Colombia's rightist paramilitaries will keep arms, demobilize in 2005

BOGOTA, July 16 (AFP) - Under an innovative deal, Colombia will allow right-wing paramilitaries to remain armed until they are demobilized in 2005, peace commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo said Wednesday.

"The urgent matter ... is the cessation of hostilities and the concentration" of paramilitary forces in one place as the initial step in demobilizing," Restrepo said.

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The deal would retire 13,000 combatants from the country's four-decade civil war in which 200,000 people have died.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) with 17,000 irregulars and the National Liberation Army (ELN) with 4,500 remain in the field after several failed attempts at peace talks with the government.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe signed the framework agreement covering peace talks late Tuesday. He said he hoped leftist rebel groups would take the cue.

"It's peace, or else. Either they negotiate or we defeat them, but we'll have peace. We must get out of this nightmare of violence," Uribe said.

The demobilized paramilitaries will remain armed as they mass under government protection from leftist rebels while a peace deal is negotiated and implemented by the end of 2005, Restrepo said.

"When concentrated, they can keep their arms, their uniforms and their internal structure but they cannot conduct any type of military action," Restrepo said.

The deal covers the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). It is an umbrella group covering 70 percent of the rightist, privately-funded paramilitary armies.

The paramilitaries were formed in the 1980s by drug traffickers and land owners to protect their property from extortion and kidnappings conducted by the FARC and ELN.

Human rights groups blame paramilitary groups for repeated massacres of civilians, often with the complicity of Colombia's armed forces.

Rebels and paramilitaries are known to murder civilians whom they suspect of collaborating with the other side.

The Colombian government has in recent years begun to see the AUC as more of a problem than an ally in the fight against insurgents.

After Uribe became president almost one year ago with the promise to take a hard line against the rebels, AUC said demobilization would be possible.

Under outgoing president Andres Pastrana, the government held lengthy but fruitless peace talks with the FARC and ELN.

AUC is considered a terrorist group by Washington. The United States has sought the extradition of its top leaders, Carlos Castano and Salvatore Mancuso, on drug charges.

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