 Okay, I'm gonna start since we're already over time. Thank you very much for coming to attend our panel this afternoon. We have a really great lineup today. We're gonna have presentations on the peace negotiations in Havana, on issues of justice and security, on innovation in education, on reconciliation and on peace building. So we have quite a full schedule for not a lot of time. And hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for questions at the end. I wanted to start by telling you a little bit about my work, in order, which I think will give this panel some good context and meaning and frame the presentations. So I've been working in a community called El Salado in Montes de María. Those of you who are familiar with Colombia probably have heard of El Salado. I've been working with the community since 2012. And El Salado is a community that's really emblematic in a lot of ways of the conflict in Colombia, the war. In 2000, El Salado suffered a horrendous massacre over a five day period at the hands of the paramilitaries. 66 people were slaughtered, some of them publicly on the soccer field in the middle of the town. People were persecuted, children had to run and hide and drink their own urine to survive. It was really absolutely awful. And I think that when we talk about the war in Colombia and we talk about the peace process and we talk about reconciliation, we have to keep in mind and remember what happened and what is currently still happening in Colombia. And we need to listen to the people who have actually suffered the horrors of war. So part of my work is trying to do that, trying to listen to the communities and trying to translate what they have to say and the way they perceive their own peace and reconciliation to policy makers, to people in Bogota, people in Washington. So I've been doing this project called the Everyday Peace Indicators Project in multiple communities in war-torn societies in Sub-Saharan Africa and now also in Colombia. And what we've been doing is essentially capturing indicators, indicators of reconciliation and indicators of peace to try to tell a story of what community members, those most affected by the war, prioritize and how they define reconciliation and define peace for themselves. So the idea is really simple. You know, who's better place to determine their reconciliation and their peace than the people themselves? Usually indicators and when we're looking at indexes and we're looking at measurement, indicators are developed by people like us here in Washington or in Bogota. But our project actually goes to the communities and through a very rigorous process of collecting and participatory action research processes of collecting indicators, we create lists with the community members through a vetting process of indicators which are then longitudinally surveyed in the communities over time. And I thought that this was a good way of starting this panel to give a little bit of context to the reality on the ground and how people are perceiving and how people are measuring reconciliation. So again, what we're asking people is what is it that you in your daily lives use to determine whether or not you are more or less reconciled, right? So what are the indicators that you're using to see I'm more or less reconciled in my life, in my community, in my everyday? So I'd like to read some of those indicators, some examples of the indicators of reconciliation that the community of El Salado came up with. Comprehensive reparations, truth, non-repetition, equality in reparations, revictimization, unity, freedom of speech, reconstruction of social fabric, perpetrators asking forgiveness, respect among community members, participation in the design of reconciliation interventions, psychosocial attention, trust in public entities, trust in private entities, acceptance of difference, police participation in community meetings, and openness to living with demobilized people. So these are the things that the community members prioritize when they think about reconciliation in El Salado, and the indicators tell us a story of how the community members look to things like truth, reparations, inclusion and participation, non-repetition and psychosocial factors, such as attention to trauma and the reconstruction of the social fabric of a community to determine whether they are more or less reconciled or they feel more or less reconciled. But they also demonstrate that reconciliation in Colombia is really highly localized. It depends on the community itself and its experience with the war of how and who they need to reconcile with. And I think that's really important and something that we need to keep in mind when we talk about policies to address reconciliation in Colombia. But it's also interesting what they don't tell. They don't tell, and we didn't just do this in El Salado, but also in another community, and indicators such as justice and forgiveness did not come up as indicators of reconciliation for the communities. And so they prioritize other things when they look at reconciliation and they think about what reconciliation means to them first before they think about justice and forgiveness. So on that note, which is in my mind a pretty provocative one considering our panel, I'd like to introduce our panelists. First we've got Mark Freeman, who is with us via Skype. And Mark is the executive director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions. And he served in Havana as independent advisor to the government delegation between June 2014 and December 2015 with a focus on, no, no, he's gone. Okay, with a focus on agenda chapter five, which was the agenda chapter for victims. And he attended all the cycles of the talks during that period, so he will share some of his observations about the challenges of the negotiation itself. Next we have Steve Hege, did I say that right? Hege. And Steve has a significant experience working with the UN, international NGOs and think tanks and governments on issues related to security sector reform, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants, local governance, human rights, political dialogue, and natural resource trade and conflict-affected territories, that's quite a lot. And he's going to speak today about the current research he's conducting here at USIP, regarding transitory approaches to justice and security in areas currently under the control or influence of the FARC. Next we have Francisco Menrique, who is the president of the Executive Council Connect Bogota, and also a businessman who has decided to dedicate himself to the youth of Colombia through education, peace-building, innovation, and young leadership development, and he'll talk about his work that he's doing to connect education and innovation for social change in Colombia. Next