Joint Europe tour raised trust

 BY TIM JOHNSON

 LOS POZOS, Colombia -- An unusual 25-day tour of Europe last month by
 government negotiators and leftist insurgents has produced a new atmosphere of
 trust that could speed up talks designed to end Colombia's 35-year civil war.

 Norwegian diplomat Jan Egeland, a special envoy to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
 Annan, said Colombia's peace efforts are now moving along ``faster than any
 other peace process that I know of.''

 Egeland is an expert in such matters. In the past few years, he unsnarled a
 years-old deadlock between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and
 also played a key role in ending a vicious guerrilla war in Guatemala that lasted
 more than a third of a century.

 The European tour, he said, may go down in history as a watershed event in
 Colombia's conflict. The war began in the mid-'60s, claims between 3,000 and
 4,000 lives a year, and continues to generate an exodus of desperate Colombians
 seeking refuge abroad, including the United States.

 ``It was a breakthrough in two specific areas: The confidence between the parties
 . . . [and] that they went from not having much trust in international facilitation to
 now welcoming international assistance and facilitation,'' he added.

 In total, six senior commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia,
 known by its Spanish acronym as the FARC, left a Switzerland-size demilitarized
 area in southern Colombia on Feb. 1 in a private plane that took them to Bogota,
 where they transferred to a commercial jetliner bound for Spain.

 The secret transfer went off without a hitch, and Pastrana's chief peace envoy,
 Victor G. Ricardo, won immediate praise from the FARC commanders.

 Leading the tour were Ricardo, a smooth-talking Bogota politician, and Raul
 Reyes, a bearded, pot-bellied guerrilla commander who spent two years studying
 in Moscow.

 ``Reyes and Ricardo get along like a house on fire,'' said a diplomat whose
 country follows the peace process and who asked not to be named.

 `RUNNING RISKS'

 Dressed in combat fatigues and seated on a log outside a rustic building in this
 jungle hamlet, Reyes described Ricardo as ``a serious man, a very responsible
 man.'' In an interview with The Herald, he said the FARC delegation agreed to the
 European trip out of trust for Ricardo and Pastrana, ``running risks but always
 thinking that peace requires sacrifice.''

 The group began the tour with a six-day stay in Sweden, then another six days in
 Norway, all paid for by host governments and business groups.

 ``They provided us with winter clothing. They gave us boots and jackets and
 scarves,'' said Armando Pomarico, president of the House of Representatives.
 Nonstop meetings introduced the delegation to Nordic systems of taxation,
 relations between business owners and unions, functioning of police forces,
 political systems and oversight of government spending.

 ``The business owners pay their taxes and the taxes are invested in the welfare of
 the people, contrary to what happens here,'' Reyes said.

 In Oslo, the delegation stayed at the Holmenkollen Park Hotel, where secret
 Israel-PLO talks took place and where Guatemalan rebels first signed an accord
 leading to their eventual disarmament.

 SNOWBALL FIGHT

 And the agenda wasn't business all the time, recalled Juan Gabriel Uribe, a
 government negotiator on the trip.

 One night, after riding through streets in horse-drawn carriages, members of the
 delegation ended the evening with a snowball fight in the street. ``Even some
 members of the Norwegian secret service, two or three of them, got into it,'' Uribe
 said. In the final weeks of the trip, the delegation went to Italy, the Vatican, Spain,
 Switzerland and France.

 During rare free moments, conversations touched on previously off-limit topics,
 including the drug trade, human rights and rebel kidnappings.

 ``There was not a single taboo subject on the trip. Everything was put on the
 table,'' Uribe said.

 If nothing else, the tour has reduced doubts about the intentions of the FARC,
 which has been accused by some analysts of negotiating only in order to buy
 time to grow stronger. ``The FARC has created big hopes in national and
 international spheres over its willingness to seek peace,'' said Ernesto Borda
 Medina, a political scientist at Bogota's Javeriana University. ``The process isn't
 irreversible, but it would be very hard to scrap the talks now.''

 POTENTIAL PROBLEM

 Amid the optimism looms a large potential problem: the proposed U.S. aid
 package of $1.3 billion to Colombia for counter-narcotics efforts. Such assistance,
 said Reyes, the leader of the FARC delegation on the tour, ``could liquidate the
 conversations'' with the Pastrana government. The package is pending in the U.S.
 Congress.

 For the moment, all indications point to the onset of serious talks. On Friday,
 government and rebel negotiators agreed to public hearings on issues related to
 the kind of economic system the country should establish. As the first public
 hearing begins April 9, the government and rebels will start six months of talks on
 specific economic and social issues.

 Later, in subsequent six-month periods, talks will tackle human rights, the role of
 security forces and other issues before broaching a possible cease-fire. ``There
 are many, many hurdles, and we'll see setbacks,'' Egeland, the U.N.
 representative, said on Friday after meeting with FARC leader Manuel Marulanda.

 ``But I'm an optimist. . . . They are now at the table with a set agenda discussing
 very concrete things.''