Bogota: In a last-minute twist, Colombia’s FARC rebels have included a young Dutchwoman believed to be their only European member in peace talks with the government.
Tanja Nijmeijer, 34, will sit down with veteran guerrilla fighters and government officials in a second round of talks, next week in Havana, after a first round opening Thursday in Oslo.
The Bogota government is apparently not pleased with the last-gasp change in the first peace negotiations in a decade and fourth official attempt in 30 years at ending Latin America’s longest running military conflict.
In recruiting Nijmeijer, the FARC’s goal is to curry favor in Europe, and reach out to young people by making the more than 50-year-old rebel army — ranked as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union — look friendlier, said Ariel Avila, an expert in the Colombian conflict.
In Europe, there had been reports Nijmeijer was being held by the FARC against her will, said Avila, who runs a peace foundation called New Rainbow.
So having the slender brunette talk peace will disprove this notion and have the added effect of boosting media coverage, said Avila.
The Havana talks are for the real nuts-and-bolts negotiating after a preliminary round in Oslo. So the Dutchwoman will be in the thick of it all.
The former schoolteacher joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 2002 and has risen to its top ranks.
Born in 1978 to a Roman Catholic middle-class couple, Nijmeijer traveled several times to Colombia and even lived for a time in the heart of the country’s coffee-growing region 360 kilometers (225 miles) west of Bogota.
Reportedly shocked at the income gap between rich and poor, she joined the FARC, receiving training on how to use weapons and make bombs.
Nijmeijer visited a vast demilitarized zone in the southeast Caguan region created during the last peace talks, which collapsed when the government concluded the FARC were using the refuge as a place to regroup.
“She represents a generation of young guerrilla fighters who joined the FARC during or after the Caguan process, many of them from urban areas,” Avila said.
The Colombian authorities say Nijmeijer took part in a 2003 Bogota bombing that killed a child and wounded 16 people.
Despite the reports she was a hostage, the woman is in fact a diehard fighter. In November 2010, Nijmeijer said in a brief Spanish-language interview filmed at a jungle camp: “I am a FARC guerrilla and will continue being a guerrilla until I win or die. There’s no going back.”
Colombian media say the government is not happy with the idea of negotiating with Nijmeijer and that her traveling with the rebels is tricky because she faces at least one indictment in the United States, for kidnapping three Americans in Colombia and holding them in the jungle from 2003 to 2008.
Nijmeijer is the FARC member who draws the most attention overseas since her role became known in 2007. Two books have been written about her in Colombia.
That same year she made headlines as advancing Colombian soldiers came upon her diary in a hastily abandoned FARC jungle camp.
The diary detailed petty squabbles among the rebel leaders, privileges the leaders enjoy, and how far the guerrillas had strayed from their Marxist ideals.
She came close to being sentenced to death for those revelations, but ultimately came under the protection of a commander named Jorge Briceno. In 2010 she survived a government bombardment in which he died.
Since then little had been heard of her until FARC leader Timoleon Jimenez plucked her out of relative obscurity and placed her at the upcoming negotiating table.
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