FARC guerrilla fighter
and delegate in the peace negotiations, Alexandra Nariño, speaks to
teleSUR about her 14 years with the rebel army / Source: telesurtv.net.
Alexandra
Nariño is not Colombian, yet the impending end of the South American
country’s 50-year
civil war between
the government and left-wing rebel forces represents “enormous
happiness” for her.
That’s
because the Dutch national has been fighting within Colombia’s FARC
guerilla army for 14 years. After living in the jungle in FARC camps
for about a decade, for the last four years Nariño
has played a key role in the peace process in
Havana, Cuba, that aims to transition Colombia out of the
longstanding internal conflict and toward a new era of peace.
But though Nariño, also
known as Tanja Nijmeijer, is from the Netherlands, she says her
reasons for deciding to take up arms as part of the left-wing rebel
movement were the same as those that pushed her Colombian fellow
combatants to join — a claim she admits may be hard for many to
believe.
“I
came to Colombia, I saw the injustice and I felt that something had
to be done,” Nariño told teleSUR from Havana, the site of the
peace talks. “The only difference might be that I didn’t really
live the injustice … I saw the state violence, but I didn’t
suffer it.”
Nariño joined the FARC
in 2002 after being impacted by the level of inequality and
state-sanctioned human rights abuses in Colombia during a year-long
stint as an English teacher in 1998. “I
think for me it was just enough to know that people (are) suffering
to make the decision to join and show my solidarity with them,” she
said.
At the time, the armed
conflict was in full swing. The notorious United Self-Defense Forces
of Colombia, an illegal paramilitary militia also known as AUC, had
launched in the previous year and established a cold-blooded
reputation by brutally slaughtering at least 30 people in an attack
known as the Mapiripan Massacre in July 1998. A U.S. State Department
report on human rights in Colombia the same year documented ongoing
problems of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, attacks on
civilians by paramilitaries and some cases of “social cleansing”
at the hands of police.
Then,
in 2000, then-Presidents Bill Clinton and Andres Pastrana
launched Plan
Colombia, the multi-billion dollar counternarcotics and
counterinsurgency military aid package widely condemned by human
rights advocates to have been a disaster that spurred massacres,
empowered death squads, and exacerbated and prolonged the civil war.
Nariño joined the FARC just two years later, the same year
far-right, allegedly paramilitary-linked former President Alvaro
Uribe entered office.
Nearly a decade and a
half later, Nariño remains committed to the fight that “has always
been a political struggle,” saying that her “awareness that
there’s still a lot to be done” has kept her in the FARC all
these years. She’s also optimistic about the much-anticipated new
phase dawning on the country through the peace process, which she
sees as offering new spaces in the “struggle for a just society,”
including the FARC’s participation in electoral politics.
“Many
people talk about the transition of the FARC into a political
movement,” she said. “Many people don’t know that we have
always been a political movement. We were a military-political
movement, and now we will be a political movement.”
The
FARC, or Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia,
formed as a rebel army connected to the Colombian Communist Party in
1964 in the wake of a bloody ten-year conflict between Liberals and
Conservatives that ravaged mostly rural areas and gave way to a
crackdown on self-organized communist communities. The guerrilla
uprising was founded on revolutionary Marxist and anti-imperialist
demands for agrarian reform and defending the rights of rural
peasants. After more than 50 years, these continue to be central
issues on the FARC’s agenda and and have formed important
cornerstones of the peace process that began in Havana in 2012. “War
can become all consuming … but I don’t think that this means that
you lose the sense of what you’re fighting for,” said Nariño in
reference to how the movement has stayed connected to its roots after
all these years.
She added that political
education and consciousness-building is part of “daily life” in
the FARC. One internal process has been developing the movement with
respect to gender equality in response to the “machismo” that
pervades mainstream Colombian society. Women make up nearly 40
percent of the FARC, and while progress has been made, the issue
remains an ongoing “everyday” struggle. “In
Colombian society you wouldn’t find a community or a group where
men and women cook, wash their clothes, go to combat, carry heavy
loads, etc.,” said Nariño “In the jungle, everything is on an
equal basis. But, this doesn’t mean we don’t have to keep working
on it.” A gender perspective has also been incorporated in the
peace agreements with a special subcommission in the negotiations
process.
The
talks in Havana have achieved landmark partial deals on issues of
transitional justice, rights of victims, agrarian reform, crop
substitution for coca production, and other matters. Earlier this
year, the two sides of the conflict signed a historic
bilateral cease-fire agreement,
a key step in bringing an end to the war that has claimed over
220,000 lives and uprooted some 6.3 million people, mostly Indigenous
and Afro-Colombian.
