PEACE, the most prestigious of the prizes instituted by Alfred Nobel, is also the most controversial because it has sometimes gone to the least deserving or undeserving persons. At one time, the recipients were mostly elderly pacifists and well-known international institutions. Sometimes, luck would smile on bland compromise candidates and at others on anti-Soviet/Communist crusaders. Then it would be the turn of those who are characterized as "doves in armor". If you go through the list of peace laureates, you will find those who received the prize only because the Norwegian Nobel Committee was prepared to go for a pretty loose construction of the will of Swedish inventor of dynamite. So it is heartening to see that this year's award has gone to someone who has been making sincere efforts to bring peace and reconciliation in his country and has nearly succeeded in it. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos got the award for his efforts to negotiate peace with his country's largest guerrilla group: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. It is all the more welcome because the peace deal Santos struck with FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño, also known as Timochenko, was rejected, though by an incredibly thin margin, by the Colombian people in a referendum less than a week ago. Thirteen million voters turned out to the polls on Oct. 2, and 50.2 percent said "No" to the agreement. The turnout was 37 percent, out of 34 million eligible voters. In one sense, it is a prize for a peace deal that wasn't, but it seems Santos has been honored for an effort that holds out the promise of turning into a credible achievement. The result of a four-year-long peace process, this is the closest Colombia has ever come to ending the war. And the Colombian people rejected the deal not because they want a return to armed conflict, but they felt that too many concessions were granted to a weakened and widely hated insurgency. Both Santos and FARC leader Londoño have pledged that the ceasefire will hold and that "they remain committed to peace." The ceasefire has been in force for more than one year. The process of disarming the rebels has already begun. Both parties have announced that they would send diplomats to Havana to begin discussing how to salvage the peace. The bestowing of the Nobel honor on Santos may galvanize the Colombians to think again about the deal. There may still be a chance of renegotiating the terms of the accord. The former President Álvaro Uribe, who campaigned against the peace deal and has been a constant critic of Santos, may become less strident in his opposition and FARC leader may be more willing to address the opponents' concerns about some of the concessions his group has extracted from the president. The point to be noted here is that both Uribe and Londoño have congratulated Santos on winning the prize. This may pave the way to fresh negotiations so that a deal that ensures a modicum of justice for victims of the war without undermining the chances of reconciliation can be worked out. The Norwegian Committee did the right thing in awarding the prize to Santos ignoring the results of the referendum. But the same can't be said of their decision to give award to the leader of only one side of the peace agreement. There have been several instances in the past when the honor was shared by two or three people. In 1973, the prize went to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Politburo Member Le Duc Tho. The 1967 prize was jointly awarded to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime minister Menachem Begin. In1994 we saw three persons receive the peace prize — Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and a former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
