishop Gunnar Staalsett, once said the Roman Catholic church’s policies like opposing the use of condoms to battle AIDS “favours death rather than life”. Staalsett left the committee last year.

Attitudes to the Pope among other committee members are unclear. New committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes backed the appointment of a lesbian priest this year to Norway’s Lutheran church. Roman Catholicism does not even sanction women priests.

Among others on the list of nominees, which is not made public, are likely to be Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the European Union for expanding to include 10 eastern European and Mediterranean states.

Chinese dissidents were encouraged in 2001 when the director of the Nobel Institute said the committee would have to speak out “sooner rather than later” about a lack of democracy in China. Among possible nominees this year are Li Hongzhi, the leader of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.—Reuters