Exhibition reflects century of war, progress

UNITED NATIONS -- Nelson Mandela releases a white dove. Mikhail Gorbachev stands beside a remnant of the Berlin Wall. Aung San Suu Kyi looks out a window. Yasser Arafat holds a picture of the late Yitzhak Rabin.

Photographs of these Nobel Peace Prize winners reflect what U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the newest peace laureate, calls "a century of savage loss and bloodshed, but also one of extraordinary progress and vision."

The new exhibit at U.N. headquarters commemorating the centennial of the Nobel Peace Prize opened Monday and continues through March.

Annan said the photo exhibition illustrates the debt to previous winners, "who worked so hard and took such risks, over the past century, to save humanity from the scourge of war."

Some like Mandela, who was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa, and Gorbachev, the Soviet leader key to ending the Cold War, succeeded.

Others like Suu Kyi, who has been struggling to bring democracy to Myanmar and has been under house detention since September 2000, and Arafat, the Palestinian leader currently confined by Israel to the West bank town of Ramallah, have not.

The exhibition includes the first Nobel peace laureate in 1901, Jean Henri Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Arafat is pictured holding a photo of Rabin, the slain Israeli prime minister who shared the 1994 prize.

The caption says, "Bethlehem heralded an eternal message to the world: 'peace on earth and good will toward mankind.' Let the year 2000 be a transition, for the realization of the dream of all people: peace, love and brotherhood everywhere on earth."

Next to Arafat's image is that of the third winner that year, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, with a dove flying above him.

He wrote: "While previous human history was written in red ink, the color of war; we hope that the future history will be written in green color, the color of hope."

In his portrait, Annan holds a white dove while looking at a globe.

The caption from his December lecture says: "Peace is not the sole responsibility of any individual, institution or nation but the responsibility of each and everyone."