Thank you so much for being here. Let me start by saying that for Australia,
it's a great pleasure to co-organized this conference with folks peace and in particular because
with these we also marked the beginning of the celebration of our ten years of existence.
And with that, let me perhaps start with a quote precisely from the Alamo, which seem seem obvious.
But I sometimes think that is not. What we have been saying for the last four months in Colombia is that peace is
political and it requires the commitment of diverse and multiple sectors that make up
society to come together with a common name and the political will of a government with
a mandate to manage resources and coordinate efforts to transform social conflict.
So those of you with those people in the world who believe that peace is a technical effort I totally eluded.
Peace is absolutely political. I would say geopolitical.
And we need to understand the complexities of politics and geopolitics in order to know how we go about building peace.
I want to do this stock following the following structure.
First, I want to give you a background of Colombia. Then I'm going to work.
I'm going to walk through six structures or piece that were created in the context of the peace agreement in Colombia.
I'm going to talk a bit about how that has been going during the implementation, and then I would offer some final remarks.
I know that sounds quite a. And because of that, I'm going to be quite general and I hope that I can answer some of the questions in the Q&A.
So for those of you who are experts on Colombia, please forgive me.
This is the background and the background starts like this.
A in 2010, President Juan Manuel Santos in Colombia decided to restart peace negotiations with the park.
The park is the Marxist-Leninist insurgency created in 1964 in Colombia.
Those secret negotiations took place for two years, and then in 2012 President Santos started for four years of negotiations in Kobane.
Those negotiations a go to a final peace agreement in September.
In August 2016, three hundred and sorry, 297 pages.
Seven hundred, sorry, five hundred seventy eight stipulations in this final peace agreement covering six points rural reform,
political participation, end of the conflict, solution to illicit drugs, rights of the victims and the implementation of the peace agreement itself.
Implementation had to start after a referendum in which Colombians four by 50000 votes rejected the peace agreement.
In October 2016, only the mobilisation of Colombian civil society and the support of the international community given Juan
Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace prise before actually managing to sign the final peace agreement with the PA,
stop the return to war in Colombia and in open a window of opportunity for a renegotiation of the peace agreement.
A new deal was this time approved by Congress, and implementation started afterwards with a very difficult geopolitical context.
I say geopolitical because Trump had won in the US and also because this created a deficit of governability
in Colombia for President Santos and his previous political allies who started to work against him.
The implementation of the peace agreement became even more difficult in 2018, when a president was elected with anti-peace mandate.
Duke took office and key institutions created to offer security guarantees to former PA combatants as social leaders have been sidelined.
Today, one thousand three hundred and forty three social leaders and three hundred and fifteen former PA combatants have been assassinated,
according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
There are six armed conflicts unfolding in Colombia in different regions like Iraq, Khartoum, Bernardino, Choko,
Kalka and put Somalia and involved, involving a multiplicity of factors like dissidents, paramilitary and criminal groups.
The security forces and other insurgencies like the ELN, the People's Liberation Army and the National Liberation Army.
However, 10 years on, since the beginning of this latest phase of peacebuilding and amid a polarising
presidential campaign which reveals the agonistic nature of peace and reconciliation.
The seeds of peace survive in some of the multiple multilateral peace infrastructures
that were created during implementation of the 2016 peace agreement.
So what I want to do now is to talk to some about some of them.
As you can see, I'm not going to go to all the five hundred and seventy eight the stipulations because it would take us probably the next five days.
But the first structure I want to talk about is the Truth Commission.
The Truth Commission was set up in 2017. It started working in 2018.
11 commissioners were selected by an independent selection committee made up of two Colombian nationals and three internationals,
and the The Truth Commission is started the mandate in October 2018.
A. They organised a big event in Bogota, but surprisingly, President Duque didn't attend the opening of the Truth Commission.
The Truth Commission decided to divide the work in 11 regions, 10 of them in Colombia.
You can see them in the map and then one that they call the Internationale a sort of region.
The truth commission in the last three years has been documented the testimonies of victims perpetrators in 23 countries around the world.
It is perhaps the most ambitious effort ever done in terms of documenting victims outside of a country by a truth commission.
The Truth Commission is going to release the final report in the next coming months on the 28th of June 2022.
And I think that would be a really important element that this structure is going to Colombia society to continue building peace,
even though President Duque has not been very supportive of the work of the Truth Commission.
The next structure I want to talk about is the special jurisdiction for peace.
The special jurisdiction for peace is the judicial branch of a very comprehensive transitional justice mechanism.
These special jurisdiction for peace is made up of three chambers, one that is called the recognition chamber,
where the most responsible actors of the armed conflict come and acknowledge responsibility and offer full truth.
And if they do that, they will get a special sentence. There is another one called the Amnesty and Pardon Chamber.
These one is the one that offers amnesty to those who have not committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And there is a resolution chamber for those who had problems with the justice system in Colombia.
But it can be proved that they did not participate in war crimes.
On top of that, there is a peace tribunal and this peace tribunal is the one that in a surreal process,
would dictate sentences against those who deny responsibility for what they have done.
