North ‘inspired Colombia’s peace deal’, says ex-leader

THE former president of Colombia, who brokered a peace deal that ended 50 years of guerilla warfare has said that the peace process in Northern Ireland played a ‘key role’ in inspiring their peace effort.

Nobel laureate Juan Manuel Santos was speaking in Tipperary town as he accepted the Tipperary International Peace Award for his work in bringing the Colombian conflict to an end.

He joined a list of former winners that includes Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Mary McAleese, Bill Clinton, and George Mitchell.

Among the guests at the ceremony were former tánaiste and Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore, who has been the EU’s envoy to the Colombian peace process since 2015. Last night, he said: ‘It is a country that has suffered long and too much in what was the longest and bloodiest conflict in the western hemisphere: 220,000 people died, 40,000 are still missing, nearly seven million people were forcibly removed from their homes.’

Mr Santos concluded an agreement with the Farc guerilla group two years ago but this was rejected by the people by a narrow majority in a plebiscite, prompting a renegotiation and the passage of a new agreement through the courts and the Colombian parliament.

The former president said he witnessed the IRA campaign for himself when he visited London in 1975 and was ‘knocked to the ground’ after a bomb exploded outside a club in Piccadilly.

When he became president in 2010, he looked at the example set in the North and decided to seek peace with the Farc guerillas. ‘The Northern Ireland Peace Process in particular, played a key role in inspiring us to achieve peace,’ he said.

Mr Santos criticised the human rights records of regimes in the Philippines, Venezuela, Nigeria and Hungary, and also new president Bolsonaro of Brazil, and said that in the United States – ‘the land of liberty’ – immigrants from central America who were marching in search of asylum were being stigmatised as ‘a criminal threat’.