Colombia’s Marxist FARC rebels concluded their disarmament on Tuesday, handing in all but a few of their individual weapons to the United Nations and ending their role in a half-century war that killed more than 220,000 and displaced millions.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, turned in the remaining 40 percent of their firearms in Mesetas, a mountainous area in southeastern Colombia.
The roughly 7,000 former fighters have pledged to continue their struggle as a political movement. The 7,132 weapons will be stored in containers until they are moulded into a monument for peace.
Explosives and bigger weapons are being cleared from caches nationwide and a few guns will remain for security at 26 camps until they close on August 1.
President Juan Manuel Santos, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, marked an end to what he called an “absurd war” which has taken over eight million victims.
Rodrigo Londono, the FARC’s top commander, who goes by his nom de guerre Timochenko, said the FARC would not cease to exist, but develop its “ideological, political and organisational actions, and its propaganda, through exclusively legal methods,” as it transitions in accordance with the final peace deal into a political party.
Also present between the two leaders was head of the U.N. mission to Colombia, Jean Arnault, who said the bilateral ceasefire had been consolidated.
The rebel group began in 1964 as a peasant army demanding agrarian reform and was battered deep into Colombia’s inhospitable jungles by a relentless military offensive that began in 2002 during Alvaro Uribe’s presidency.
Santos, who took office in 2010, began secret talks with FARC commanders that led to negotiations in Cuba and a final peace accord late last year. He is trying for a similar accord with the National Liberation Army (ELN).
Reuters
