The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last week to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. He does deserve congratulations for his efforts. Yet, the Colombian population, in a referendum five days before, voted by a narrow margin to reject the agreement
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last week to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. He does deserve congratulations for his efforts. Yet, the Colombian population, in a referendum five days before, voted by a narrow margin to reject the agreement Santos negotiated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to end the country’s 52-year-old civil war. The conflict claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and seriously retarded Colombia’s economic development.
The war was financed on the FARC side in no small part by drug dealing. American military and other aid played an equally large part in financing the war on the government side. It is the last such civil war in this hemisphere.
It has to be assumed that the Nobel committee gave the prize to Santos, even though the Colombian population rejected the accord, to encourage him to stay the course in pursuing an agreement. There is every reason to hope he will do so. One Colombian politician opposed to the accord is former president Alvaro Uribe, a longtime favorite of the United States for his receptivity as president to American military involvement in Colombia.
The comparison of Santos having been awarded the prize and new U.S. President Barack Obama’s having received it in 2009, based on expectations of what he might do in office, is impossible to avoid. In the case of Obama, it didn’t work. At the end of nearly eight years in office, the United States is bogged down up to its axles with troops in wars with no end in sight in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
It is fair to ask why that is so. The basic argument for U.S. involvement is that it is fighting “the enemy” there to avoid fighting them here. That argument breaks down when terrorist attacks occur against Americans in revenge for U.S. activities overseas. The rockets fired Monday against a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf following a U.S.-supported Saudi Arabian air attack on a funeral in Yemen, killing 140, is an example.
That doesn’t mean the Nobel Peace Prize shouldn’t be used to encourage peace-making. Let’s hope it works better with Santos than it did with Obama.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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