COLOMBIAN'S PEACE PURSUIT: PART CARROT, PART STICK

NewsAnalysis

BOGOTA, Colombia, Dec. 7 -- His peace efforts faltered. Guerrillas stepped
up their attacks. A greater number of Colombians clamored for a harder line
against rebels, who have waged war for 36 years.

But President Andres Pastrana, who won office promising to bring peace to
this divided country, decided late on Wednesday to offer the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, another concession.

After feverish meetings with government ministers and several foreign
ambassadors, Mr. Pastrana's government said the rebels could extend their
hold a while longer, until Jan. 31, on a large swath of territory that the
government ceded to them in 1998 as a peace gesture, though squeezing the
rebels with new restrictions.

An extension may have been the president's only viable alternative.

By allowing the rebels to continue their oversight of a 16,000-square- mile
zone in the southern province of Caqueta, Mr. Pastrana was forcefully
prodding them to peace negotiations that they froze just over three weeks
ago, complaining that the government was not doing enough to curb
paramilitary forces, which are the rebels' nemesis.

"Even though the talks are now frozen, you're still in a peace process, and
it's important that you try to negotiate," Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat
of Minnesota and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said on a
visit to Colombia last week. "I suppose there is a time when you say, `All
bets are off, it's over and this goes in another direction, all-out
military conflict.' But it seems to me that it has to be a very, very high
threshold before you do that."

Indeed, had Mr. Pastrana decided to end the demilitarized zone, it would
have meant abandoning peace efforts and dislodging a well- equipped rebel
ar my that has become firmly rooted.

"To do away with it would be doing away with the most important program of
the Pastrana administration, which is the peace process," said Armando
Borrero, a political scientist and former national security adviser to
President Ernesto Samper, who was Mr. Pastrana's predecessor.

Still, no one is arguing that the talks have produced much in the way of
tangible results or that the outlook is rosy.

Supporters of Mr. Pastrana's administration say he has taken great steps to
build an environment of trust in which peace talks could flourish. In early
November, he announced the creation of a peace coalition with the
opposition leader Horacio Serpa. In recent speeches, the president has also
spoken passionately about the need to resume talks and avoid war.

The short time frame is meant to put pressure on the rebels, giving them a
closing window for rejoining peace talks. Right now they have been at a
peak of their strength, but their critics say that the paramilitary forces
are pounding them and that government actions to take away their drug trade
are bound to have some effect.

In talks leading up to the decision Wednesday, Mr. Pastrana consulted a
cross section of government officials and others familiar with the conflict
to shore up political support.

Senator Samuel Moreno, an independent who is a recent addition to Mr.
Pastrana's Common Front for Peace, said, "What I consider positive is that
the peace process has become an agenda of the state, not just of this
government."

Yet many in Colombia and in Washington continued to argue today that the
demilitarized zone has resulted in little more than a safe haven for the
rebels to stage attacks, hold kidnapping victims and cultivate coca.

"The Colombian government, regrettably during this long, drawn-out process,
has become weaker and the FARC has become stronger," Representative
Benjamin A. Gilman, Republican of New York, said today. He is chairman of
the International Relations Committee and an architect of the large
American financial commitment to Colombia's anti-drug programs.

"The Pastrana government should end the fiction of a peace process that's
going on in the demilitarized zone," he said.

Many in Colombia have come to agree.

In a poll published on Sunday in El Tiempo, Colombia's leading paper, 76
percent of those surveyed said the government should not extend the
demilitarized zone, and 88 percent said the demilitarized zone had served
no useful purpose.

Mr. Pastrana and his ministers did not ignore those concerns. The
government, which had offered six-month extensions on the demilitarized
zone in the past, limited this extension to 55 days.

The government also promised to restrict entry into the zone, to monitor
incoming flights and to ensure that chemicals used for processing cocaine
not be allowed to enter.

"All this sends a message that Pastrana does not accept FARC's
recalcitrance," Mr. Borrero said. The president's message, he added, is
that "peace is valued but that the demilitarized zone is not indefinite."

Officials said the president assessed such problems as the recruitment by
the rebels of teenage fighters and their use of the territory to mount
offensives, but came back to the option that has been the centerpiece of
his administration, the search for a negotiated settlement.

Representative William Delahunt of Massachusetts, a Democrat on the
International Relations Committee who has visited Colombia and met with the
rebels, said: "If you're talking, windows of opportunity will present
themselves. If you're not talking, windows of opportunities will pass by,
unnoticed."