Colombian President gets it, rebel leader doesn’t
Should genuine and sustained efforts in establishing peace in a strife-torn region be enough to attract a Nobel Peace prize or should the recognition come once a reasonable level of peace is restored in a sustained mannerIJ The 2016 Nobel Peace award has gone to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for having reached a pact with the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in a bid to end a more than 50-year old civil war in the country. According to the deal, FARC rebels would disarm and join the political mainstream. But soon after it was inked, a national referendum to ratify the accord rejected the landmark agreement. While the turnout for the referendum was a mere 40 per cent, at least half of those who voted found the accord flawed and set it aside. What we are left with is Santos having won a Nobel award for a peace he will find difficult to enforce. Of course, the referendum's result does not mean the accord is dead; the deal will have to be tweaked to address the concerns of the people. Perhaps the public saw it as some sort of surrender by the Government in the form of too many concessions offered to the FARC. Since it takes two hands to clap, the FARC leadership's role in arriving at a settlement is equally praiseworthy. However, the Nobel Committee in Oslo chose to recognise just one player — Colombia's President — while FARC leader Timoleon ‘Timochenko' Jimenez was left out in the cold.
We don't know for sure what the considerations were before the Nobel panel to decide thus, but one-sided recognition in bilateral agreements is not very common in Nobel history. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1978 after the Camp David agreement was signed. In 1994, there were not two but three joint winners: Palestine liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, senior Israeli leader who was to succeed Rabin. They were awarded the Nobel Peace “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East”. Only recently, a Pakistani and an Indian jointly received the Nobel Peace award for different contributions in different parts of the world. Thus, it would have been in the fitness of things if the FARC leader had been recognised.
It must be rare for the Nobel Committee to have, in a particular year, many befitting names of individuals and organisations to choose from. The more there are wars, the more there would be players struggling to establish peace. The more there is social inequality or discrimination, the more will be individuals and non-Government organisations contributing to correcting the anomaly. 2016 was no different, and the arena stretched from Syria to Iran. Colombia must consider itself fortunate to have received the world's attention through a Nobel win. Now it must make full use of the occasion.