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| 2003/09/22 |
Peres: Arafat deserved nobel prize!
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01:44:04 �.�
Tel Aviv, Sept 22 - Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres said Monday that beleaguered Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat fully deserved to be awarded the nobel peace prize.
The current Israeli government has deemed Arafat an absolute obstacle to peace and agreed in principle to remove the 74-year-old from his West Bank headquarters. But Peres, speaking here 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.
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