World
  |
|
Peres to be sworn in as Israeli president
By Jean-Luc Renaudie
AFP
JERUSALEM
Petroleumworld.com 07 16 07Israel's elder statesman and Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres is to be sworn in as president on Sunday, crowning an unparalleled career stretching back more than half a century.
Peres will be sworn in as Israel's ninth president a month after being elected by parliament to the largely ceremonial post -- the first vote for top office that he has ever won.
He will take the oath of office less than three weeks before his 84th birthday, having held just about every other top post in the country, to replace disgraced former president Moshe Katsav.
The ceremony in the Knesset (parliament) is due to start at 1530 GMT.
"Shimon Peres is one of the most important figures in Israel over the past 60 years," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, leader of Peres's centrist Kadima party, said at the weekly cabinet meeting.
"He is a person who is welcomed and known in the entire world as a representative of the state of Israel and he is one of the best-known figures in the world."
Peres's landslide win in parliament on June 13 -- he was elected by 86 votes to 23 -- marked a triumph that laid to rest the ghosts of seven years past, when he famously lost the same ballot despite being the overwhelming favourite.
His election was the crowning triumph in a record-breaking career of an octogenarian who has held just about every major office in a career with a political pedigree second to none and stretching back five decades.
Admired abroad far more than at home, supporters say his international prestige could lift the presidency out of disgrace with two consecutive incumbents forced out by scandal.
Katsav has agreed a controversial plea bargain in which rape charges were dropped but he agreed to charges including sexual harassment, indecent acts and witness subordination.
Peres, the two-time prime minister who has never won a national election, has said the presidency could be his last service to Israel.
In the July 2000 presidential election, Peres was widely expected to win, only to watch in shock as the then obscure Katsav, from Likud, beat him for the prize after the surprise defection of ultra-Orthodox MPs.
Peres's humiliating defeat -- and his loss in 2005 of the Labour leadership -- sealed his image as the perennial loser after failing to lead his party to victory in parliamentary elections in 1977, 1981, 1984, 1988 and 1996.
Peres commands great respect abroad, including for his role in the 1993 Oslo accords with the Palestinians that saw him win the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize along with former premier Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
One of his first top public jobs was as director general of the defence ministry, a post to which he was appointed at the age of 29 and held for seven years, until his election to parliament in 1959.
During his career, he has held a string of top posts, including the foreign and defence portfolios, and is considered the father of the Jewish state's biggest deterrent -- its suspected but undeclared nuclear weapons programme.
Following his loss of the leadership of his lifelong Labour party in 2005, he joined the new Kadima party founded by former premier Ariel Sharon, who suffered a massive stroke just weeks later.
Peres also dedicates much of his time to promoting peace between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world through his Peres Centre for Peace, which hopes to build an infrastructure for peace by promoting socio-economic development.
Born in 1923 in what was then Poland but is now Belarus, Peres emigrated to Palestine when he was 11. He speaks English and French as well as Hebrew. He and his wife Sonya have three children and six grandchildren.
AFP 15 0909 GMT 07 07
Copyright© 2007 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
Your
feedback is important to us!
We invite all our readers to share with us
their views and comments about this article.
Write to editor@petroleumworld.com
Any
question or suggestions, please write to:
editor@petroleumworld.com
Best
Viewed with IE
5.01+
Windows
NT 4.0, '95, '98 and ME +/ 800x600 pixels