we have Leonel Narvarez Gomez, father at Leonel, who is the director of the Foundation for Reconciliation Colombia. Father Leonel is the founder of the Fundación para la Reconciliación, and also the current president. He's devoted the last 20 years to constructing technologies of political culture of forgiveness and reconciliation, such as the Schools of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, which he'll be talking about today, adult literacy through forgiveness, centers of reconciliation, and a school pedagogy for care and reconciliation. And then finally, last but not least, we have Darinel Rodriguez Torres, who is the program manager for policy and advocacy at the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict. And Darinel is a Colombian who for several years has been working in conflict prevention and peace building at the global level, and he has contributed to the development of different conflict prevention and peace building initiatives in regions such as the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Pacific, and of course Latin America, and he'll speak a bit more about the main challenges ahead in the process of reconciliation in Colombia. All right, so without further ado, Mark, do you want to begin? Thank you, Mark. Thank you for giving us that context, and now we can move on to Steve Hage, who, Hage, sorry, who will talk a little bit about those next steps. Great, thank you very much, Pamina. I'm gonna follow Mark's very important insights from one of the most critical agenda items in La Havana with some remarks about an issue that has been circular to the process itself, and not specifically on the agenda, but has had a big impact already on the process in terms of stakeholder buy-in, as well as preparing for the implementation, particularly the demobilization in far controlled areas, and that's the broad security and justice related issues, not focusing, I'm not going to focus my remarks on transitional justice per se, but more the broader issues of how will provision of justice and security be influenced by this peace process, given the long legacy and entrenchment of a civil war in Colombia. The government has insisted that this not be on the agenda, both with the FARC and with ELN, it's been a part of the red line that the doctrine of the military would not be subject to negotiations, nor would the institutions of security and justice be on the table to be negotiated with the FARC. However, at different times, there's been illusions and Marx insights and presence there would probably provide us a bit more of comments on this, but the FARC has made illusions to the fact that they would like to see the military doctrine changed, and in and of itself that has elicited strong response and resistance from the military establishment, from the associations of retired military and public service personnel. And this is something that has been, let's say, nourished or increased by the resistance to the peace process led by former president Uribe, and his strong ties and alliances within the military itself. So one of the big challenges has been to make sure to reach out and continue to have the military and the police to a lesser extent, be involved, understand the peace process, and that led President Santos to bring several of those, several key members of the military to Lawana to work on, specifically the sub-commission on the laying down of arms and demobilization. However, that hasn't been without differences in interpretations, but this has been a part of the media portrayal and the perception of their resistance to the implications of the peace process. The LN for its part, their agenda, doesn't address these issues either, but does speak very clearly about democratic participation, social participation, which we can only anticipate if those processes do take real, are seen to be credible for to discuss main issues, that civil society organizations and social organizations will raise these issues about the role of security and justice actors in Columbia, in rural parts of the country. And so we can anticipate that coming up in that process, even though it's not officially on the agenda and the government has insisted that it not be. So that's just to begin. Nevertheless, justice and security, while not being on the agenda, there are a tremendous amount of implications, and I'm gonna just lay out four observations that I see of the peace process for justice and security in the country. The first being the ceasefire implementation itself, and a big part, a critical component of this is the deterrence of spoilers in that process. And that includes, or is not necessarily limited to, but should prioritize the protection of ex-combatants, particularly FARC combatants, given the legacy of what has happened in Columbia in the past with a FARC political party, Union Patriotica, and that plays a very central role in the psyche of the FARC and their social base with regards to trust in the state and the state's ability to implement on agreements. So that this is a big part, how to ensure security for ex-combatants, social leaders, human rights leaders in areas that have been affected by conflict and where there will be a focus for the post-conflict or post-acord transition. The second point that I'll raise, and I'll share a little bit more towards the end, is the vacuum, the potential security and justice vacuum that may arise in certain parts of the country where the FARC will be moving some of its former, or formal combatants to concentration areas or concentration zones. And the FARC de facto has provided security and justice in many of these areas for decades. And there's a big question about how to ensure that other actors don't take up that space and that equitable democratic rule of law is upheld or is established in those areas. And again, I'll share a little bit more. That's not necessarily a straightforward process given that the FARC will continue to have a political, social, and economic project or agenda in all the territories that they have had under control as they see it as the beginning of their political project for the country. The third element which picks up a little bit on the transitional justice component that Mark worked so intimately on is the commitment in transitional justice frameworks is the idea that we work towards non-repetition and then that is a part of reparations, of integral reparations. And that requires to a certain extent implies institutional change. So institutions can't simply say we are just going to provide some level of truth, provide some degree of justice and some degree of financial or social reparations, but they need to be commitments to ensure that these types of incidents don't take place again. See, there's a long history of public institutions in