Colombia leader, rebel chief meet for important announcement

Colombia's president and the head of the FARC rebels flew into Cuba Wednesday for their first meeting, which officials said would conclude with an "important" announcement on ending a half-century guerrilla war.

After nearly three years of stop-start peace talks in Havana between the Bogota government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), President Juan Manuel Santos announced the surprise trip on Twitter, saying: "Peace is near."

The FARC went even further, saying "Peace has arrived," in a message posted on their negotiating team's Twitter account announcing that their leader, Timoleon "Timochenko" Jimenez, had arrived in Havana.

Cuba, which is hosting the talks, said Santos had also arrived and that an "important deal will be announced."

The Cuban foreign ministry said the announcement concerned a "special peace jurisdiction" to deal with one of the most sensitive issues at the talks: the question of justice for the abuses that rights groups say both sides have committed during the conflict.
Santos, who won re-election last year vowing to see through the peace process he started, will meet Timochenko at 5:00 pm (2100 GMT), said a source in the Marxist guerrilla group's delegation in Havana.

Cuban President Raul Castro and the two negotiating teams will also be present, the rebel source said.

This is the first time since the negotiations opened in November 2012 that Santos has traveled to Cuba to take part -- raising hopes in Colombia that a major breakthrough is imminent in talks to end a conflict that has killed more than 220,000 people and uprooted six million.

A meeting between Santos and Timochenko, who is wanted in Colombia on charges of terrorism, rebellion, aggravated homicide and kidnapping, will be a landmark step in the peace process.

Santos said his trip to Havana was "for a key meeting," but did not mention an encounter with the FARC leader or say how long he would spend in Havana. He is later due to travel to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

- 'End of conflict' -

Both sides have reported progress on the justice issue, which includes the thorny question of whether guerrillas will face prison time for kidnappings, use of child soldiers, cocaine trafficking and other crimes.
"Justice is at the heart of the peace negotiations and with an agreement on that issue, the dream of building a country in peace begins to become a reality," the president's office said in a statement.

The FARC said on September 11 that the parties were "at the doors" of an agreement on the issue.

Santos's trip means that "a deal on transitional justice has been reached," predicted political analyst Jorge Restrepo, director of CERAC, a research center on the Colombian conflict.

"That would mark the end of the conflict phase and the beginning of the phase of transition toward the post-conflict era."

That would be historic news for Colombia, which has been torn by conflict since the FARC was launched in 1964 in the turbulent aftermath of a peasant uprising.

- Pope appeal for peace -

The apparent breakthrough comes on the heels of a visit to Cuba by Pope Francis, who warned Sunday that Colombia could not afford "yet another failure in peace talks" and called for "definitive reconciliation."

Over the decades, the Colombian conflict has drawn in not only government troops and various leftist rebel groups, but also right-wing paramilitary groups -- now officially disbanded -- and drug traffickers.There are six broad items on the agenda at the talks.

Deals have already been reached on three of them: land reform, political participation for ex-rebels and fighting the drug trafficking that has fueled the conflict in the world's largest cocaine-producing country.

Besides the justice issue -- part of broader discussions on victims of the conflict -- the other unsettled questions are disarmament and the mechanism by which the final accord will be ratified.

The FARC, the largest leftist guerrilla group still active in Colombia, has an estimated 7,000 fighters.

The other remaining rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), has about 2,500.

The ELN and the government have been in "exploratory" talks since January 2014, but have not yet opened a formal peace process.

Source: AFP