“Sometimes
I feel a little sad when think of all the people who were comrades of
mine who died in the jungle, and now I think they could have made a
huge contribution here in Havana and of course in the construction of
a new country,” said Nariño. “That is difficult for me to accept
… They were young people who could have contributed a lot.” But for Nariño, there’s
a lot of reason to be optimistic. “I know how Colombian people have
suffered the conflict, and I think it means an opportunity for
everyone to start the construction of a new country, to start a new
page in the book of history of Colombia,” she said.
Despite
being on the much-heralded brink of peace, important challenges
remain. Outstanding issues at the negotiation table include the
future political participation of the FARC, the reincorporation of
demobilized rebels into society, and other important end-of-conflict
measures. Meanwhile, former President
Uribe has been fearmongering with far-right rhetoric and
pushing for a “No” vote in the plebiscite on the peace agreement,
expected within months of signing the deal. “It
doesn’t make any sense to vote against peace,” argued Nariño,
saying that Colombia’s “extreme-right” has used a series of
“false slogans” to obscure the many positive aspects of the peace
agreements, from plans for land redistribution to substituting
illicit coca production for other crops and specialized peace
tribunals to try alleged war criminals.
“It
has become clear that the people who are against the peace process
are not the victims of the conflict … they are not the people who
have really suffered,” she continued. “They are the people who
take advantage of and profit from the conflict.”
The
plebiscite on the peace agreement will need to secure a 13 percent
threshold to pass. Even in the unlikely event that Colombians vote
down the deal, a “No” vote would
not mean that the government could reopen negotiations with
the FARC on specific issues, the government’s lead negotiator
Humberto de la Calle has said.
Even after the peace
accords are finally signed, which could happen as early as in a
matter of weeks, many challenges will of course remain to rebuild the
society ravaged by over five decades of conflict.
“I
think that the main challenge for Colombian society will be
reconciliation,” said Nariño, pointing to what she described as
two divergent Colombias that must be reunited to offer opportunities
and provide for the basic needs of all, not just a privileged sector
of society. “We will keep on working for reconciliation, social
justice and peace in Colombia and we'll make sure that those two
Colombias disappear and become one.”
But the road to this
point has not been easy. Nariño says it’s a “pretty tough life”
in the FARC and that she has “suffered the stigma” like other
rebel fighters nationally and internationally. She argues that the
media, especially in Colombia, has had a role in whipping up this
contempt while also showing a “lack of teaching peace” in
society. The Dutch rebel fighter faces terrorism charges in the U.S.,
while her home country of the Netherlands recently approved a law
that allows the country to revoke the citizenship of citizens who
join so-called terrorist organizations abroad. Both the United States
and European Union list the FARC as a terrorist organization.
In
Colombia, the FARC and other guerrilla groups have evidently faced
harsh criticism over the years, such as accusations of alleged
forced recruitment
of child soldiers.
The organization has denied the charges, maintaining that the forces
accepted young victims while highlighting the conditions of war that
often force people to make hard choices. Earlier this year, the FARC
banned all recruits under 18 years old and agreed to send
home all soldiers under 15.
“We
know that in Colombia the situation for children is very tough, and
that many times they seek refuge in our camps, sometimes even younger
than 15,” said Nariño, singling out examples such as paramilitary
violence, domestic violence, and lack of access to education and
housing as situations of desperation that push young people into the
guerrilla. “But we as the FARC also know of course that war is not
a scenario for children to live in and we were more than willing to
make this decision as a gesture towards the construction of peace.”
That construction of
peace, though, is only in its infancy as Latin America’s
longest-running civil war draws to a close. “We have said many
times that peace is not only decided by weapons,” Nariño added.
“It is a long term construction and it should involve social
justice, opportunities, employment, healthcare, housing, dignified
living conditions for everyone.” The country is home to the world’s
second-largest population of internationally displaced people after
Syria.
The
FARC now has around 8,000 combatants, down from some 20,000 or more
at its peak in the 1990’s. The country’s smaller rebel army, the
National Liberation Army or ELN, founded at the same time as the
FARC, currently has some 3,000 members and has not launched a formal
peace process with the government. Colombia has fought the left-wing
guerrillas and the so-called “war on drugs” with heavy
militarization backed by the United States’ US$10 billion in
military aid over 15 years of Plan Colombia. Presidents Barack Obama
and Juan Manuel Santos announced a new Plan
Colombia 2.0 earlier this year, called Paz Colombia,
which is set to pour some US$450 million into Colombia for a total of
up to US$4.5
billion over 10 years.
But as the government
locks in military aid in the year Santos has heralded as the “year
of peace” and the FARC prepares to disarm and start to participate
in politics legally, what’s next for the FARC’s Dutch rebel
fighter and top peace negotiator at this historic turning point for
Colombia remains uncertain. “In
a general way I can say that I will keep up the struggle for justice
in Colombia and also in the world,” said Nariño. “What exactly I
will do depends on what is needed.”