Columbia trying to do this throughout the war given the length of the war, but one would hope that in a post-conflict scenario that there would be a more concerted effort and there would be greater room to breathe and reflect about the institutional changes that need to happen to ensure that certain types of crimes do not take place again. And notably, very important interest on false positive crimes and the incentives, institutional incentives that led to those serious human rights violations. The last implication of security or the security and justice implication for the peace process is the whole idea of how to adapt the security institutions to post-fark, post-armed fark, I should say, because the fark will not stop existing. It will hopefully pass from an armed movement to a political movement or social movement depending on the phase, but that the security institutions particularly need to think how they're going to revamp themselves to adapt to that new scenario, that new context on the ground, and that being whether it's a focus on criminal organizations, bandas criminales, or is it going to be an exclusive focus on the ELN depending on how that process evolves. They've put a lot of effort into illegal mining, particularly the police. Obviously, there will be less of a law enforcement focus on drug trafficking and drug production, coca production, given the agreements in La Havana about alternative development, but that's another big question about how to adapt and create security services that are adequate to the actual threats that rural Colombia will continue to face following the peace process. So I'll just say that the police on their side have created a special unit to take on these issues. Very recently established called La Unidad Policial para la Divicación de la Paz, which is just the police peace building unit essentially, and lays out a number of these, some of their challenges. For the military side, they've established the Comando Ejecutivo de Transición, COETS, that has been working on contributing to the sub-commission on the laying down of arms and demobilization for some time, but also along with a main concern of both of these units from the police and the military side has been historical memory and the legacy that their institutions will be left with. There's a repeated concern in the research that we've conducted from both police and military. An anecdote that has been consistently brought up is I want my children to be read the history books and know that we were heroes and that the 75 or 80% credibility that we have in public polling, that is maintained for decades to come. And that's a real strong concern from both police and military. I'll just end quickly with a few remarks then on specifically justice provision in rural areas. And there's a whole plethora of institutions that have provided justice. I mentioned the FARC themselves, and Padre Lionel knows these institutions and their role quite intimately after many years. But you have causes de justicia and covivencia, which are just integrated justice mechanisms to try to help bridge coordination. You have Oasis de paz or peace judges and Concilia Ores and Equidad, which are individuals that we tried to help for amicable solutions. Unfortunately, none of these institutions, there are others, inspectores de policía, none of them actually reach out to rural areas where the FARC, so it's not an easy sort of transition just to push these individuals out there. The one institution that it does exist in rural areas is basically the communal action committees, which are the lowest level of governments, administrative government in Colombia, elected officials, the junta de acción comunal. And they have conciliation committees that try to resolve problems, again, amicably, not through a penal process, but they will play a huge role. The FARC and the ELN have influenced placed individuals on these committees, but have stepped back. In recent years, our research has shown that the influence of armed groups has decreased significantly in that they've allowed these committees to really take on greater leadership. Now, will that be the same when they're competing more openly for positions on those committees in elections? It's unclear. But nevertheless, the importance of these committees in providing justice, informal justice, in rural areas in an initial stage will be absolutely critical. And I'll just end by raising a couple points that were brought up in the Civil Military Relations panel just before lunch. And that's the importance of reestablishing some degree of trust between public institutions and Pamina brought this up as one of the indicators of reconciliation. But the levels of trust in rural, rebel-controlled areas with public institutions that somehow believe, like was the case with the paramilitaries, that they will just extend their presence and impose their presence on these communities is not necessarily going to be the case because the FARC will still be there and will still be mobilizing support and potentially antagonism towards those institutions. For the time being, most communities see the presence of military and police as providing insecurity as opposed to security. And this is a key fundamental issue. They see that if the police is there, they're more likely to be attacked by the ELN or the FARC. If they are related, they're close to the police, then they may be, if they bring information to the police, they may be accused of providing intelligence and therefore, their consequences for themselves and their families. So the image of the police is not of security, it's of insecurity. And on the other hand, the police views a lot of these communities as systematically infiltrated as all, a very strong generalization of their sympathies for rebel structures. And this is obviously not the case. It does complicate the fact that there is a lot of intelligence back and forth, but this is not the case 100% of the time. So this is a huge challenge. I will stop there just by noting that one of the security institutions really need to view the communities themselves and the FARC process as not exclusively through the prism of this all means of war. And that the political phase of their evolution as a movement is not just a continuation of the insurgency, but is actually some sort of legitimate credible democratic process. But this is very deeply ingrained in the security institution. I think that becomes really a key to unlock those relationships with rural communities. