Nobel award is a farce

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos will receive the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, although he failed to convince his country to accept a treaty with the narco-terrorist group FARC. (AFP photo)

The Nobel Peace Prize has again gone to a political leader for whom "peace" is questionable. The Norwegian Nobel committee said Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos worked on a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc. But he failed to convince his country that the agreement was valid, and voters turned it down last week in a referendum. Mr Santos becomes the latest Nobel Peace laureate without an actual achievement, and the prize takes another blow to its credibility.

The Nobel Peace Prize normally goes to outstanding personalities and groups whose work and reputation advance the prospects of peace. Names like Aung San Suu Kyi, Bishop Tutu, Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu honour the peaceful. The strange awarding of the prize in 2012 to the European Union puzzled many. But the last two given to Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet and to admirable child activists Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai helped to restore some esteem.

The bizarre reasoning for the award to Mr Santos does the opposite. It fails to recognise or even mention in passing his partners in the peace negotiations. The chief peace negotiator, Ivan Marquette, and the Farc commander Rodrigo "Timochenko" Londono did as much as Mr Santos's government to bring about the peace agreement. Four tough years of negotiations in Cuba were needed to bring about the deal, but the Nobel Peace Prize makes no mention of the duality of the entire procedure.

In the end, Colombian voters turned down the deal, by a narrow margin. The reasons for that are clear. The proposed agreement awarded all Farc members total immunity for all crimes. It set aside 10 seats in parliament for the Farc, without the process of an election. There is also to be no compensation for anyone harmed in the 62-year war, which so far has left 220,000 dead and caused six million to become refugees.

Farc posed as a pro-communist social movement, concerned with the plight of the poor, especially the rural poor. Behind that veneer, however, Farc displayed a far different side. It is one of the world's biggest drug trafficking rings. And it does not just finance itself through drugs and extortion rackets. Farc has unknown billions in assets, spread in dodgy banks around the world.

None of that was to be touched under the terms of Mr Santos's rejected peace deal. One can imagine the fate of a similar agreement hammered out between the Thai government and southern separatists. Like Colombians, Thais certainly wish to have peace. But a final agreement must take into account the victims of conflict, or it is not just.

The Nobel committee has acted equally strangely in the past. In 1973, one of history's most vicious realpolitik practitioners, Henry Kissinger, was a co-recipient with Vietnamese official Le Duc Tho for their "peace agreement" that did nothing to end the Vietnam war. Tho, to his ever-lasting credit, simply turned down the award.

In 1994, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin were co-winners "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East" -- although they obtained no actual peace. And in 2009, an embarrassed, non-achieving US President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, even though he had already escalated wars and was immersed in an eight-year process of starting new ones.

Mr Santos is a known peace advocate. He is also a democrat who allowed his people to vote on his peace deal with Farc, although it was not necessary. Around the world, many brave individuals and groups strive for peace. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for a failed agreement leaves them unrecognised.