Middle East winners have little else positive to show

The decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Prize to David Trimble and John Hume reflects what is clearly a Nobel committee strategy - to encourage the protagonists in nascent peace processes to continue their groundbreaking work, and to send simultaneously a message of support to the populations involved.

Without wanting to draw too many comparisons between peace processes that, obviously, involve many different components and circumstances, there is an inescapable parallel to be drawn between this year's winners and the Middle East trio who collected the peace prize in 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. And if what has taken place on the Israeli-Palestinian peace track since that award ceremony four years ago is any kind of harbinger of progress in Northern Ireland, Messrs Trimble and Hume might want to think twice about accepting.

At the time, not just with hindsight, the committee's 1994 selection seemed entirely inappropriate. As with Northern Ireland, the award committee appeared to have moved prematurely to recognise an achievement that, to put it bluntly, simply hadn't been achieved. A process of reconciliation had been started, but it still faced innumerable obstacles, and there was no guarantee that it would be completed.

Doubtless, the Nobel committee members (with the obvious exception of the one member who resigned over the award) felt that, by inviting the world to pay tribute to the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, they would be creating a warmer international environment in which to proceed. But, against such a relatively marginal potential benefit, they failed to consider the potential cost.

As it turned out, confirmation of the long-rumoured decision to name Mr Rabin, Mr Peres and Mr Arafat for the 1994 prize coincided, in October that year, with the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, Nachshon Wachsman, by a gang of Islamic militants from the Hamas movement, who steadfastly opposed the Middle East peace process. It found Mr Rabin, far from contemplating a joint appearance with Mr Arafat in Oslo, publicly warning his Palestinian counterpart that he held him responsible for Mr Wachsman's welfare.

Ten days after the kidnapping when, with the help of Mr Arafat's security agencies, Israel had located the building where the soldier was being held (inside Israeli-occupied West Bank territory), Mr Rabin ordered a rescue attempt by elite Israeli commandos. It failed. Mr Wachsman and one of the commandos, along with members of the kidnap gang, were killed in the botched effort.

Although Mr Rabin subsequently made clear that Mr Arafat could not, after all, be blamed for the affair, Israeli right-wing critics, who always doubted and still doubt Mr Arafat's commitment to peace, took a different view. When, at the year's end, Mr Rabin, Mr Peres and Mr Arafat did attend the awards together, the Israeli right derided the prime minister for participating in what they portrayed as a farcical ceremony.

Less than a year later, Mr Rabin was assassinated by an Orthodox Jewish extremist because of his partnership with Mr Arafat.

Four months after that, a series of Hamas suicide bombings which the Israeli right blamed Mr Arafat for not preventing, put paid to Mr Peres's hopes of winning the Israeli general elections, and let in the hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu.

This very weekend, as the latest prize winners are announced, Mr Arafat and Mr Netanyahu are still banging their heads together, at a US-sponsored summit, years behind the original peacemaking schedule, with most of the major obstacles to permanent Israel-Palestinian peace still ahead of them.

Ironically, in 1994, there were appropriate candidates for a Nobel Peace Prize in the Middle East: Mr Rabin and King Hussein. Israel and Jordan, that October, completed a full, permanent peace accord, one that has held firm, despite considerable strain, ever since. Giving them the award might have encouraged progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front. Giving it to Mr Rabin, Mr Peres and Mr Arafat had no discernible positive impact whatsoever.