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. Next, we have Francisco Manrique, who will speak a little bit about his work in education and innovation. We have a little moment here to set up the PowerPoint. Okay, thank you very much. What we heard in the last two presentations has to do with the present and the past of my country. What I want to talk about here and is to show you another perspective is about the future, because after all, the question is, and if this goes right, then what? And therefore, that's the reason why I put in this name innovation to serve the peace process as a new narrative for a country like Colombia. I come from a very different background, and I'm not expert in peace or violence or anything like that, but I have been involved since 1997 in different moments regarding to what happened in my country in this regard. And probably the important point to underline is that two years ago, or four years ago, I was invited by the Minister of Defense to gather a group of people like myself from the private sector to help them think about the possible post-conflict. And this was just a very tiny idea at the time. And given some experience that I had leading an organization regarding science, technology, and innovation, I propose a different perspective to the whole thing. Let me give you a little bit of background. Colombia has almost 48 million people. It's an upper middle income country, but the point I want to make here is that we have spent quite a lot of money trying to contain the violence that we have for so many years. American government has been part of this in Plan Colombia, now it's past Colombia, but the fact is that's a reality in our country. But the reality also is that we have more than six million displaced as a result of this stupid thing that we have for so many years. But the worst part is 20% almost of those six millions are children and young people. And this picture is quite graphic of what is happening today. Actually, FARC just two weeks ago announced that they were ending the use of young people to carry arms like this little girl that you see in front of this picture. Problems, well, you can talk about many things, but from my perspective, I just want to share three things. There's trust, the lack of trust in a society is a quite big problem and that's happening in Colombia because if you want to get together to collaborate, to solve problems with lack of trust, it's almost impossible. They incapacity to handle conflict that means that if you don't agree with someone, you don't take a gun and kill him and later on ask about why. And that's something that puts this spot right in the Colombian society more than FARC. And along these four years, I found out that there is a lot of people disconnected which are fantastic people disconnected. There is a lot of potential leadership, but it's invisible and therefore, if they are disconnected, they are invisible, they are not part of a solution for a country like ours. Another problem is that the educational system is misaligned in regard to what is required for the 21th century for a country that wants to be relevant in the global stage. And then the number I want to put here is the one which is there. What it says there is that it will take us one century to reach the levels of the highest score of a country which is measured by the PISA test that is done internationally in which around 65 or 67 countries are measured. We are going to have the final results at the end of this year for the 2016 results, but for the 2012 results, that's more or less what give us the idea of what is happening in our case. Okay, the impact of this is that we have a situation which is quite challenging, and it's a society that moves between two extremes. On one hand, a very turbulent past, on the other hand, a wonderful future we are able to do the work right. But being part of a process because I decided to not just be an observer, I understand very well that we are not really prepared to handle this transition period that we are facing today. And I think that's a fact. There is another impact here. There is an increasing gap among different people, and I think that this picture describes very well what is happening, and this is not just the case in Colombia. I think this is a case all over the wall, right? But that's something that you have to take into account. So the challenge is less, history can be an anchor around your neck that doesn't allow you to walk and to look forward. And therefore what we are proposing with the project that we started to build four years ago is that we should challenge ourselves to build a new narrative for Colombia. There is a story behind this, but I don't have time. So I wanted to leave it there. The idea came that if we want to leave behind this history of violence, we have to be able to write a new narrative. And the main characters of this narrative should be, two, this is our proposition. One, innovation, the second, education. Remember that we are talking about the future of a country has 48 million people. The challenge is short term as was mentioned before in the previous presentations. The government should have a social approval, and that's a very hot topic today in Colombia. But I think that the median and long term challenge is even bigger and is not visible. And the main topic is that we have to take care of ourselves of what is going to happen moving forward. If that's not the case, this is not going to play for long time. If we want to do that, then we have to there to explore new ideas. That means that we have to bring people with different visions. And then the other thing that is very important is that there is not a single silver bullet that will solve all the problems that we have as a society. And therefore, from the innovation point of view, it is possible, it is important to build pilots, prototypes in many different areas of the country in order to explore and to come up with new ideas and trying to scale them up later on. That's part again of our proposal. And that's the reason why we are bringing innovation into this conversation and use innovation in the context of the social problems of the Colombian country like ours, which is trying to overcome so many years of violence. What else is required? Well, I would call this a new paradigm. And why is a new paradigm? Because everyone is focusing in other things, the legal stuff, the things that is happening in Lavana. And to me, the real focus should be in how to build the human talent required to support the new narrative of a country who wants to be relevant in the global stage, right? For that, you need courage because this is going against the current. You need leadership, which is missing, unfortunately. And by the way, you need a very active participation in society. That's why I am talking about collective impact, which is an idea that we are starting to work right now in the case of some projects in Colombia and in Bogota especially. To move, we need to innovate in the value chain of the formation of the human capital. That's the only way