And there is an investigation and accusation unit that is actually in charge of
buying the evidence to show that these people have not tell the whole truth.
So far, the special jurisdiction for peace in Colombia has opened seven cases.
One about the kidnapping carried out by the dysphoric, another one by extrajudicial killings carried out by the army,
which actually presented innocent people as guerrilla fighters to try to show that they were winning the war.
There are three cases about different regions. One is what about the other?
One is to Mako and the other one is coca. There is another case about the destruction of a political party called the Patriotic Union,
and there is another case about the police recruitment of child soldiers.
The special jurisdiction for peace has done an incredible progress, has regional offices across Colombia.
Even though President Duque actually tried to contest the organic law that was presented to put into function the special jurisdiction for peace.
Last week, for the first time in the history of Columbia,
the special jurisdiction for Peace carried out a public hearing in which army officers, including a general, acknowledge responsibility.
To the victims and to Colombian society for the extrajudicial killings of these innocent people, offering dignity to the victims.
The next structure I want to mention quickly is that you with the U.N. mission to Colombia.
And this is really important. The mission was created to Colombia thanks to the UK.
The UK was the patent holder in the UN Security Council in 2016,
asking for a political mission to come to support implementation of the peace agreement.
This mission has got to different, and there have been two missions.
The first one was really about monitoring and verifying how far we're going to leave from there,
their camps in the jungle and move into some transitional and normalisation zones.
These U.N. mission was part of a tripartite mechanism in which the U.N., the Colombian Army and the FAQ created all these monitoring mechanisms.
That first mission also had the responsibility of certifying the decommissioning of weapons by the park.
This took place in September 2016 17, when finally all the weapons of the park where decommissioned and that first commission ended.
When that first commission ended, President Santos requested to extend and create a new a UN mission,
the second UN mission to Colombia started working in 2017, and they decided to only create this mission for a year.
And ever since the UN mission to Colombia, the mandate has been extended year by year.
But in 2017, the decision was that the UN mission was going to focus only on two points.
One Make sure the socio economic rain corporation of former combatants and secondly,
try to monitor the security guarantees for former combatants in Colombia.
They've been doing that until now in 2018, when President Duterte got to power.
People were sceptical. They didn't know if he was going to renew this mandate. But at the end, he did it.
And actually,
what happened last year is that President Duterte has requested the U.N. mission to extend the mandate to also monitor and verify the sentences.
That permit for combatants are going to be in some of the regions of Colombia, thanks to the special jurisdiction for peace.
So now this U.N. mission is articulating to the implementation of the transitional
justice restorative sentences that the former PA combatants are going to receive,
and actually not only for combatant species, including also members of the army,
because according to the transitional justice mechanism that has a restorative justice focus,
the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity will have to work in the communities in the regions more affected by the conflict,
and the UN mission would be verifying that that happens. Let me now move quickly to.
Unfortunately, I did this in March, so these things happen to let me move to the National Ring Corporation counsel.
The National Ring Corporation Council is a body created with members of the park,
and the government is saying it's got a legal backing, but it hasn't really got a finances.
What that means is that most of the responsibility of the National Ring Corporation
Council lies on the hands of the Rain Corporation agency of the Colombian government.
They are in charge of approving collective. A productive project for members of the park.
So far, they have approved more than 190 projects to to to get these collective projects going,
and they usually work with what is called Territorial Ring Corporation councils created in 16 zones of Colombia,
where former combatants are incorporating collectively to the two economic life.
This council. A unfortunately, according to many people,
has become stuck in particular because there is no willingness on the Colombian government to see the FARC as an equal counterpart.
The next infrastructure or structure I want to talk about very quickly is the National Coal Coca Crop Substitution Plan.
The whole idea was that the government was going to invite Colombian coca farmers to be part of developing these substitution plan.
That was the aspiration. But fortunately, after five years of implementation,
what has happened is that the Colombian government is stop talking to the coca growers and has mainly used forced eradication of coca crops.
So there is large dissatisfaction amongst Colombians who were doing a coca crop substitution today.
Finally, I want to mention that territorially focussed development plans.
The idea was that in 16 regions of Colombia, there were going to be these development projects.
And unfortunately, this also lies in the hands of the Colombian government in the final part of this, a implementation of these development plans.
There is a very serious concern because in the implementation of the plans, the communities haven't been consulted.
So again, the government hasn't really been paying attention to them.
So my final remarks are three, because this is what I want to leave you with first.
Infrastructures that are heavily dependent on the government's political will have failed to deliver.
That's the example of the National Ring Corporation Council,
the National Plan of Substitution of Crops and the territorially focussed development plans.
Second piece infrastructures that have a large degree of autonomy from the
government and enjoy international support have kept the peace process going.
This is a sample of the Truth Commission, the special jurisdiction for peace and the joint mission.
And finally, and I haven't mentioned this at all here, but it is related to what John Politologue will say, Antonio.
Informal peace infrastructure's not discussed here have all the potential because they rely on a spontaneity which nurtures curiosity and creativity,
enabling them to face the challenges posed by a politics of peace.
And that's usually the case of what civil society organisations do.
And that's certainly the case of the album. Thank you very much.