By Stephen Lendman: Notable peace activists needn’t apply. Despicable war criminals time and again become Nobel Peace Prize honorees. This year was no exception, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos the latest recipient for negotiating dubious peace with FARC-EP freedom fighters.James Petras earlier called them “the longest standing, largest peasant-based guerrilla movement in the world…founded in 1964…legitimate resistance” against ruthless Colombian repression.
He described years of Uribe/Santos state terror against “over 2 million mostly rural poor…forcibly uprooted and driven from their homes and land and displaced across frontiers into neighboring countries, or to urban slums.”
Regime military forces aided by paramilitary death squads “kill(ed) and terrorize(d) entire population centers…”
Santos became Colombia’s 32nd president in August 2010, earlier serving from July 2006 – May 2009, as President Alvaro Uribe’s defense minister.
Both men were involved in narco-terrorism, responsible for murdering thousands of trade unionists, campesinos, human rights workers, journalists, and others opposing ruthless regime policies, along with maintaining close ties to US imperialism.
Former UN Human Rights Rapporteur, Margaret Sekaggya called Colombia under Uribe/Santos a sinkhole of “illegal surveillance…arbitrary arrests and detentions…judicial harassment,” extrajudicial assassinations, and other ruthless practices against anyone resisting regime ruthlessness.
In announcing its award, the Nobel Committee praised Santos, a major human rights violating serial killer, citing “his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end, (taking) at least 220,000 (lives) and displacing (around) six million people.”
Most Colombian voters rejected ceasefire terms Santos and FARC-EP leader Rodrigo Londono agreed to by referendum. Longstanding state-terrorism remains a weapon to be used by Santos or his eventual successors any time at their discretion.
Peace may turn out more illusory than real. Regardless what lies ahead, rewarding Santos’ involvement in years of state terror is more evidence of deplorable Nobel hypocrisy.
War criminals aren’t peace champions, yet repeatedly win Nobel honors – Committee members making a mockery of their highest award, again this year like so many previous ones.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
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