The 1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Medecins Sans Frontieres, demanded yesterday that Russia halt its campaign in Chechnya, calling it an indiscriminate onslaught on defenceless civilians.
Speaking at a formal award presentation ceremony, the MSF president, Dr James Orbinsky, also criticised the United Nations, NATO and national governments for duplicity and cowardice in the face of large-scale humanitarian crises.
"The people of Chechnya, and the people of Grozny, today and for more than three months, are enduring indiscriminate bombing by the Russian army," Dr Orbinsky told dignitaries at the Oslo City Hall. "I appeal here today to his excellency the ambassador of Russia and, through him, to President Yeltsin, to stop the bombing of defenceless civilians in Chechnya," Dr Orbinsky said.
MSF, founded and based in France, has along with other international humanitarian organisations been denied access to Chechnya.
Dr Orbinsky said "dangerous ambiguity" was created when governments and organisations, such as NATO, mixed military action with humanitarian and security concerns.
"We must criticise those interventions called `military-humanitarian'," he said. "Humanitarian action exists only to preserve life, not to eliminate it."
MSF, founded in 1971, rejected the assumption that aid groups should be silent in the face of humanitarian crises. "We are not sure that words can always save lives, but we know that silence can certainly kill," he said.
Dr Orbinsky directed harsh criticism at the UN, saying its responses to massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in particular were too slow or inept and had "deadly" consequences for local populations.
"Srebrenica was apparently a safe haven," he said, referring to the north-east Bosnian city where thousands of Bosnian Muslims were missing and presumed executed after a Bosnian Serb takeover in July 1995.
"We were present. The UN was also present. It said it would protect . . . and the UN stood silent and present as the people of Srebrenica were massacred," Dr Orbinsky said.
This year's other Nobel laureates received their prizes in Stockholm. The awards for medicine, chemistry, physics, economics and literature were presented in the Concert House by King Carl Gustaf XVI. Each award this year commands a prize of 7.9 million Swedish crowns (£637,619).
Several of the winners have said they plan to give some or most of the money away and get back to the laboratory or desk immediately. MSF has pledged to use the award to create a fund to fight diseases like tuberculosis. The German author, Gunter Grass, who received the literature award, said he plans to spend about a fifth of his prize money for the welfare of the Gypsy community in Germany. Grass received worldwide fame for his 1959 novel The Tin Drum.
The German biologist, Dr Gunter Blobel, who received the medicine award for protein cell discoveries which have helped uncover why hereditary diseases arise and how to treat them, promised to give most of the prize money to help restore the city of Dresden, which was destroyed by allied bombing in the second World War.
The economics laureate, Mr Robert Mundell of Canada, dubbed "the godfather of the euro" for his work on currency unions nearly 40 years ago, plans to restore his villa in Tuscany.