COLOMBIAN President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday as he struggled to rescue the accord with the Farc liberation army.

Mr Santos dedicated the prize — previously awarded to warmonger Barack Obama and final apartheid-era South African president FW de Klerk — to the Colombian people: “Especially the millions of victims that have suffered in this war that we are on the verge of ending.”

“We are very, very close,” he claimed. “We just need to push a bit further to persevere.”

Colombian voters narrowly rejected the hard-won peace deal with Farc in Sunday’s referendum.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised the result had created “real danger that the peace process will come to a halt and that civil war will flare up again.”

It urged Mr Santos and Farc commander Rodrigo Londono, better known as Timochenko, to “continue to respect the ceasefire.”

Prize committee chair Kaci Kullmann Five denied the decision not to award the prize jointly to Timochenko was a snub.

Timochenko for his part said “the only prize to which we aspire” was peace and social justice and “Colombia without paramilitaries, without retaliations and without lies.”

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) director Dan Smith said “It is important to remember that it takes at least two parties to end a war,” congratulating Farc for putting “their trust and effort in peace.”

But Farc guerillas in central Meta province, who had been preparing to disarm and return to civilian life and politics, began heading back to their strongholds in the Llanos del Yari ahead of the October 31 expiry of the ceasefire declared in August.

Meanwhile, the guerilla National Liberation Army (ELN) freed hostage Fabio Ardila, former mayor of Charala.

Mr Santos held talks on Thursday with former president Avaro Uribe, who led the No campaign claiming the peace would grant impunity to guerillas accused of war crimes — ignoring his own complicity with far-right death squads.

Guatemalan indigenous peoples’ campaigner Rigoberta Menchu, the last Latin American Nobel peace laureate in 1992, urged Mr Santos not to lose hope.

“This is an extraordinary stage for Colombia in its intense search for peace,” she said.