PEACE EFFORTS IN COLOMBIA MOVING QUICKLY, U.N. ENVOY SAYS

LOS POZOS, Colombia -- An unusual 25-day tour of Europe last month by
government negotiators and leftist insurgents has produced a new atmosphere
of trust that could speed up peace talks designed to end Colombia's 35-year
civil war.

Norwegian diplomat Jan Egeland, a special envoy to U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, said Colombia's peace efforts are now moving along "faster than
any other peace process that I know of."

Egeland is an expert in such matters. In the past few years, he unsnarled a
years-old deadlock between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
and also played a key role in ending a particularly vicious guerrilla war
in Guatemala that lasted more than a third of a century.

The European tour, he said, may go down in history as a watershed event in
Colombia's internecine conflict. The war began in the mid-'60s, claims
between 3,000 and 4,000 lives a year, and continues to generate an exodus
of desperate Colombians seeking refuge abroad, including the United States.

"It was a breakthrough in two specific areas: The confidence between the
parties ... and that they went from not having much trust in international
facilitation to now welcoming international assistance and facilitation,"
he added.

In total, six senior commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Force of
Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym as the FARC, left a Switzerland-size
demilitarized area in southern Colombia on Feb. 1 in a private plane that
took them to Bogota's El Dorado International Airport, where they
transferred to a commercial jetliner bound for Spain.

The secret transfer went off without a hitch, and Colombian President
Andres Pastrana's chief peace envoy, Victor G. Ricardo, won immediate
praise from the FARC commanders.

Leading the tour were Ricardo, a smooth-talking Bogota politician given to
cigars and designer clothing, and Raul Reyes, a bearded, pot-bellied
guerrilla commander who once spent two years studying in Moscow.

"Reyes and Ricardo get along like a house on fire," said a diplomat whose
country follows the peace process closely and who asked not to be named.

Dressed in combat fatigues and seated on a log outside a rustic building in
this jungle hamlet, Reyes described Ricardo as "a serious man, a very
responsible man." In an interview with The Miami Herald, he said the FARC
delegation agreed to the European trip out of trust for Ricardo and
Pastrana, "running risks but always thinking that peace requires sacrifice."

The group began the tour with a six-day stay in Sweden, then another six
days in Norway, all paid for by host governments and business groups.

"They provided us with winter clothing. They gave us boots and jackets and
scarves," said Armando Pomarico, president of the House of Representatives.

Nonstop meetings introduced the delegation to Nordic systems of taxation,
relations between business owners and unions, functioning of police forces,
political systems and oversight of government spending.

"The business owners pay their taxes and the taxes are invested in the
welfare of the people, contrary to what happens here," Reyes said.

In Oslo, the delegation stayed at the Holmenkollen Park Hotel, where secret
Israel-PLO talks took place and where Guatemalan rebels first signed an
accord leading to their eventual disarmament.

The agenda wasn't business all the time, recalled Juan Gabriel Uribe, a
government negotiator on the trip.

One night, after riding through streets in horse-drawn carriages, members
of the delegation ended the evening with a snowball fight in the street.

"Even some members of the Norwegian secret service, two or three of them,
got into it," Uribe said.

In the final weeks of the trip, the delegation went to Italy, the Vatican,
Spain, Switzerland and France.

During rare free moments, conversations touched on previously off-limit
topics, including the drug trade, human rights and rebel kidnappings.

"There was not a single taboo subject on the trip. Everything was put on
the table," Uribe said.

If nothing else, the tour has reduced doubts about the intentions of the

FARC, which has been accused by some analysts of negotiating only in order
to buy time to grow stronger.

"The FARC has created big hopes in national and international spheres over
its willingness to seek peace," said Ernesto Borda Medina, a political
scientist at Bogota's Javeriana University. "The process isn't
irreversible, but it would be very hard to scrap the talks now."

Amid the optimism looms a large potential problem: the proposed U.S. aid

package of $1.3 billion to Colombia for counter-narcotics efforts. Such
assistance, said Reyes, the leader of the FARC delegation on the tour,
"could liquidate the conversations" with the Pastrana government. The
package is pending in the U.S. Congress.

For the moment, all indications point to the onset of serious talks. On
Friday, government and rebel negotiators agreed to public hearings on
issues related to the kind of economic system the country should establish.
As the first public hearing begins April 9, the government and rebels will
start six months of talks on specific economic and social issues.

Later, in subsequent six-month periods, talks will tackle human rights, the
role of security forces and other issues before broaching a possible
cease-fire.

"There are many, many hurdles, and we'll see setbacks," Egeland, the U.N.
representative, said on Friday after meeting with FARC leader Manuel
Marulanda. "But I'm an optimist. ... They are now at the table with a set
agenda discussing very concrete things."