Colombia’s Santos to receive Nobel Peace Prize
President to be awarded the prize for his efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end.
The Nobel Peace Prize of 2016 is set to be awarded to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who called it “a gift from heaven” for his country’s peace process with FARC rebels.
The prize ceremony will be held on Saturday evening in the Norwegian capital, Oslo.
Al Jazeera will be talking exclusively to the Colombian president at 17:00GMT. Watch the interview live here.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the prize to Santos for his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to an end.
The war has cost the lives of at least 220,000 Colombians and displaced close to six million people.
Santos was named peace prize laureate on October 7, just four days after the people in Colombia in a referendum narrowly rejected a peace deal his government had reached with the FARC rebels.
Despite the outcome, Santos concluded “all wanted peace”, he told a news conference at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo.
“Four days later the Nobel Prize award was announced, and it came like a gift from heaven because it gave us a tremendous push,” he said on Friday.
“People in Colombia interpreted it as a mandate from the international community to persevere.”
The recipients of the Nobel prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry and economics are also to receive their awards. The ceremonies for these prizes will be held in the Swedish capital of Stockholm.
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