by Our Foreign Desk

COLOMBIAN President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the Farc national liberation movement announced a dramatic negotiated solution to their 51-year armed conflict on Wednesday.

Mr Santos said in Havana that the two sides had set a six-month deadline to sign a final agreement, following which the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) would demobilise within 60 days.

“We are on different sides but we advance today in the same direction, in the most noble direction a society can take, which is toward peace,” said the president, minutes before a public handshake with Farc military commander Rodrigo Londono, known generally as Timochenko.

A joint statement revealed that negotiators had overcome the last significant obstacle to a peace deal by agreeing a formula to punish human-rights abuses. 

Rebels who confess to abuses at special peace tribunals, agree to compensate victims and promise not to take up arms again will receive from five to a maximum of eight years of labour under a form of confinement — but not prison.

War crimes committed by the military will also be judged by the tribunals and combatants caught lying could face up to 20 years in jail.

“It’s satisfying to us that this special jurisdiction for the peace has been designed for everyone involved in the conflict, combatants and non-combatants, and not just one of the parties,” said Timochenko.

Negotiators must still decide upon a mechanism for rebel demobilisation and then the government needs to come up with additional money for parts of the countryside ravaged by war.

Colombians will get a chance to endorse or reject any deal by referendum.

Opposition leader and former president Alvaro Uribe, who is widely suspected of involvement with far-right death squads, called the agreement a gift to Farc and Venezuela’s “tyranny,” even before details were known.

“This is a bad example for society that will generate more violence,” he threatened.

Plans for land reform, political participation for guerillas who lay down their weapons and combating drug trafficking had already been agreed.

US Secretary of State John Kerry backed the development, saying that “peace is now ever closer for the Colombian people and millions of conflict victims.”