FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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A measurement of peace in our combative times

A measurement of peace in our combative times

More world leaders should emulate Colombia’s president, whose Nobel Peace Prize ignores his failure and applauds him for just trying

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize this week to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has proved controversial, a seemingly odd decision, much like the choice of Barack Obama seven years ago when he was only just settling into the Oval Office as new president of the United States.
In the case of Manual Santos, the Nobel selection committee was clearly rewarding his efforts to end the 52-year-old armed insurrection in his country. Those efforts proved to be in vain when, in a public referendum on October 2, a majority of Colombians rejected the terms of the peace agreement he’d struck with the Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia, known as FARC, its Spanish acronym. Nevertheless the Nobel Prize is fitting recognition of the president’s valiant effort, one that would have succeeded but for voter apprehensions.
More importantly, the Nobel committee was perhaps has hopefully indicated to other world leaders that trying to foster peace has merit regardless of the final outcome. In this perspective, it doesn’t matter that Colombians spurned the Santos peace deal. What matters, rather, is that the president and Rodrigo Londono Echeverri, the leader of FARC, worked hard to secure an agreement despite the horrific history of the conflict and the dauntingly complicated negotiation process.
Indeed, the controversy that the Nobel committee has generated – apart from awarding the prize for a failed undertaking – involves the fact that Santos’ prize wasn’t shared with Echeverri, better known by his nom de guerre, Timoleon Jimenez. It can only be assumed that he was excluded because of the atrocities committed by FARC over the years – the chief factor behind the public’s rejection of the peace deal, along with the promise to FARC rebels of immunity from prosecution. It now falls to Santos to convince the public to accept the peace pact, even if he has to renegotiate the terms.
This was not the same leap of faith the Nobel committee took when it chose Obama in 2009, soon after he became president. On that occasion there was merely the expectation, based on his campaign rhetoric, that he would steer America away from the warlike course of the Bush years. As it happened, global politics forced Obama to abandon his projected reliance on diplomacy and tolerance, to devastating effect. Modern warfare involves arrays of stakeholders with divergent interests and longer-term goals. Syria is a case in point, a shattered nation where the major powers’ tunnel-vision ambitions collide, causing havoc amid ever-rising tensions.
If the Obama peace prize seems to have been wasted, the recognition of Santos is not. It should be viewed as encouragement of a different order than that directed at the US president. It demonstrates to national leaders around the world that the struggle for peace is never futile.
In our own region, the possibility of a Nobel Prize might spur leaders to bring peace to Mindanao, Southern Thailand, the Korean peninsula, Kashmir and Jammu. We have two living Nobel Peace laureates in our midst – Aung San Suu Kyi, de facto leader of Myanmar, and Jose Ramos-Horta, former president of Timor Leste. Both have established international legacies in their striving for justice, freedom and democracy.
World leaders talk a great deal about peace, but for the most part they mean peace on their own terms. Remove the self-interest and genuine peace comes within reach. It is not far-fetched to believe that all of the major conflicts could be halted within a relatively short space of time if the members of the United Nations Security Council alone could agree on a mutually beneficial future.

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