that we feel the group of people, like myself, that we are thinking around these lines that will be able to support the bet that we are making into the future right now. And if that's the case, that means that we have to involve the new generations, which, by the way, is something that is missing also in these conversations. As I mentioned, 20% of the people displaced are young people, children. But if you take anything that has been written in regard to the process in Colombia, I don't see the role of the new generations taking charge of the whole process. That's why we propose the innovation for education and education for innovation as part of the way to prepare these new generations to be playing an active role in the whole process. We have a long road ahead because if you see the statistics, they are not good. They are not good. We are not preparing the people required to play this new game. That's a fact. It's not just my invention, right? When you compare that to other countries around the world, that's a fact. And then there could be a question. What is the role of innovation in the whole conversation about peace in Colombia? Well, if you read a little bit about it and I have been doing that the last seven years, innovation brings very important things. One, a cultural framework with values like trust which is absolutely essential collaboration because you need to bring a lot of people from very different backgrounds. That's why the inclusion and diversity is so important. Entrepreneurship are new ways of thinking or mental models. You need also practices like networking, use of technology, new business models to solve many challenges that we have and of course new perspectives from different disciplines. And so if you, in a nutshell, what is the project that we are proposing really? We have been working the last four years. You can read it there. We seek to promote a network of pilot learning communities that represented the diversity of the country through creating a new narrative. Based on visibility and connection of these leaders, their needs, initiatives and achievements, we are basing this that leadership plays an essential role in trying to overcome all the obstacles that we have to face in a situation as complex as it is right now in our country. We need a new educational spaces that will enable children and young people to be an active change makers of their own future. And there are some examples, beautiful examples that this can be actually put in place. Third, we need to mobilize national and international networks. That's what we have been doing in the last four years. I had been with this project in London, in the Silicon Valley, in Israel, in Singapore, and it's unbelievable. Outside, it makes sense. Inside my country, it's very difficult to sell the idea. But that's a fact. We need new innovative models of collaboration because again, a single guy, organization, or president just can tackle this challenging job. You need to mobilize a lot of people. And of course, we need to use the digital infrastructure that has been put in place in the last few years in Colombia and use science, technology and innovation. And there are many creative ways of doing so. Things that we have been working on is just some of the examples designed for change, to mobilize kids in their communities to take charge in solving the problems that they have there. Aulas and Paz, which is a beautiful project, more than 30,000 students have gone through this in very violent backgrounds, working with their parents, with their teachers, and helping them to overcome the traumas that they got because of the violent environment that they had. Orijen, which is a beautiful organization I hope to develop, we are developing a new generation of leaders in our communities to build a new narrative of things like new symbols, like Pazicleta, use the bike as a way of transmitting the idea that peace is possible. And there is a beautiful story that you can tell about Pazicleta. TV series, we discovered a guy who won an award in Europe. And there is a pilot about a community in the southern part of our city in Bogota where a community actually takes charge of reality. Their kids were being taken by the FARC and they decided to do something about that without violence. The other thing that is there is narratives or micro narratives. We found out that there is a technology to capture micro narratives. And actually we are going to start with Juanita, which is with me in the coming weeks with that thing which is reality today. Forgiveness and reconciliation that Father Narváez is going to talk about that. So at the end, a new cultural model for a productive coexistence in our country. That's what we are talking about. So this is about the future, not about the past or the current situation in La Habana. Thank you very much, Francisco. So next we have Father Lionel who's going to be speaking about education for forgiveness. I've got 10 minutes. Okay, I'll do my best. Yeah, I put the title a crucial component for sustainable peace is the case of Colombia, but I think of many other countries. You know, there are two main problems for a sustainable peace in Colombia. What I call the culture of revenge. And second, the political economy of hate. And I'm going, I'm trying to explain the two huge and hidden problems. I used to show this, the three needs for a sustainable peace. And I speak about the objective needs, housing, employment, education, health. And that should be a very strong kind of the trunk of the tree. But also the needs and environmental needs through the justice, reparation, and facts. But still, those two are not enough. You have to go to how to satisfy subjective needs, anger, hate, urge for revenge after nearly 60 years of conflict. And you know, I'm going to concentrate in this last one. You know, that thing is influencing the whole health of the tree. And I would say that's the crucial problem for us in Colombia. I have been working in Syria recently. I was in Libya and Lebanon. And it's also the same in Muslim countries. But if you go to Israel and Palestine, it's also the same problem. And you know, that red point there is a kind of hidden problem which is not being taken care of yet, very much. Now, let's say for the case of Colombia, you know, 92% of our homicides are motivated by revenge and fights. And you cannot solve that problem with police or prisons or whatever. The problem is somewhere else. I want to underline this. Men are the main motivators of this kind of violence. Women are not really participating in violence. Actually, I would say at the end that they are the solution. In the Global Peace Index, these are the first very best countries in relation to peace. But these are the worst. Honduras, Guatemala, South Africa, Rwanda. But you