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An article from Telesur

The first group of United Nations observers arrived in Colombia to help with the monitoring and verification of the recently signed bilateral cease-fire between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq confirmed Tuesday.

brief video of celebrations

The role of the U.N. observers is critical to the success of the peace process, as they will work to ensure all parties are complying with the terms of the agreement.

“For now, the team on the ground is engaging in preparatory activities, while the Special Representative of the Secretary-General Jean Arnault is actively engaged in the discussions in Havana about cease-fire implementation,” said Haq.

The 23-member team, which is comprised of observers from Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, and Uruguay, will be joined by a second team in late July when the final agreement is expected to be signed.

The June 23 agreement between the FARC, as the guerrilla army is known, and the government, gave terms for implementing the cease-fire, but not a specific date.

According to Haq, “The United Nations will be able to begin monitoring and verifying activities as soon as a final peace agreement is signed and the bilateral cease-fire comes into effect.”

Twenty civilian staff from the U.N. were already in Colombia to coordinate and establish the basis for the verification process.

The United Nations has been a strong adovocate of the peace process, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon having traveled to Havana, Cuba, site of the peace talks, to participate in the ceremony celebrating the signing of the bilateral cease-fire.

What is happening in Colombia, Is peace possible?

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An article by Greg Grandin in The Nation

There’s still a lot to work out—on land, disarmament, refugees, paramilitary power—and many things can go wrong, but it seems Colombia’s decades-long civil war is ending. The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have announced that they “have successfully reached an agreement for a definitive bilateral ceasefire and end to hostilities.” Depending on how you date it, you could say the war has been raging since the early 1960s, 1948, or even as far back as the 1920s. Fighting started well before TV was a household item, when few Colombians owned telephones. Now it’s ending with a tweet: “On Thursday, June 23, we will announce the last day of the war,” FARC commander Carlos Lozada wrote to his followers on Twitter.

You can read the text of the final disarmament accord here. According to the Washington Office on Latin America, this agreement “closes the fifth of five substantive items on the FARC-government negotiating agenda. It sets out a roadmap for disarming and demobilizing the FARC after a final peace accord is signed. It foresees a swift process: a full turnover of guerrilla weapons within six months. This is a tremendous milestone. What remains between now and a final, conflict-ending peace accord are details. Some of these will be thorny, and may require weeks or even a few months to unravel. But the hardest parts of the FARC peace process are now in the past.”

The Nation has covered Colombia well over the many decades of the war. Last October, Winifred Tate and I discussed what was at stake—especially around land, paramilitary power, and internal refugees, of which Colombia has millions—in the peace talks, and what obstacles might sideline them. Here, I discussed a story not reported in the US press, of the at least 54 Colombian children sexually abused by US soldiers and contractors.

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What is happening in Colombia, Is peace possible?

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Six years ago, Teo Ballvé did an excellent report for the magazine on the “dark side of Plan Colombia,” on how the billions of dollars authorized for Colombia by Clinton, and continued under Bush and Obama, helped narco-traffickers steal massive amounts of land to plant crops for biofuels. Going back to 1948, the journalist Herbert Matthews, also in these pages, wrote that the assassination of left-liberal leader Jorge Gaitán was a “lighted match dropped into an open gasoline tin.” He was right. Days of rioting gave way to decades of civil war, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions driven out of their homes, a fire only now hopefully doused.

If you search for Colombia on The Nation’s website, you will see how key the country has been in regional politics. Returned stories come back on Cuba, Iran/Contra, Panama, Israel, immigration, drugs, Central America, death squads, Iraq, private security forces, and so on, giving an indication of the key role Colombia, and its war, has played on the larger foreign stage, particularly in the paramilitarization of global politics that took place with the rise of the New Right in the United States. Colombia was to broader Latin America, a good analogy goes, what Israel is to the broader Middle East, a stalking-horse proxy that has allowed Washington to project its power into a critical region. The end of the war promises to change that relation, perhaps integrating Colombia more fully into Latin America, a process that picked up steam with the election of the current president, Juan Manuel Santos.

The signing of this final accord took place in Havana, a testament both to Cuba’s historic role at the beginning of Latin America’s Cold War insurgent left and to its current role as peacemaker. By any standard that judged Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger worthy of Nobel Peace Prizes, Raúl Castro deserves a laurel for his steadfast help in negotiating an end to hostilities. Here’s what Castro had to say at the signing:

“The peace process has reached a point of no return. Peace is a victory for all of Colombia, but also a victory for Our America. The short history of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States has led to the proclamation of this region as a Zone of Peace.… The achievement of peace in Colombia represents a hope for millions of people on the planet, whose main concern continues to be human survival in a world shake by violence and wars. Peace is not a utopia; it is a legitimate right of every human being and of all peoples. It is a fundamental condition for the enjoyment of all human rights, particularly the supreme right to life.”

