Nobel laureate from Iran urges against military action

Shirin Ebadi, in interviews between sessions at a Los Angeles youth peace conference, called on the Iranian government to abandon uranium enrichment, which has fueled fears that the country is developing a nuclear bomb. But she also urged the United States and Israel to forgo any plans for a preemptive military attack, because it would only give the regime an excuse to crack down on human rights activists such as herself.

"If there is a military attack on Iran, people will forget their differences with the government, and they will defend their country," she said in an interview. "It will also damage our human rights movement because the government will expand its powers and limit freedoms using the excuse of national security."

Instead, the Iranian jurist called for direct and public talks between leaders, legislators and civilians in both countries.

Ebadi carried her message of nonviolent action to 3,000 students from around the world, who gathered this weekend at Loyola Marymount University at a peace conference sponsored by the PeaceJam Foundation. The high-spirited conference featured music, prayer, testimony and advice from six Nobel laureates, who were cheered on like rock stars.

Aside from Ebadi, the laureates included Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, anti-land-mine activist Jody Williams, Betty Williams of Northern Ireland, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina and Rigoberta Menchu Tum of Guatemala.

The Colorado-based PeaceJam was founded in 1996 to develop young leaders to work for nonviolent change through the advice and inspiration of Nobel Peace Prize laureates. In the last decade, PeaceJam has mobilized 600,000 youth around the world to develop more than 1 million service projects addressing disease, human rights, racism, equal access to natural resources, environmental degradation, weapons proliferation and other global issues.

Several of the projects were highlighted over the weekend. In one presentation Saturday, Burmese activist Charm Tong tearfully described her encounter with a woman who was gang-raped while seven months' pregnant and whose husband was taken and presumably killed by members of Myanmar's military junta. Tong, who has helped document mass rapes by soldiers, appealed to students to step up political pressure on the military regime to democratize the nation and free Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader and 1991 Nobel laureate.