know, which is the main question. These are the countries which came out lately from conflict resolution and negotiation. Why are they so high in the violence ranking? Then you have Mexico, Colombia, and the last one is Syria. I'm going to say that perhaps Honduras, Guatemala, South Africa, and Rwanda, they have not touched that hidden problem which I was mentioning before, below the soil of the tree. There is not a country which has been able to satisfy objective needs, not even the environmental needs, like through justice reparation and no repetition. That was the first problem. It is called the culture of revenge. The second problem is very imperceptible and perverse, and it is called the political economy of hatred. It is coming from our political elites. And you know, political economy of hatred is simply this, the capacity of some leaders to sell hate to gain votes and political power. I don't know whether it reminds you of something here in, of somebody here in the States. But if you go to Venezuela, or actually many countries, and it's happening also in Brazil recently, yes, they are selling hate to gain votes or power. And you know, the worst thing is that they know how to apply the tools of this economy. They know how to produce it. They know how to distribute hate. They know how to exchange, and they know how to make it being consumed. There is a book which came out just one month ago of Martha Nussbaum. The book is called Anger and Forgiveness. And Martha is saying that anger is everywhere and it's also very popular. And she refers to this very ancient drama of a skillos which is called Oresteia. And they speak about furious, those who cultivate anger. And she says, skillos says, they are like repulsive and horrifying monster. They are hair made of snakes, their eyes drip a hideous liquid, their mouths vomiting up clots of blood that they have ingested from their prey. And they snore like dogs saying, get him, get him, get him. The smell of the furious breath is the smell of half digested blood. No, it was 25 centuries ago. Athena, who is the the inspirer of the city, tell them the furious, learn to repose the bitter force of your black wave of anger. And in fact, she manages to help them to go to adopt benevolence and generosity. It was said by a skillos 25 centuries ago. And you know, that is a transformation, even physically. Now they have an erect posture. Now they are women and not beasts. Their name now is kindly once, you mean it is not furious as before. Now, we were having a look to these three and you know, we were saying that if this anger spreads everywhere, we are going to have problems. The real change that we can promote, yes, is through what I would like to call the political culture of forgiveness. Stopping the urge for revenge. It's like saying that we are changing these kind of things like this. And that's a crucial problem. Now, I'm saying about forgiveness. Let me say what is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is not denying justice. Forgiveness is not embracing your offender. Forgiveness is not denying your pain. Okay, what is forgiveness? Forgiveness is a narrative term. I'm happy that Francisco and I, we are trying to meet in this effort of narrative term in Colombia. And you move from the memory in action instead of the coagulated memory or the frozen memory. Instead of retaliation, you promote compassion, generosity. It is a process of self-reparation. It is a political virtue. It's not a religious resource. Forgiveness is a political virtue. Say it by Hannah Arendt. What is reconciliation? Reconciliation is simply the effort of recuperating the trust in your offender. But there can be forgiveness without reconciliation and not the opposite. There is a successful project that we are now implementing in Colombia, but also in 18 countries of the continent, the Schools of Forgiveness and Reconciliation. 50 to 60 hours course, normally three hours per week. It has the, it adopts the TOT approach. People who start in a group, they make a pact of confidentiality. They, it's mainly based on three people dialogue. It has some disciplinary approach. It's adapted to each culture and it works with a lot of rituals of commitment. Rituals from the same region. But we also, we also have adopted this process of political culture of forgiveness in literacy. And there is a project now in Colombia at this moment, the joy of reading and writing through forgiveness. 32,000 people at this moment are passing through this program of other literacy. We are having also centers of reconciliation at risk areas, two or three years presence, and then we move to another area. And we are also implementing this in the Schools Pedagogy of Care and Reconciliation in approximately 28,000 students. These are the results, the results of working with forgiveness are mainly behavioral. There are changes in the, in the behavior of the people. Now, thousands of Colombians, thousands of Colombians are forgiven. I don't have time to mention a few cases here, but the main impact is the victim becomes a victor. And that's powerful. I was in the previous panel and they were insisting that now we are moving from police security to human security. And this, I think is the best human security. Now the word forgiveness is in our newspapers, in TV, it's increasingly in the daily life of our people in Colombia. There is a statistics data saying that Colombians are more or less half and half about forgiveness. Colombian contribution to the word is the arms are the failure of our words. I would leave it there. Arms are the failure of our words. That's what we learned in the last 60 years. And I'm going to finish. You can read there very quickly. Forgiveness does not change your past, but it certainly changes your future. Desmond Tutu used to say no future without forgiveness. And you know, the main experience is this. Life is forgiving. That's why we speak about forgiveness. Express through compassion, kindness, care, and generosity. