With peace, Colombia has a great opportunity to unite as a nation

No country in the Americas has suffered a more protracted and more destructive armed conflict in modern times than Colombia. The numbers are bad enough, with about 220,000 killed and close to 7 million forcefully displaced — the second largest number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the world after Syria. Bad as they are, the numbers still don’t give an adequate account of the extent of the suffering: what it means for a family to be driven from their land and to endure the humiliation of living in utter poverty in some shanty town.

In Tierralta, for example, a town of about 100,000 in the north that for decades sat at the crossroads of FARC and paramilitary violence, fully 90 percent of the population is registered as a victim of forced displacement. Fifteen years ago, 170 displaced families descended on the town’s square in a single day. If you take a quick helicopter ride, you will notice settlement after settlement of IDPs, far exceeding in size the original lay out of the town. Not surprisingly, 89 percent of the people of Tierralta live below the poverty line.

{mosads}Today, the displaced are trickling back to their villages, thanks to the peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). It has truly been a long haul that took first a concerted security campaign to drive FARC units back into their rear-guard areas. Hundreds of soldiers and policemen gave their lives valiantly year after year. Security was much improved, and urban Colombia flourished. But the conflict raged on in the destitute fringes of rural Colombia, where it had started in the first place.

President Juan Manuel Santos saw with great foresight that conditions were ripe for a negotiation that would put a definitive end to the conflict and move the country forward, instead of losing our soldiers to mine fields. But it had to be done carefully, as Colombians had witnessed too many failed peace processes with FARC. So in 2012, we embarked first on six months of secret talks in Havana to lay out the playing field with a framework agreement, followed by four years of gruelling negotiations.

Now the war is over. The wards of our military hospitals are empty, civilians in the conflict-ridden areas learn to live without fear and the guerrillas themselves are busy reuniting with their families in the 26 cantonment zones or giving birth to the children they were never allowed to have.

But the agreement aims not just, as it must, at preserving life. It also seeks to put a stop to that very Colombian phenomenon that is the “recycling of violence” by addressing the conditions that have kept it going for so long. Jean Paul Lederach of Notre Dame has generously said that “the Colombian accord sits atop the 10 most comprehensive agreements signed in the last 25 years.”

In any case, here are some examples of what we tried to do. First, we agreed to set up a massive rural development program that should give young Colombians in the country a chance at decent employment and keep them from falling into the hands of armed groups, as has so often happened in the past. More ambitiously, it should cut rural poverty by half, help integrate the vast Colombian periphery and bring institutions closer to the people of those regions so that they regain their trust in government and feel, as they should, that we are all part of one country. That is the great window of opportunity that the peace agreement has flung open, it is up to us now to make the most of it.

Rural development is also the key to dealing more effectively with the coca fields. For the last twenty years we have mostly used forced eradication to put a stop to coca cultivation. At best, we have contained the problem, not solved it. And sometimes not even that: in 2006 we sprayed 172,000 hectares, eradicated manually 42,000 more, and the fields still grew by 21,000, according to U.N. figures. How could that happen? The one thing we do know is that if you only eradicate, the grower will simply move his plot a few miles down the road.

The agreement calls for an alternative development programme that should offer growers a way out and bring in the necessary infrastructure to make projects economically viable, while the government still has the power to eradicate where it must. In other words, it is all about a judicious use of carrot and stick.

Second, we set up a comprehensive system of transitional justice that aims to promote both accountability and acknowledgement of grave human rights violations. It is frankly a by-the-book agreement, such as had never been reached in a peace negotiation, with all the standard elements that should allow us not just to face the past but a build a basis of trust for the future.

Some critics, including some in the U.S., have claimed not without malice that war crimes will be amnestied. In fact, the opposite is true. The burden of argument is on them: in what other peace agreement, I ask, has a guerrilla force agreed that international crimes cannot be amnestied and that it has to be accountable before a tribunal for the crimes committed, to tell the full truth lest it end up in prison, to serve an alternative sentence, and to repair its victims with its own assets?

Third, we agreed to a very detailed protocol both for the cease fire and the disarmament process, and asked the U.N. Security Council to send a mission to oversee it. That, too, had never happened before in Colombia and is a major guarantee of compliance. The member states of the council, who were in Colombia a few weeks ago and expressed their unanimous support, are watching. By the end of the month, all of the FARC’s members should have handed their weapons over to the U.N. and moved on to civilian life.

Naturally it is one thing to sign an agreement, another to turn paper into reality. The challenges of the Colombian transition are immense, as drug trafficking bands still roam the countryside, resources are always scarce, and institutions take their time to get their act together. But we have overcome the biggest hurdle that was ending the armed conflict and are a better country for that.

Who would have thought 15 years ago in Tierralta that we would get this far? That has been thanks to the leadership of President Santos, to the efforts of previous governments as well, and not least to the steady support all these years of the United States.

Sergio Jaramillo serves as Colombian High Commissioner for Peace.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.