STOCKHOLM -- The 1987 Nobel prizes will be announced in the next two weeks with Philippine President Corazon Aquino being a strong candidate for the prestigious and often controversial peace prize.
The six-prize Nobel series leads off with the announcement of the medicine honor in Stockholm on Monday Oct. 12, but public interest as usual has focused on the decision of the Oslo-based Norwegian Nobel Committee, which presents the peace prize.
The five-member committee made its choice last Monday, but the winner remains a secret until the prize is announced on Tuesday Oct. 13. The committee has said 62 individuals and 31 organizations were nominated, but refuses to name them.
Candidates confirmed by various sources include Aquino, retired British U.N. official Brian Urquhart, Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, Live Aid fundraiser Bob Geldof of Ireland, missing British Mideast hostage negotiator Terry Waite, South Korean opposition politician Kim Dae Jung and the World Health Organization.
Last year the award went to American Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-born Jewish writer who survived the Nazi death camps in World War II and chronicled the Holocaust.
Most observers believe the 1987 peace prize will go to 'Cory' Aquino, who led the peaceful 'People Power Revolution' that drove Philippine autocrat Ferdinand Marcos from the presidency into exile in February 1986.
Aquino received more than 20 nominations, more than anyone else this year. Peace prize candidates may be nominated by former laureates, members of legislatures throughout the world and university professors of political science.
Although the number of nominations alone means little to the Nobel Committee members, it has probably not passed unnoticed that one of Aquino's proponents is Liv Aasen, an influential member of the foreign relations committee of the Norwegian parliament.
The parliamentarian said she made the nomination because Aquino had 'chosen political dialogue instead of military confrontation' as a means of solving political conflict.
Only two Asians have received the peace prize in its 86-year history, Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in 1974 and Le Duc Tho, who won the honor jointly with Henry Kissinger in 1973. But the North Vietnamese chief negotiator refused to share it with the American secretary of state, calling him 'a horsetrader.'
Since the Nobel Peace Prize in reality is a subtle way of making politics, giving it to Aquino may serve to add lustre to her crisis-ridden presidency, under frequent attack from both right and left.
There is a precedence for bestowing the prize on a leader who has fighting forbold new initiatives.
When then-West German Chancellor Willy Brandt won the award in 1971, his effort to open a dialogue with the East Bloc, the so-called 'Ostpolitik,' was highly in dispute.
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa captured the peace prize in 1983, two years after his independent trade unions had been outlawed by the Polish government.
Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, credited with reintroducing civilian rule in a country long run by a rightwing military junta, also falls into the fighting-leader category, as does Korean opposition politician Kim Dae Jung, who has survived years of jailings, exile and house arrest to help pressure the government into elections.
In 1984, a bomb scare disrupted the awards ceremony in Oslo for black South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, an anti-apartheid crusader.
The peace prize is the only Nobel award announced in Norway, which was in a political union with Sweden when Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel penned his will in 1895, the year before he died, and endowed the five original awards.
Each of the prizes carries a cash stipend of about $340,000 this year, up eight per cent from 1986.
The Swedish Academy has not yet decided on the Nobel literature laureate, but the announcement is expected on Thursday Oct. 15 or Thursday Oct. 22. Until then, the prize is the subject of guesswork based on past selections by the 18-member academy.
Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka last year became the first African to win the Nobel Literature Prize, probably making the academy less inclined to consider South African authors Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink for a few years.
The fact that French novelist Claude Simon got the prize in 1985, Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert in 1984, and British author William Golding in 1983 would seem to rule out Europe this time.
Latin America, which last won the prize in 1982 through Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has a few strong candidates who could be on the academy's secrecy-shrouded short list, including Octavio Paz of Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.
Artur Lundkvist, the most powerful member of the Swedish Academy and reportedly the force behind the selection of Garcia Marquez and Simon, has followed Latin American literature closely for decades.
On the other hand, Lundkvist has described Joyce Carol Oates, who recently visited Sweden, as 'one of the most impressive phenomenons in American literature in 10 years.'
The latest U.S. literature laureate was Polish-born American Czeslaw Milosz in 1980.
Only two Asian authors have won the literature award, Rabindranath Tagore of India, in 1913, and Yasunari Kawabata of Japan, in 1968. But China could have its first literature prize winner in poet Bei Dao. He is favored by Goran Malmqvist, an expert on Chinese literature who filled the fifth blue silk-upholstered chair of the Swedish Academy in 1985.
The academy has a tradition of giving the coveted prize to obscure poets who were unheard of before receiving the award.
The medicine honor, the first prize that will be announced this year, was awarded last year by Stockholm's Karolinska Institute jointly to American Stanley Cohen and Italian-American Rita Levi-Montalcini for discoveries in cell growth that promise hope for everything from cancer to burns.
On Wednesday Oct. 14, the physics and chemistry prizes will be decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The physics honor last year was shared by Swiss Heinrich Rohrer and West Germans Ernst Ruska and Gerd Binnig for building advanced microscopes.
On Wednesday Oct. 21, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the winner of the Economics Prize, the sixth Nobel created by the Bank of Sweden in memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded since 1969. The original five Nobels have been presented since 1901.
James McGill Buchanan last year became the 14th American to capture the economics prize. He also was the last American to walk away with the cash stipend tax-free.
As of this year, the prizes are being taxed in the United States, despite protests by the Nobel Foundation, which says the award should benefit only winners, not national governments.
The awards ceremonies take place in Oslo and Stockholm on Dec. 10, the 91st anniversary of Nobel's death.
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