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Father Layano. Next, we have Darinel Rodriguez speaking more about reconciliation, but also peace building and state building in Colombia. Yes, thank you. Couple of years ago, and I like your introduction because it reminded me of couple of, no. Two years ago I was in a conference with Tillman Brook, who some of you may know. He's the former director of CIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And he's an expert on the relationship between the expectations of peace and war and economic development. So at the time we were working in G-PAC on advocating for the inclusion of a peace goal in the Sustainable Development Agenda, something that we eventually got through goal 16. And we were thinking about what indicators could suggest whether a country was moving towards becoming more peaceful or not. So having this person there and having this work for me to do, so I thought I would make my life easier and just ask him. So I did and I said, okay, what kind of indicators do you think we should include in the framework to signal whether a country is moving towards becoming more peaceful or not? After thinking for two seconds, he gave me an answer that was very short, very concrete, but I thought very insightful as well. He said, well, if there was one thing that I could use to measure whether a peace is moving towards becoming more peaceful or not, I would measure fear. He said, I would measure fear. The levels of fear of a country would tell me whether the country is going to become more peaceful or not, whether it is hoping the future or not. And I thought that answer was very insightful and very relevant for the Colombian conflict. Because as in Colombia, we've been living in fear for over 60 years. Now what kind of fears have we been living with? We've been living with fears of being kidnapped or being in the wrong place at the wrong time or being mocked or having our rights violated somehow. And of course there are levels of fears. Those fears are more accentuated in rural areas, in rural communities than in the cities, but those fears are there nevertheless. Let me just give you some numbers to show what kind of fears Colombians have been living with. The conflict has been going on for almost 60 years. It's the longest conflict in the Western Hemisphere. Throughout those 60 years, there have been 7.8 million victims recognized by the National Register of Victims set up by the government. 220,000 deaths directly related to the armed conflict. During the peak of the violence, that's the period between 1996 and 2005, there was one kidnapping every eight hours. The, and during that same period, there was one victim of land mines every day. Up to today, there are about 11,300 victims of land mines in Colombia. There have been 1,980 documented massacres in the country. And the number that shocks me the most is that four out of every five victims of the conflict are non-combatant civilians, four out of five victims. 80% of the victims have not been from one side or the other, they were just in the middle. With that picture, do you think, well, now finally Colombia is moving towards peace? No, we're going to sign this peace agreement. But as we hear, we have heard here, Colombian society is actually quite divided over whether we should pursue this peace agreement or not. The agreement is becoming a divisive issue, it's becoming an issue that is polarized in the society. It's, every time I go to Colombia, I feel more and more tension about this. And I think this is also the result of fear. There is fear on what is going to happen after the signature of this peace agreements. There are even calls for civil resistance lately, last week against the peace process. And it's like, let's have a civil resistance movement to prevent the agreement, you know, go figure. But like I said, this is moved to a great extent by fear. You know, there is fear about uncertainty. There is fear about maybe the state's capacity to actually implement and carry out these agreements in the correct fashion. Let me give you the example of a point one that was agreed on the agenda, land reform. Now land reform, land has been at the core of the Colombian conflict since the beginning. There's a commitment reached by the government to grant two million hectares of land for farmers, for farming, community development, and for restitution of IDPS who have been forced to be displaced from their lands. However, there is a big question mark about how this is going to happen because there is a big problem in Colombia. About 50 to 60% of the land in Colombia has dubious property titles. Nobody knows who the land belongs to. Nobody saw. People fear that their de facto control over some land might end or that some land might be taken away from them and given to others or that we are giving away half of the country to the leftist guerrillas. So there is a lot of fear about the capacity of the government to actually implement this process. And this is just one point of the agreement. Same thing happens with transitional justice, with victim reparation, with all of the other elements of the, no, with illegal stopping illegal drug trafficking. How are you going to do that? No, they are just going to continue doing that. So there's a lot of fear and uncertainty and there is a lot of political entrepreneurs who are capitalizing on this fear. And that's something that we have to address, changing the narrative of fear to a narrative of hope. And in that sense, thinking about what will make the Colombian peace process, what will tell us if the process has been successful, I don't think it will be the signing of the agreements, something that I think will happen in the next months if not even weeks, luckily. I don't think it's not even the implementation of the agreements, but what really, the proof of the pudding, whether the process is being successful or not, will be on whether Colombians have the perception that their security situation has changed when they feel more secure or not, whether they feel their levels of fear going down and their levels of hope going up. There are some interesting data that suggests that this is actually sort of happening. As I was coming here a couple of days ago from Bogota, I was reading the newspaper in the airplane and I found this newspaper clip about a program called PASIFICO, the program started by the government tackling the Pacific region of the country issues, one of the poorest areas in the country and where the conflict has been felt more strongly. There are some very promising indicators and this is taking sort of like a peace lab of what could be the post-conflictionary in Colombia. In two of the cities, most of the poorest cities of the country, Bonaventura and Tomaco, the indexes of homicides rates were skyrocketing. Just three years ago, Tomaco had 137 deaths for every 100,000 inhabitants and Bonaventura had about 80 or something like that. Now two years after the implementation of that program, those Tomaco went from 137 deaths to 227 deaths per 100 inhabitants. Of course, the perception of security of the community has improved dramatically and they are already experiencing the benefits of peace and this has been a combination on one side of yes, a stronger military presence but with a community orientation but also a deliberate plan to think about integral development and to fight extreme poverty in the country. So not only levels of violence have decreased but the levels of development are increasing and I think that's a promising scenario of what could happen in a post-conflict Colombia