“Peace in Colombia is not a political or electoral issue”: Duke to the UN

On Tuesday, April 12, the President of Colombia, Iván Duque, assured the UN Security Council that “peace in Colombia is not a political or electoral issue”, reiterating that within the institutions there are no enemies of peace.

In the midst of the United Nations session, which addressed the progress made in the implementation of the Final Peace Agreement between the Colombian State and the demobilized FARC guerrillas, the president took stock of his peace policy with legality in which he stressed that progress in his government is “visible, unquestionable, without question biases, but knowing that we have challenges ahead, that we do not intend to hide them.”

“Peace in Colombia is not a political or electoral issue; it is not an ideological issue, it has no individual owners; it is the collective purpose of an entire nation and its institutions. The future challenges for peacebuilding, with the advances described here, are based on the existence of genuine, indisputable, non-ideological, unbiased truth,” said the head of state during his speech.

He also reiterated that he expected the implementation of all sanctions for those most responsible in the light of international law, “taking into account transactionality, but that there are real restrictions on freedoms”, while noting that he expected progress in the macrocases being advanced by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) , with the aim of revealing the “truth about kidnappings, crimes against women and harassment of the security forces”.

In this regard, he suggested that the UN Security Council accompany the development of sanctions that transitional justice will produce against those most responsible, as a mechanism to “strengthen” this process, “which has resulted from the actions of the government,” he also indicated that the greatest challenge of the process was not the signature, but its development to over the course of three administrations.

“In Colombia there are no enemies of peace within institutions and democracy. We all love it, we all work for it, and the only enemies of peace are those who have wanted to affect our nation since violence. Today we can also say that significant progress has been made in the face of many demands that, with or without agreements, were necessary,” said the president.

Finally, he referred to the controversy that has arisen over the operation carried out by the public forces in the village of Alto Remanso, in the rural area of the municipality of Puerto Leguizamo, Putumayo, against FARC dissidents, in which civilians, including the president of a community action board, his wife, a under 16 years of age and an indigenous authority.

In this regard, he indicated that it was important for the country to continue to provide certainty in the operation of the security forces in the light of international humanitarian law and to ensure that the supervisory bodies could clarify the serious violations that would have been committed in the midst of this operation that has been defended by the institutions and denounced by the community and social organizations with a “massacre” or cases of “false positives”.

“Our nation has zero tolerance against any violation of human rights by agents of the security forces; but also of a public force that every day, in the territory, wins the affection of citizens, including those in the process of being reinstated, to whom it provides protection,” concluded the President Duque, who have defended the legitimacy of the operation.

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