Joint Nobel prize for Vanunu and Shahristani

By Gwynne Dyer

The attitude toward my case needs to be on the ground of respecting my action as an act that helped all the world, even Israel. -- Mordechai Vanunu, Jan. 19, 1996

LONDON (JP): Nobody has actually seen Mordechai Vanunu's face for ten years except his two brothers, who take turns making the sole permitted fortnightly visit to Ashkelon prison, and the Israeli guards outside his 3 by 2 meters cell. When his protests against solitary confinement occasionally get as far as a court appearance, his jailers cover his head with a mask. And he never gets any mercy.

Vanunu's crime, for which he was sentenced to 18 years in solitary confinement, was to fly to London in 1986 and tell the Sunday Times newspaper all he knew about Israel's nuclear weapons program. He had been a low-level technician at Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona, but from the information and photographs he provided, experts were able to deduce that Israel then had between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons.

The Israel government, which has never publicly admitted (or denied) owning nuclear weapons, was furious at this revelation, and acted ruthlessly to silence him. A female Israeli agent lured Vanunu from Britain to Italy -- where he was kidnapped, drugged, and shipped back to Israel in a crate for punishment.

But that was a long time ago, and there's nothing new on the case, so why bring it up now? Because ten years is a good round figure that could capture the public imagination -- and it's time for nominations for the next Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize is a tool, and applied to the right problem it can do wonders. It helps to protect democratic leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi from the wrath of the generals who rule Myanmar, as it once protected nuclear physicist and peace advocate Andrei Sakharov from the anger of the Communist tyrants who ruled the old Soviet Union. It might help to free Vanunu, or at least end the vengeful cruelty of his solitary confinement.

This is an urgent matter, for there are signs that a whole decade alone is affecting Vanunu's mental stability. "They want to drive him mad," says his brother Asher. "They want to harm him.

They want revenge." Dr. Ruhama Marton, an Israeli psychiatrist who addressed a pro-Vanunu conference in Tel Aviv last October, agrees.

"The most common feeling people in solitary confinement have is that of extreme and profound anxiety," said Marton. "The feelings of deep abandonment and deep anxiety, coupled with the factors of thought disorder and hallucinations, rapidly put a person into a constant state of doubt and uncertainty in which they may lose their self-confidence, self-esteem, and finally their identity." Vanunu has had ten years of this.

But there is a problem with nominating Vanunu for the Nobel Peace Prize: some are bound to see it as an anti-Israeli gesture rather than a campaign motivated by anti-nuclear and humanitarian sentiments. Fortunately, there is also a solution to the problem. He is called Dr. Hossein Shahristani.

Shahristani, like Vanunu, has spent a decade in prison for opposing the introduction of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, but he was rarely alone. He had torturers to keep him company, for he is an Iraqi, and the government whose nuclear ambitions he defied was that of Saddam Hussein.

Hossein Shahristani trained in nuclear chemistry at the University of Toronto, and returned to Iraq to work in the government-run Atomic Energy Organization at the time when Saddam was rising to supreme power. Shahristani rose too, to become Saddam's chief scientific adviser -- until the fateful day in 1979 when Saddam ordered his scientists to start work on nuclear weapons, and Shahristani defied him.

He was arrested on Dec. 4, 1979, and accused of treason. (As a Shia Moslem, he was regarded as a potential traitor by the predominantly Sunni regime). The torture began at once, and continued day and night. They tied his hands behind his back and then hoisted him into the air by them: "After a few minutes, the pain is so severe in your shoulders, the pain is unbearable." And then they applied an electric cattle prod to his genitals.

After 22 days the torture ended, but Shahristani remained in Abu Ghorraieb prison in Baghdad for a decade. For a time, security police moved into the house with his Canadian-born wife Bernice and their children Mohamed and Zahra, who saw him only once a month for the next ten years. Once the regime offered to free the scientist if he would work on its nuclear weapons, but he refused.

Finally, miraculously, Shahristani escaped from prison in one of the bombing raids on Baghdad during the Gulf War in 1991. He fled north with his family to Kurdistan, and from there was smuggled into Iran. He and his wife live in Tehran today, running an Iraqi refugee aid organization.

Hossein Shahristani is a brave and just man who would deserve a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize on his own merits. But he would never be awarded it on his own, any more than Mordechai Vanunu would. The politics of the rival nationalisms, Arab and Israeli, would get in the way.

A joint nomination of Vanunu and Shahristani, on the other hand, would have an impartiality and a symmetry that rose above such considerations. They have each paid a great price for acting as their conscience dictates, and they deserve recognition. But most importantly, the Nobel Peace Prize is a tool that could save Vanunu by embarrassing the Israeli government into releasing him.

Vanunu has no more secrets to reveal, and there is no reason except revenge for Israel to keep him in such terrible isolation. He needs help from outside, and he is entitled to it.