A historic ceasefire on Monday came into effect in Colombia, ending a 52-year war between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government and taking a major step toward ending a conflict that has claimed more than 250,000 lives.
The full ceasefire ordered by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the head of the FARC, Timoleon Jimenez, began at midnight.
‘WAR IS OVER’
Photo: AFP
“This Aug. 29, a new phase of history begins for Colombia. We silenced the guns. The war with the FARC is over,” Santos wrote on Twitter one minute later.
A message from the official FARC account at the same time was more restrained: “From this moment on the bilateral and definitive ceasefire begins.”
The Colombian government’s chief peace negotiator, Humberto de la Calle, grew visibly emotional at a news conference, describing how church bells and sirens had rung out in some of the areas hardest hit by the conflict.
“A lot of human lives are going to be saved with this giant step we are taking today,” Colombian High Commissioner for Peace Sergio Jaramillo told journalists.
“The morning of peace has dawned,” the FARC’s chief negotiator Ivan Marquez tweeted.
The ceasefire is the first in which both sides are committed to a definite end to the fighting.
“The ceasefire is really one more seal on the end of the conflict. It is the test of fire,” said Carlos Alfonso Velazquez, a security expert at the University of La Sabana.
The conflict began in 1964 with the launch of the FARC, a guerrilla group born out of a peasant uprising. It has left 260,000 dead, 45,000 missing and 6.9 million uprooted from their homes.
To end the war with the FARC for good, Colombians must vote in an Oct. 2 referendum on the peace accord hammered out in about four years of talks in Cuba.
Santos said the exact question that will be put to voters in the referendum would be announced “in the coming days.”
“We are on the verge of perhaps the most important political decision of our lives,” he said in a speech on Saturday.
NATION DIVIDED
Opinion polls show Colombians are divided ahead of the referendum.
Santos’ top rival, former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, is leading a campaign to vote “No” to the peace deal.
He says a special justice system envisaged for crimes committed during the conflict would give FARC fighters impunity.
Opponents question the FARC’s commitment to peace.
“I don’t think we can believe them,” said Felipe Giraldo, a 25-year-old unemployed man in Bogota.
Others have a high personal stake in the vote.
Adelaida Bermudez, 50, said she hopes it will bring home her daughter, who joined the FARC nine years ago.
“I hope we’ll have peace ... so the children come home,” she said in Gaitania, in the central region where the FARC was born.
Santos and Jimenez are due to sign the peace agreement sometime between Sept. 20 and Sept. 30 — possibly at the UN General Assembly in New York, Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin said.
The end of hostilities is to be followed by a six-month demobilization process.
Starting on Monday, the FARC’s estimated 7,500 fighters are to go to collection points to surrender their weapons under UN supervision.
Guerrillas who refuse to disarm “will be pursued with all the strength of the state forces,” Santos told El Espectador newspaper.
Before the demobilization, the FARC is to convene its leaders and troops one last time before transforming into “a legal political movement,” according to a statement published on Saturday.
‘DEFINITE WILL’
The territorial and ideological conflict has drawn in various left and right-wing armed groups and gangs.
Efforts to launch peace talks with a smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army, have yet to bear fruit.
However, with the FARC ordering a ceasefire, the conflict appears to be reaching an end.
“We wish to express our clear and definite will for reconciliation,” said Jimenez, known by the nom de guerre Timochenko, in Havana.
“Today more than ever we regret that so much death and pain has been caused by the war. Today more than ever we wish to embrace [the military and police] as compatriots, and start to work together for a new Colombia.”
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