On the eve of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said Friday the award was a "gift from heaven" that gave a "tremendous push" to reach a new agreement with FARC rebels. Santos said the prestigious honour, which was announced just days after a major setback in the peace process, "came like a gift from heaven because it gave us a tremendous push" to achieve a new peace deal with FARC.
"People in Colombia interpreted it as a mandate from the international community to persevere, to continue striving to achieve a peace agreement," Santos said. "It encouraged me, it encouraged our negotiators, but particularly it encouraged the Colombian people to press" for a new deal, he told a press conference in Oslo. The initial deal, signed with pens made from bullet casings on September 26 after nearly four years of talks, was supposed to be ratified in an October 2 referendum. But voters narrowly rejected it, leaving Colombia teetering just short of ending a five-decade conflict that has killed more than 260,000 people, left 45,000 missing and forced nearly seven million to flee their homes.
As she announced Santos as the 2016 Nobel Laureate, Nobel committee chairwoman Kaci Kullman Five said voters rejecting a peace accord does not mean an end to the peace process itself. "It shows that peace is not made in one day," Berit Reiss-Andersen, deputy chairwoman of the Nobel committee, told reporters in Oslo on Friday. Santos' government and the Marxist FARC rebels then renegotiated a new peace accord signed on November 24.
"Something that was for many Colombians and for many Latin-Americans and for the world an impossible dream just a few years ago is now reality," Santos said. "The FARC are already moving to the zones where they will concentrate and disarm." The peace deal calls for the disarming of the rebel group and its transformation into a political party. But right-wing hard-liners led a campaign against the accord, arguing it offered the rebels impunity for massacres, kidnappings and other crimes committed during the conflict.
Santos' will formally receive his Peace Prize on Saturday at a glittering ceremony at Oslo's City Hall in the presence of the Norwegian king, members of the government, as well as two of the FARC's most high-profile ex-hostages, Franco-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt and Clara Rojas. The award consists of a gold medal, a diploma and a check for eight million Swedish kronor (about 824,000 euros, $871,000), a sum that Santos promised to donate to the victims of the war. Another ceremony will be held on the same day in Stockholm where this year's Nobel laureates in the sciences, economics and literature will be honoured, marked by the notable absence of this year's literature laureate Bob Dylan.