Colombia awoke this morning to the news that President Juan Manuel Santos has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end Colombia’s 52 year civil war with FARC guerrillas. The president’s hopes for the prize seemed to have been crushed by his country’s marginal decision to vote ‘No’ to the peace accords he had presented, and signed in a lavish Cartagena ceremony just last week, and the Nobel committee’s decision to reward him anyway has been met with a certain degree of shock in Colombia. However, many proponents of peace have taken the award as a positive sign, giving the President and the Colombian people further impetus to continue working to salvage the peace agreement which, just last Sunday, seemed to have been destroyed by the 50.2% ‘No’ vote.
According to the President he was awoken before dawn by his son Martin Santos, who informed him of the committee’s decision to recognize his work in securing a peace deal with the FARC. He dedicated the award to all the Colombian people, in particular the victims of the 52-year conflict, who overwhelmingly supported the ‘Yes’ vote in the recently rejected plebiscite. “I am infinitely grateful for this honorable distinction with all my heart. I accept it not on my behalf but on behalf of all Colombians, especially the millions of victims of this conflict which we have suffered for more than 50 years. It is for the victims and so that there not be a single new victim, not a single new casualty that we must reconcile and unite to culminate this process and begin to construct a stable and durable peace,” said President Santos in a public statement this morning.
Syria’s White Helmets were considered the favorites to claim the prize, but many have interpreted the decision to award the prize to Santos as an endorsement of the peace process, and as an effort to help salvage the talks between the government and the FARC, and to prevent Colombia from sliding back into civil conflict. As Ciaran Norris wrote in a peace for The Guardian: “For the first time in my lifetime, and perhaps more so than in its entire 115-year history, the prize has not been a reflective reward but an optimistic assertion that a particular peace is possible.” It’s no coincidence that the decision was made to present the award to Santos alone. There had been talk before the vote of him sharing the prize with FARC leader Timochenko, an idea that many Colombians, understandably, found hard to swallow.
The Nobel Prize committee themselves signaled in their public statement that the award was given, in part, to push President Santos to continue working hard to deliver peace to Colombia: “The committee hopes that the peace prize will give him strength to succeed in this demanding task,” said chairwoman of the Nobel committee, Kaci Kullmann Five. “Further, it is the committee’s hope that in the years to come, the Colombian people will reap the fruits of the reconciliation process.”
In spite of Colombia’s divisions, and Santos’s unpopularity with many Colombians, the news has largely been greeted positively – the President becomes Colombia’s second Nobel Prize recipient, following the 1982 awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to legendary novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even President Santos’s most vocal public opponent, former president Alvaro Uribe, offered his congratulations (before adding: “I want him to lead to change these peace accords that are damaging to democracy”).
The news is quite a turn-around for President Santos’s fortunes considering that, in the days following the rejected plebiscite, it had been speculated that he would be forced to resign his role, having staked his reputation on achieving peace for Colombia. It remains to be seen what he will do with the nearly one million dollar prize money that comes with the award (President Santos comes from a traditionally wealthy Bogota family), but the prize itself is a deserved recognition for his efforts in pursuing a final end to a conflict that has claimed so many lives and ruined many others. With the end of the ceasefire with the FARC set for October 31, the race is now on for the new Nobel Peace Prize winner to secure a final and secure piece for his country.
Chris
Lawrence Earl on
Mi pais, gracias a Jesus!