Nobel winners call for Suu Kyi release

Aung San Suu Kyi has not left Myanmar since 1988

OSLO, Norway -- Nobel Peace Prize winners have paid tribute to democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and urged the Myanmar government to release the fellow laureate.

Suu Kyi was unable to attend one of the largest gatherings of Nobel Peace Prize winners at a conference in Oslo which celebrated 100 years of the coveted award.

The conference also marked 10 years since Suu Kyi won the peace prize for her non-violent resistance to the Myanmar military regime.

Despite her National League for Democracy party winning a general election in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest and has not left Myanmar since 1988.

At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony on Saturday, 24 laureates wrote a letter to Myanmar's ruling junta appealing for the release of Suu Kyi and hundreds of "political prisoners".

'Tireless champion'

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"We're all thinking of the empty chair that belongs to Aung Suu Kyi, and we are looking forward to the day when she will actually come here and deliver her Nobel lecture," Geir Lundestad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

U.S President George W. Bush sent a message to the conference praising Suu Kyi and her campaign for democracy.

"As a tireless champion of human rights and democracy in Burma, Suu Kyi inspires countless people around the world who strive for peace, justice and freedom," Bush said in a statement read to the crowd.

"In the face of great hardship she has never wavered in her commitment to peaceful change."

Annan to deliver lecture

Among the laureates were East Timorese freedom fighter and acting Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta and the Dalai Lama.

Also attending was this year's Peace Prize winner, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who will receive the 10 million Swedish kronor ($940,000) award, which he shares with the United Nations in a ceremony on Monday at Oslo City Hall.

Annan, who arrived Saturday, was to deliver the Nobel lecture after receiving the award, while the president of the U.N. General Assembly, South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo, will accept the prize on behalf of the organization.

The awards were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in his will and are presented on the anniversary of his 1896 death.

The prizes in literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and economics are presented the same day in Stockholm, Sweden, where more than 160 laureates were gathering for similar centennial celebrations.