Bogota: Colombia's Congress has ratified a revised peace agreement with the country's largest rebel group, after voters rejected the original accord, starting a six-month countdown to the disarmament of about 7000 combatants.
The Chamber of Representatives voted 130-0 on Wednesday in favour of the peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a day after the Senate also gave its unanimous approval with a 75-0 vote.
Critics, including former President Alvaro Uribe, said the agreement remained too lenient on guerrillas involved in more than 50 years of insurgency.
Ratification means rebels will start to move toward designated transitional zones in five days, with all weapons to be handed over to United Nations representatives within 150 days. The disarmament will be the final chapter in an armed struggle that has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced millions more.
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"The cost of the armed conflict is too high," President Juan Manuel Santos said at a signing ceremony in Bogota last week. "Peace and harmony are part of our shared values. They are a communal desire and a dream that we've sought to make reality for years."
The opposition Centro Democratico party, which has criticised the terms of the peace deal, abstained from the vote in congress, clearing the way for its approval. They still demanded that voters have the final word on the accord.
Voters had rejected the original accord in a referendum October 2, sending negotiators back to Havana, Cuba, where after working on the deal for four years, they clarified parts of the text, rather than insert whole-scale changes.
The modified accord makes its explicit that those who confess to serious crimes during Latin America's longest running insurgency may have their liberty restricted to areas not larger than a hamlet for five to eight years. Still, they won't face jail and a post-FARC political party will get 10 automatic congressional seats between 2018 and 2026.
"Can congress really approve points that were rejected and which continue to exist in this accord?," Centro Democratico party leader Oscar Ivan Zuluaga said during the Senate debate on Tuesday, referring to the October referendum. "This agreement is going to define the next 100 years. Those of our children and grandchildren. It isn't just any old matter."
How successful the former fighters will be in the political arena remains to be seen. Starting out as a rebel uprising that sought better conditions for Colombia's rural poor, the FARC increasingly funded operations through kidnapping, drug trafficking and the control of illegal gold mines, making them deeply unpopular with many in the Andean nation.
The region's longest-running conflict killed more than 220,000 and displaced millions. An end to the war with FARC is, however, unlikely to end violence in Colombia as the lucrative cocaine business has given rise to criminal gangs and traffickers.
Bloomberg, Reuters
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