Colombia

Uribe agrees to 'meeting zone' for hostage talks

Sunday 09 December 2007

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe agrees to create a demilitarized "meeting zone" to enable talks on a hostage-swap with Marxist FARC rebels.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Friday announced the creation of a demilitarized "meeting zone" and 100 million dollars in rewards to spur talks on a hostage-swap with Marxist FARC rebels.
  
"This area would include the presence of international observers to define the humanitarian exchange and weapons would not be allowed," Uribe told a police ceremony in Bogota.
  
He also announced that his government had set aside 100 million dollars to pay rewards to guerrillas who hand over their hostages.
  
The Colombian government has been pushing to swap some 45 hostages held by the FARC, many captured several years ago including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans, for some 500 rebel prisoners.
  
"The Catholic Church proposed to set up this meeting zone and the government has shown its willingness to accept it," Uribe said, adding the zone would spread over 150 square kilometers (58 square miles) and should be unpopulated or only sparsely.
  
Leading church official Luis Augusto Castro welcomed the announcement saying he hoped the rebels "will give us this Christmas gift and accept the zone so we can begin to talk in a fast and clear manner."
  
And Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos warned the zone would only be in operation for one month.
  
The announcement reversed Uribe's opposition to setting up such a zone which has been one of the rebels key demands.
  
The move comes just after a news agency close to the rebels praised moves by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to win the hostages' release.
  
"The French government's intentions are good, praiseworthy and healthy," the Anncol agency said in a statement late Thursday.
  
But the agency, which considers itself independent and is close to Latin America's oldest insurgency, insisted in an unsigned Internet posting on the need for a demilitarized zone to be set up first.
  
Sarkozy's message to insurgent leader Manuel Marulanda urged him to release Betancourt and other hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
  
"To achieve my objective, I have the support of all French people. I also need your support," Sarkozy wrote in a letter to Argentina's outgoing President Nestor Kirchner.
  
Betancourt, seized when she was running for Colombia's presidency in 2002, was seen for the first time in several years last week, when videos and letters captured from the rebels were released to the press.
  
The video dating from October showed her looking thin and dispirited, and while friends and families hailed the proof that she was still alive, it has revitalized the campaign to win her freedom.
  
FARC, the main rebel group in Colombia with some 17,000 members, has demanded the release of some 500 of their members in exchange for freeing Betancourt and three Americans held among some 45 "political" hostages.
  
The wife of one of the hostages told Caracol radio that new proof that the other hostages were still alive was due to be released before the end of the month.
  
Deyanira Ortiz, wife of hostage Orlando Beltran, said she had been told by Foreign Minister Ricardo Maduro and others that "proof of life will arrive in the coming days, before December 31. And we are delighted."
  
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez had initially mediated in the efforts to achieve a prisoner swap, but Uribe dropped him from that role last month, claiming the leftist leader was biased in favor of the FARC.
  
The Colombian government has been struggling for more than 40 years to defeat the FARC, which draws much of its funding from the illegal drug trade.