NOBEL PRIZE TO RUSSIAN DRAWS FIRE
Author: Associated Press
Date: Monday, December 2, 1985
Page: 6
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
Chancellor Helmut Kohl and conservative party leaders in nine other nations
have urged the Norwegian Nobel Committee not to present the 1975 Peace Prize
to Dr. Yevgeny Chazov of the Soviet Union, Khol's spokesman said yesterday.
Juergen Merschmeier, spokesman for Kohl's Christian Democratic Union
party, said the politicians had sent a letter to the committee in Oslo asking
that it withhold the prize from Chazov.
The committee awarded the prize in October to the International Physicians
for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The committee invited two of the group's
leaders, Chazov and American Dr. Bernard Lown, to accept the prize Dec. 10 in
Oslo.
Merschmeier said the conservative leaders opposed giving the prize to
Chazov because they believed he participated in the persecution of dissident
Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Chazov is the Soviet Union's deputy health minister and a member of the
government's Cardiological Institute.
Sakharov, who helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb before becoming a
human rights activist, was banished to internal exile in the closed city of
Gorky by the government in 1980.
Merschmeier said the letter was signed by Kohl, Bavarian state Gov. Franz
Josef Strauss, and conservative party leaders in nine other West European
nations.
In Oslo, Jacob Sverdrup, secretary of the five-member Nobel Committee,
said last night that the letter would not affect the ceremony.
The Boston, Mass.-based International Physicians group, created in 1980
and jointly led by American and Soviet doctors, has campaigned against nuclear
war.
WILKIN;12/01,19:31 LDRISC;12/03,17:45 NOBEL02
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