IMPORTANT GAINS IN COLOMBIA NOW AT RISK

Colombia's peace process is heading for a crucial deadline at the end
of the month, a Special Correspondent reports.

COLOMBIA: Two years after the inauguration of the most promising peace
initiative in the history of Colombia's fratricidal wars, the talks
between the government of President Andres Pastrana and the oldest,
most powerful guerrilla force, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of
Colombia (FARC), have reached a critical juncture.

Nobody ever said that making peace in Colombia after four decades of
civil war, involving several protagonists operating on shifting fronts
simultaneously, would be easy. Especially when FARC imposed conditions
for holding talks while the war continued to rage. Its escalation of
guerrilla violence has undercut political support for the peace
process at home and abroad and stripped FARC and its cause of
credibility.

Yet, Mr Pastrana's stubborn refusal to budge from his commitment to
solve the endless blood-letting through political negotiation has kept
the process alive and achieved substantially more than his critics
admit. In the last two years, the negotiators have reached a mutually
agreed agenda that addresses the fundamental political, social and
economic causes of the insurgency. This agenda, which has been on the
table since May, implicitly denotes acceptance that what is at stake
in the negotiations is nothing less than a redistribution of Colombian
political and economic power.

Mr Pastrana's unprecedented diplomatic campaign has won him crucial
international support for peace, especially in Europe, and has enabled
the international community to become actively involved, for the first
time, in assisting the Colombian peace process.

These important gains are now at risk. The talks have been in limbo
for two months since they were frozen by FARC last November to protest
at the government's failure to control the right-wing paramilitaries
who massacre FARC supporters and selectively assassinate progressive
civilians with impunity. And on January 31st, the legal status of the
demilitarised zone (DMZ) that Mr Pastrana temporarily ceded to FARC
two years ago expires. Mr Pastrana faces a crucial decision: he must
decide whether to renew FARC's authority within the zone. But as the
DMZ goes, so goes the peace process. Closure would be the equivalent
of an official declaration of war against FARC.

It is undeniable that FARC has abused its tenure of the DMZ. It has
acted like an army of occupation, intimidating the urban civilian
population, and according to its critics, it uses the territory to
hide hostages, stockpile weapons, process and ship out cocaine,
recruit minors, launch attacks in neighbouring regions, and execute
those FARC intelligence identifies as agents of the army or
paramilitaries.

Yet it has also used the zone in just the way the government intended:
to provide a safe venue for meetings between the guerrilla leaders and
international and Colombian visitors. Since last spring, over 26,000
individual Colombians have trekked, at their own expense, to meet FARC
leaders and present their ideas and proposals for that distant dream
known as "the New Colombia".

The DMZ has been the most central, as well as the most controversial
element of Mr Pas trana's peace policies. At the time it was
established, Mr Pas trana's decision to withdraw temporarily Colombian
troops from a jungle territory in southern Colombia the size of
Switzerland, to create a safe venue for the talks, was bitterly
opposed by the Colombian army. It also infuriated President Clinton's
powerful drug czar, Mr Barry McCaffrey, and his allies among
conservative US Republican Congressmen, who viewed the peace process
in general, and this concession to FARC in particular, as an
unwarranted interference with the prosecution of the US drug war in
Colombia.

Since then, Washington's opposition to the Colombian peace process has
produced Plan Colombia, the Clinton administration's massive new
military aid programme. Presented as a programme for combating drugs,
Plan Colombia is virtually a carbon copy of the US strategy for
fighting a proxy war against the Salvadoran guerrillas two decades
ago.

By strengthening the hardliners on the left and the right of the
Colombian divide, Plan Colombia's impact on the peace process has been
devastating. The right-wing establishment no longer feels pressured to
assume the costs of a future peace settlement, and FARC's kidnapping
and extortion campaigns went into immediate overdrive to pay for an
arms and recruitment build-up, with the predictable human rights and
political costs.

Most disturbingly, Plan Colombia has also strengthened the
paramilitaries. Washington's silence on right-wing terrorism and
narco-trafficking has convinced FARC that, as was the case in
Nicaragua, US strategy in the coming war in Colombia includes using
the paramilitaries as shock troops in search and destroy operations.

Two weeks ago, as Mr Pas trana struggled to reinvigorate the stalled
talks with FARC, on the one hand, and to open a second, smaller
demilitarised "peace zone" to get talks going with the second
guerrilla force, the smaller Army of Liberation (ELN), a Washington
Post editorial called on the President to close down the DMZ and admit
the defeat of his peace policies. In Colombia, the Post editorial was
seen to reflect the views of the Pentagon and conservative Republicans
who want President-elect Bush to support a war of extermination
against FARC in the name of the US national security interest. It is
clear that neither the government nor the guerrillas wants to break
off talks. In a move calculated to give Mr Pastrana cover to keep the
zone open a while longer, FARC recently announced the surprise release
of over 100 soldiers and police prisoners for February. Two days ago
the "thaw" began. After their first formal meeting since November, the
negotiators issued a joint communique on Thursday night announcing
further meetings to analyse where the peace process has gone wrong and
make proposals for reopening talks before January 31st. Nevertheless,
the government has failed utterly to respond to the most recent
paramilitary atrocities. It remains clear the paramilitary issue will
not be solved.

According to Colombian Defence Ministry figures, the paramilitaries
are growing twoand-a-half times faster than FARC, and since July have
been conducting a mass recruitment drive. They also pay better -
commanders can make up to $4,000 a month.

Mr Pastrana has cashiered more army officers for paramilitary links
than any previous Colombian president. But in relation to the gravity
of the threat, government action has been totally inadequate. Since
the start of the year paramilitaries have committed 26 massacres in 11
regions of Colombia in which over 170 people have been
slaughtered.

The paramilitaries are the shock troops of a well organised
conspiracy, ruthlessly determined to drive Colombia to war, and they
are gaining the initiative.

Meanwhile the Colombian Minister of Defence announced that the first
18 US helicopters will arrive on Monday to begin Plan Colombia
operations.