BOGOTA, Colombia _ Despite rejection of his peace deal at the polls, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his "resolute efforts" to end a 52-year war with the nation's largest rebel group, one of the longest civil conflicts in modern times.
Members of the Oslo-based Nobel committee said in a statement Friday that they hoped the prize would encourage the 65-year-old Santos and "give him strength" to get a peace deal approved.
"I receive (the prize) with humility and as a mandate to continue without rest to achieve the peace," Santos said Friday on national television. "To that cause, I will dedicate all my efforts for the rest of my days."
Santos said he accepted the award on behalf of "the millions of victims who have suffered for more than 50 years."
By a razor-thin margin, Colombians last Sunday voted down the peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist rebel group. Santos's team took four years to negotiate the accord with leaders of the FARC.
Santos has dedicated his presidency to finding a peace accord. The ongoing war has claimed at least 220,000 lives and caused the displacement of 7 million people. After losing the plebiscite, Santos promised to continue with his peace effort and has begun negotiations with opposition leaders to come up with a new deal.
"The award should also be seen as a tribute to the Colombian people who, despite great hardships and abuses, have not given up hope of a just peace, and to all the parties who have contributed to the peace process," the Nobel committee said in a statement.
Voters rejected the deal 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent because many thought it to be too generous to the rebel group. The agreement gave them light maximum sentences for horrific crimes including massacres, kidnapping and extortion as long as they confessed and asked forgiveness for their crimes.
Voters also objected to giving guaranteed political representation in Colombia's congress to demobilized FARC leaders, including those accused of having participated in crimes against humanity. For the time being, a cease fire declared in August is holding and rebel leader Rodrigo Londono, alias TImochenko, has said rebels are committed to peace.
On Wednesday, Santos met with former president and now senator Alvaro Uribe, a leading proponent of the "no" vote on the deal, with both men announcing afterward that they would try to find common ground to come up with a new deal. It was not clear, however, that the FARC would accept possible jail terms for alleged crimes, a Uribe demand.
Uribe congratulated Santos via Twitter on Friday, adding, "I hope it leads to changing agreements that are harmful to democracy."
Many pundits assumed after the defeat of the peace deal at the polls that the Nobel committee would take Santos off the prize candidate list. Despite the vote, the committee decided to make the award in light of Santos' efforts and as a tribute to " the countless victims of the civil war."
"The fact that a majority of the voters said no to the peace accord does not necessarily mean that the peace process is dead," the committee said. "There is a real danger that the peace process will come to a halt and that civil war will flare up again. This makes it even more important that the parties, headed by President Santos and FARC guerrilla leader Rodrigo Londono, continue to respect the ceasefire."
It was not immediately clear why the award went only to Santos. Traditionally, the Nobel committee has acknowledged both sides of a conflict ended by peace agreements, such as the late Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, who shared the prize with Yasser Arafat in 1994.
Colombian Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas warned Thursday that the cease-fire, which has been extended until Oct. 31, cannot be held indefinitely. In interviews with local media, Villegas said a timeline to start the disarmament process is imperative if the cease-fire, "the most important asset achieved in the negotiations," is to hold.
Santos is the second Colombian to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," received the literature award in 1982.
Successive Colombian governments have fought largely peasant armies of leftist guerrillas, who claimed they were fighting for a Cuban-style revolution to eliminate gross inequalities in land distribution and other areas of the economy.
The sole remaining armed conflict in Latin American has killed about 260,000 people. More than 6 million have been internally displaced. It was high voter turnout by family members of those victims for the Oct. 2 referendum that scuppered the deal.
"Striking a balance between the need for national reconciliation and ensuring justice for the victims will be a particularly difficult challenge. There are no simple answers to how this should be accomplished," the committee's statement said. "The referendum was not a vote for or against peace," it said. "What the 'No' side rejected was not the desire for peace, but a specific peace agreement."
Born in Bogota into one of Colombia's wealthiest families, Santos was educated at Harvard University. As defense minister, he was at the front lines of the struggle against the FARC, overseeing a cross-border raid into Ecuador that took out a top commander. The rejected peace deal he negotiated would have spared jail time for rebels who turn over their weapons and confess to war crimes. The FARC would also have gotten 10 seats in congress with the expectation they would transition into a political movement.
In a trip to Washington this year, Santos spoke of the challenges he faced persuading his people to accept a peace agreement.
"Most Colombians have never seen one day of peace," Santos said. "Colombia got accustomed to war. You ask people what they think about peace, and they are afraid. It is change."
The last time the prize went to someone from Latin America was in 1992, when it was awarded to Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchu.
A record 376 candidates were nominated for this year's award.
Last year's prize went to Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet for its efforts to build a pluralistic democracy.
