Colombia declares FARC war over as last decomissioned weapons roll away
BOGOTA: President Juan Manuel Santos declared Colombia’s 50year conflict with FARC guerrillas finally over on Tuesday, as the last truckloads of decommissioned weapons rolled away to be melted down.
Santos himself shut a padlock on the last lot of decommissioned rifles before it was taken out of a remote demobilisation camp to formally seal the UNsupervised disarmament by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
“With the laying down of arms ... the conflict is truly over and a new phase begins in the life of our nation,” Santos said at a ceremony in Pondores, a remote area in the northern Guajira department.
“This is truly a historic moment for the country,” he said.
“We have been a republic for 198 years. Never had we had such a long conflict and today is indeed the last breath of that conflict.”
The leftist rebel force has said it will officially transform into a political party on Sept 1, a major step in reintegrating into civilian life as part of a historic peace deal signed last year.
“Soon we will be holding a founding congress for the new political party that will be called the Alternative Revolutionary Force of Colombia,” said one of the FARC’s senior leaders, Ivan Marquez, at Tuesday’s ceremony.
“We do not want to break with our past. We were and will continue to be a revolutionary force,” said Marquez.
The FARC arose in May 1964 from a peasants’ revolt, and its ranks were made up mostly of country-dwellers who rallied behind the group’s MarxistLeninist ideology, with land reform its key demand.
As well as a quarter of a million dead, about 60,000 Colombians remain unaccounted for and seven million have been displaced in the conflict.
A small rebel group called the National Liberation Army is now in peace talks with the government. And 450 renegade FARC members are refusing to embrace the idea of peace.
For now, former FARC rebels will live in 26 demobilisation camps. — AFP