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Business News/ Opinion / The Colombian way to peace
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The Colombian way to peace

The fundamental question that peace negotiators in Colombia face is how to reconcile peace with justice

Photo: APPremium
Photo: AP

When does a war end? Is it when two armies agree to a ceasefire? When bombs are put away, guns are laid down, and soldiers return home? Does that absence of war mean peace? Or is there something more to peace?

On Sunday, Colombian voters narrowly voted against the accord signed by President Juan Manuel Santos with Timoleón Jiménez, the commander of the left-wing armed group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc), that aims to end the conflict that has torn apart Colombia for half a century. Santos didn’t need to call such a referendum, but he did, thinking he would win it easily. The peace negotiations in Havana, the Cuban capital, had been four years in the making, and there was speculation that Santos and Jiménez were likely candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. With peace, people will feel more secure.

Colombians value security because hundreds of thousands have died during La Violencia, the civil war which began in 1948, after a presidential candidate was murdered. In her novel, Delirium (2004), the Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo writes of a Bogotá “where everyone is at war with everyone else", and the country had either lost its mind or loved insanity enough to be unwilling and unable to change. The vote was to end that insanity even if peace came at a price.

While Farc agreed to lay down arms, it said it would not send its leaders to jail. It wants to become a left-leaning political party. Santos and his allies believe that a compromise is necessary, if Colombia is to move beyond the fossilized positions of the past.

The conflict has fractured Colombian society and frayed its fibre. Between 2005 and 2009, I went to Colombia nearly a dozen times for a project to analyse the conflict and support peace-enabling processes consistent with international human rights standards. My work took me to the Magdalena Medio region in central Colombia and in La Guajira on the Venezuelan border. I spoke to trade unionists, church leaders, military officers and soldiers, indigenous communities, business executives, local journalists, and former guerrillas. Conflict was intermittent but ever-present.

But investment had begun to pick up and there was the risk that economic activity in the region could exacerbate conflict. An oil company wanted to begin drilling an old oilfield where thousands of people now lived. The field itself was a tranquil spot, but armed guerrillas and militia surrounded the field on either side. Bringing in government troops to protect the oilfield would heighten tensions (guerrillas regularly attacked oil pipelines in Casanare, for example). Over in La Guajira, an indigenous community called Wayuu ignored the border with Venezuela, and it was getting caught in the crossfire between government troops and drug smugglers. Coal mines operated there. How could economic activity contribute to peace and not fuel conflict? How can companies win the trust of communities? That was the project I was working on.

Companies wanted to create jobs for the soldiers who would surrender; academics pondered over ways to resettle internally displaced people who would want to return to their old homes where new communities had emerged. Everyone hoped for a new chapter, which will now need rewriting.

But the vote on Sunday has sent the country into uncharted territory. Some analysts have compared the Colombian vote with the British vote to leave the European Union in June. It is tempting to see the vote as “anti-establishment", but there is another undercurrent—the desire for justice and, in some instances, revenge. Leading the charge against the truce was former president and Santos’ predecessor, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who opposed Santos because he saw the accord as being too lenient to Farc. During his two terms (2002-10), Uribe managed to get thousands of right-wing AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) militia to disarm, and his popularity soared among the middle class because he made the country’s three large cities—Bogotá, Medellín and Cali—reasonably secure.

If Uribe could obtain peace through strong methods, was it necessary to compromise with Farc? This is the fundamental question that peace negotiators face—how to reconcile peace with justice. Leaving difficult questions unresolved sows the seeds of future conflict, as the Treaty of Versailles after World War I showed. Should the perpetrators of violence face justice, as in Nuremberg after World War II? Or should they be forgiven if they express remorse, as South Africa did with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)? Or does forgiveness encourage a culture of immunity? But what if offering immunity is the only way to stop conflict? South Africa’s TRC was an attempt at restorative justice; war crimes tribunals for Sierra Leone, Liberia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Bangladesh are examples of retributive justice. Which approach is better?

Colombia will have to find its own answer; it won’t be easy. Colombians haven’t spoken with one voice—many want conflict to end; the debate is over the terms of peace. Those are details, and that’s where the devil resides.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.

Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com. Read Salil’s previous columns at livemint.com/saliltripathi

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Published: 06 Oct 2016, 12:26 AM IST
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