Wrap-up: A Nobel Week

Peace
Colombia president Juan Santos wins Nobel for the peace efforts, though the deal was rejected by the people

The Colombian Conflict
The 1948 assassination of populist firebrand Jorge Eliecer Gaitan led to a political bloodletting known as “La Violencia,” or “The Violence.”

A 1964 military attack on their main encampment led to the creation of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Reason behind the rebellion
The FARC has sought to make the conservative oligarchy share power and prioritised land reforms in a country where more than 5 million people have been forcibly displaced, mostly by far-right militias in the service of ranchers, businessmen and drug traffickers.

The human toll

2,20,000 lives have been lost, most of them civilians. In the past two decades, many of the killings were inflicted by the militia, which made peace with the government in 2003.

The FARC abducted ranchers, politicians and soldiers who were often held for years in jungle prison camps. Its captives included former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors, all of whom were rescued in 2008.

Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 to Jean-Pierre Sauvage University of Strasbourg, France, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA and Bernard L. Feringa University of Groningen, the Netherlands “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”

Medcine

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy

Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 with one half to David J. Thouless University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA and the other half to F. Duncan M. Haldane Princeton University, NJ, USA, and, J. Michael Kosterlitz Brown University, Providence, RI, USA “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”

Peace efforts
Talks began in 2012 in Havana and produced an accord in late August on demobilisation of 7,000 FARC fighters, land reform, FARC’s political participation and punishing war crimes on both sides.  However, Colombian voters narrowly scuttled the deal in a national referendum on Sunday.

Why Santos
President Santos initiated the negotiations that culminated in the peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, and he has consistently sought to move the peace process forward. Well knowing that the accord was controversial, he was instrumental in ensuring that Colombian voters were able to voice their opinion concerning the peace accord in a referendum.

96 Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded 1901-2015. 2 Peace Prizes have been divided among three persons. 16 women have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize so far. 62 is the average age of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates the year they were awarded the prize. 1 Peace Prize Laureate, Le Duc Tho, has declined the Nobel Peace Prize. 3 Peace Prize Laureates have been under arrest at the time of the award: German pacifist and journalist Carl von Ossietzky, Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi and Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.