Rebels Say No to Colombian Military Role in Peace
Leftist FARC guerrillas in peace talks aimed at ending a five-decade conflict rejected Monday a Colombian plan to put the military in charge of disarming the rebels.
"There is no way" that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia will accept a military role "to resolve issues that are of political nature by definition," top rebel negotiator Ivan Marquez told reporters.
Marquez spoke in the Cuban capital Havana, where peace talks began in November 2012 even though hostilities have continued in the absence of a ceasefire. Monday marks the start of the 28th round of talks.
President Juan Manuel Santos said Friday that he would put Colombia's top general, Javier Florez, in charge of a military operation to demobilize and disarm the guerrillas.
But Marquez dismissed the military role as "fiction" especially, he added, "if you consider that none of these issues have been a topic for debate" in the negotiations.
He insisted that the peace talks were "not in the final stretch," adding that the FARC had called for an "emergency meeting" to review and clarify everything that has been agreed to so far.
Florez, 57, previously headed up the Omega joint military force tasked with fighting the FARC.
Under his command, the force carried out an operation that killed FARC military chief Jorge Briceno, alias "Mono Jojoy," in 2010.
He was also involved in a 2008 bombing campaign that killed Raul Reyes, the FARC's second in command.
Government negotiators, led by former vice president Humberto De la Calle, did not talk to reporters.
After a presidential election widely seen as a referendum on the peace process, Santos was sworn in for a new four-year term in August vowing to finally put an end to Latin America's longest-running armed conflict.
The talks have so far produced deals on three points: land reform, political participation for the rebels and fighting the drug trafficking that has fueled the conflict.
Still to be negotiated: reparations for victims and the mechanism by which the final peace agreement will be adopted.
The Colombian conflict has killed 220,000 people and caused more than five million others to flee their homes since the 1960s.
Source: Agence France Presse
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