Ceasefire in Colombia
ALL EYES ARE ON PRESIDENT SANTOS’ ABILITY TO CONVINCE VOTERS ABOUT DEAL WITH FARC
President Santos will now have to convince voters to approve the peace deal |
Even as Colombia yesterday began its first day of peace with the country’s largest insurgency after a ceasefire between the FARC and the government went into effect, ending 52 years of warfare, the focus turned to President Juan Manuel Santos.
With a peace deal in hand to end the longest-running conflict in the Western hemisphere, Santos must now heed his new task: convincing voters to approve it on October 2.
The full ceasefire ordered by Santos and the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Timoleon Jimenez, began at midnight on Sunday. “This August 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 after midnight.
A message from the official FARC account at the same time was more restrained: “From this moment on the bilateral and definitive ceasefire begins.”
In a declaration to reporters in Cuba, where peace talks were held, Jimenez said that he ordered all commanders and units, “and each one of our combatants to definitively cease fire and hostilities against the Colombian state” starting at midnight.
Santos ordered the Colombian armed forces on Thursday to halt anti-FARC operations at midnight on Sunday. The ceasefire is the first in which both sides are committed to a definite end to the fighting.
The accord means the country may finally know peace after having been at war since 1964. The conflict has cost 220,000 lives and forced millions to flee their homes. Santos and his supporters will tout a “peace dividend” of economic growth, more jobs and rural development.
Test of fire
“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.
But recent polls show Colombians are sharply divided over the peace deal with the FARC, and generally give Santos low marks as president. Against that backdrop, Santos will now mount an intense campaign to convince them peace is worth the concessions the deal would provide the rebels.
“We now have two choices: continue down the agonising path of war or move towards a firm peace,” the government’s lead negotiator, Humberto de la Calle, said at a news conference in Havana last Thursday, a day after the agreement was announced. “I am convinced this is the best agreement possible.”
It faces well-financed opponents led by ex-president Alvaro Uribe, now a popular senator. Uribe says the deal was too generous to a rebel group that in his view was nearly defeated on the battlefield in 2012 when Santos initiated talks.
Among the deal’s most contentious terms is a pledge to give the FARC 10 congressional seats. Many Colombians also oppose the promise to give rebels relatively light sentences even for crimes such as murder and kidnapping as long as they confess and ask forgiveness.
The high cost of implementing the agreement — $70 billion over the next decade, largely in aid programmes for demobilised guerrillas — could also dissuade voters from approving it, said Ariel Avila, assistant director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation in Bogota.
Avila and other analysts predict the agreement will win the plebiscite but that the vote may be close because of the revulsion many Colombians feel for the FARC. Several said Santos has done a poor job rallying Colombians to his side.
Santos and Jimenez are due to sign a final, full peace agreement between September 20 and 26. The end of hostilities will be followed by a six-month demobilisation process. Starting on Monday, the FARC’s estimated 7,500 fighters will head to collection points to surrender their weapons under UN supervision.
Among the deal’s most contentious terms is a pledge to give the FARC 10 congressional seats. Many Colombians also oppose the promise to give rebels relatively light sentences even for crimes such as murder.