Nobel winners meet to end war

Gorbachev will join a symposium to discuss ways to try to stop wars

OSLO, Norway -- More than 200 Nobel Prize winners are to tackle the world's ills to mark the 100th anniversary of the awards next December, organisers said.

About 32 Nobel Peace Prize winners, including former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, will gather in Oslo for the December 6-8 symposium.

Top of the agenda will be how the globe can avoid conflicts in the 21st century.

Around the same time, many of the almost 200 laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics will converge on Sweden to wrestle with issues like "frontiers in molecular science," "beyond genes" and "witness literature."

Laureates will also speak at universities in the two nations, and Sweden will set up an exhibition to mark the first century of the prizes, named after Sweden's Alfred Nobel, a philanthropist and the inventor of dynamite.

Mandela stays away

The celebrations will culminate on December 10 when this year's awards are handed out -- a century after the first prize was awarded in 1901.

"We've never had such a big meeting of peace prize winners," said Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

"We'll go through what went wrong in the 20th century -- why we had so many wars and conflicts -- and we'll try to sketch out solutions for the 21st," he said.

"The prize winners will, as the visionaries, try to give us solutions for the 21st century," he said, adding that all living laureates have been invited.

Former South African President Nelson Mandela is the only Nobel laureate invited who has declined to attend, although other laureates like Palestinian President Yasser Arafat have yet to reply.

Mandela, who shared the 1993 prize with former President F.W. de Klerk for helping bury apartheid, gave no reason for turning down the invitation.

Seventeen of the peace laureates are individuals, including Northern Irish politicians John Hume and David Trimble, who won in 1998 for efforts to end sectarian bloodshed, and 15 represent organisations like the U.N. peacekeeping forces.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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