Quoting José Martí, Castro ended his remarks by insisting that “homeland is humanity” (a good sentiment to keep in mind, considering events on the other side of the Atlantic).

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An article by Nazareth Balbas in RT (translated by CPNN and abbreviated)

Although the announcement of the signing of the agreement on the end of the armed conflict in Colombia was received with joy; however, for artists and cultural activists from the South American country, the agreement in Havana is just the beginning of a more complex disarmament process: the language of violence.

“We have to to disarm our words because they are still loaded with violence. That will take a lot of pedagogy and here culture can help a lot. We need to heal, to seek the truth, to have some kind of repair,” notes Sergio Restrepo, cultural manager and director of Teatro Pablo Tobon of Medellin, in an interview with RT.

Restrepo, who heard the announcement while in Brussels, believes that the signing of the agreement is a positive point but that “it will take thick skin” to tackle the next stage, not only because expectations are very high but “because the country is going to polarize more and that will be used, no doubt, for electoral purposes “.

In addition to the polarization which is expected in the public sphere, the initialling of the agreement will make visible some realities that remained buried by the conflict, warns Restrepo: Thousands of people must be demobilized and join the civil society. There are deep social inequalities that must be resolved to prevent the resurgence of armed groups. And the state must become present in areas that have historically been marginalized.

This process will have to be done in the midst of a difficult economic context for Colombia, which this year has been affected by falling oil prices and coal exports, as well as the depreciation of its currency against the dollar. The challenge, says Restrepo, is to put the country back on the growth path, and the government must ensure that this leads to a more equitable society.

“We will not overcome the conflict quickly because there are many conflicting interests and tempers are frayed. Peace cannot be achieved only through negotiation or ceasefire between the government and the FARC; for now, we are in the stage of a post-agreement, not yet post-conflict, “said Restrepo.

For the director of the International Poetry Festival of Medellin, Fernando Rendon, the signing of the bilateral ceasefire “is the realization of a dream of several decades and several generations of Colombians who have suffered firsthand all the cruelty of the painful and bloody conflict. ”

For Rendon the news found him in the middle of the event that brings in Medellin, the second largest city in Colombia, hundreds of national and international poets: “Not only a new era of reconciliation and resumption of dialogue opens between divergent positions, but this will strengthen our struggle for beauty and for coexistence, “he said in an interview with RT.

(Click here for the original Spanish version)

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Rendon, like Restrepo believes that this is just the beginning of a long road. “What comes next is a post-agreement (…) The social conflict is not over, even less the political conflict and the cultural conflict, because we still have a culture of slaughter, violence and exploitation rather than what is needed, the idea of ​​a homeland for freedom, for creation and for democratic expression. ”

He confesses that his feelings are mixed. On the one hand, the joy of the expectation that “Colombia can live in peace after a hell of war, and now we can begin a period of prosperity and the cultural flowering of a new generous spirit”. On the other hand, fear of a repeat of our history of failed commitments.

“We hope the government understands that the conflict is not only with the guerrillas but between the state and the people. We need a structured dialogue with the deep Colombia jungle, with the countryside, the grassroots, all of Colombian society, before we can be certain of lasting peace, “he says.

The director of the Festival of Manizales, Octavio Arbelaez, considers that the agreement is not the last day of the war, but it enables us to see peace as “a possible utopia within our reach”.

“It’s the beginning of the end of a period of intensification of contradictions that gave rise to the most violent forms of confrontation,” he told RT. This is the problem, he says, at the core of the conflict: fear in social relationships that “saps the body’s energy and the ability to build a world of conversation and imagination”.

While noting that Colombia has made great strides in cooling off social confrontations, as evident in the decline in the number of victims of the conflict in recent years, “violence remains an area about which little is spoken and which in many cases is feared. This is a significant area in which we must work as people of culture “.

Culture, he insists, is ideal for generating nodes and “spaces for peace, dialogue and social participation”. There is already some progress in grassroots communities, but there is not yet enough “link between their networks of conversation and action, in a context where there remain levels of exclusion against those with roots going back into the worlds of Africa and the indigenous “says Arbelaez.

“Dialogues of the nation without exclusion, that is what we need,” he adds. . . .

The signing of the treaty is only a beginning, according to Arbelaez. Now we enter “the stage of post-agreement, an agreement that must be culturally appropriate, to allow the emergence of new dimensions of a democratic culture with spaces and times of freedom and creativity.”

It is also the entry point where Restrepo dreams of a country that is possible but so far unknown, “one where we live with our differences, where we can build stories from everyday life and where we can close the social gap in Colombia” .

“May the spirit of this agreement be transmitted to ordinary people in everyday life, which is the great creator of our destiny. My hope is that this dialogue will permeate all walks of life to start together the struggle for existence, for beauty, for love, for life, “said Rendón. .