and you made reference to this and the panel before, this requires a conception of security that puts the focus on people. So we need to focus on move from the national security model and to more again the human security, having people at the center of the security policies and this means creating spaces for the armed forces are for communities to be able to dialogue and to rebuild relationships of trust. Relationships of trust that have been broken and have been very difficult over these years and I wanted to show you a picture that illustrates I don't know if it can be seen from here. It's there, okay. Couple of years ago, it's a picture of the indigenous communities in Calca and it's a very telling picture of what it means not to trust in your armed forces, your armed forces. So it's this community reservation of indigenous reservation decided to kick out all the actors of the conflict. They kicked out, they said they kicked out the guerrilla and then they also, the army had presence there and they decided to forcefully take down the army as you can see there and you can see the impotence of the armed forces and being let out and also the cold head that they had at the time to prevent a major reaction. I didn't know that it was to the credit of the armed forces. That was very good, but something that cannot be replicated in the future. Just imagine something like this happening in the US and also the communities taking the police out because they don't want it to be here and they say, well, we simply do not trust people with uniforms, whether they are from the army or from the guerrilla, so we'd rather have this by ourselves. That's the kind of relationship of trust relationship that has to be rebuilt in Colombia and if we're going to do that, it is key that we create these spaces for civilians, for community and the military to work together to jointly identify what are the threats that we perceive and to work together towards addressing those threats. I want to finish coming back to the Sustainable Development Agenda with which I started this intervention because I think it's a great coincidence that as Colombians move into, hopefully, the path of peace and reconciliation, we have this global process that will tell us how to measure peace and reconciliation. So we have this match between, okay, we have Gold 16 and we have this peace process and now it's the time for Colombians to think together. Okay, what is it? What does it mean for us to be a more peaceful society in 2030? And I think organizations from civil society, from business sector, from academia, from the government have to create these spaces to jointly imagine what Colombia will look like in 2030, what's the more peaceful Colombia will be and we need to engage in this dialogue. We need to engage in determining what kind of indicators we want. We need to engage in determining what role is there not only for the government but for the military forces, for civil society organizations, for academia, for businesses in building this new Colombia, free from fear, free from want, and free from indignity. Thank you very much. So we have two minutes left since we started late today and I was thinking of closing it but I think I'll let one question and if it's a quick one then two. So we might go over a few minutes but at least we'll get in a couple of questions. Okay, we had somebody who was gonna bring, yes, thank you. There's two, so. Sorry, I didn't see, here we go. If you could introduce yourself. Yes, I'm Laurel Stone. I'm with the Crock Institute for Peace Studies and I work with the Peace Accords Matrix which follows implementation of peace agreements including the upcoming Colombian one. I have two questions but I'll save one just in case someone else has another question. So I guess my primary one is brief. What do you think will happen if the referendum is negative? What happens if the people vote against this peace agreement? It's something that my team has been really trying to struggle with and try to understand and it'd be great to hear, especially those that have been in Colombia very recently with all the negative opinions. What do you think will happen? Great, thanks so much Laurel. Sir? Tom Bermud, I'm with Catholic Relief Services, CRS. I wanted to ask Father Lionel and perhaps others. What do you see as the relationship between the anger, the desire for revenge and those kinds of psychosocial attitudes and trauma? We talked yesterday about trauma. I didn't hear any reference that sort of connects the pain and the trauma with those feelings and those psychological dimensions. Okay, thanks. And I saw one last one. So let's just do one quick last one and then the panelists can address the questions. Thank you. My name is Ntavisen Gormon from Zababwe. And I wanted to hear a little bit more about the truth-telling processes. I think you shared very well in terms of forgiveness, repatriations. I just want to know about the truth-telling process and what support structures exist to enable that to happen. Great, thanks so much. Who would like to begin? I'm going to say a few words about forgiveness. You know, in fact, I think forgiveness is the best healer for trauma. I've been working for the last 15 years with thousands of people, both from victimaries, from offenders or from victims. And I don't have time enough to speak about that, but you know, the self-reparation, self-restoration is so important. And what we found in Colombia is that thousands of people are healing their traumas through forgiveness. Yeah, I know. About the referendum, that's a very tricky question. I have exactly the same discussions, and their government made a commitment to endorse the agreements through referendum, but so polarized, and there is so much opposition that they have to live to the commitment, but there is a real big risk there. I think us as organizations who support the peace process need to be very active now, changing the narrative, changing the narrative of fear and really mobilizing ourselves to promote an affirmative vote to the agreements. And then on reconciliation, just one final comment. There's a lot of talk here about reconciliation, and as Father said, on reconciliation, it's very important to deal with the past, to forgive, but as important as dealing with the past, more important is dealing with the future. Reconciliation is also dealing with the future. What is the program? What is the project that we have to gather as Colombians? And that's an opportunity that we have to articulate those spaces to discuss reconciliation among all different sectors of society, and I hope we have an opportunity to do that in the coming years. I'll just say that there's a very similar experience in the Philippines with the MILF process in which the Congress was not able to pass the implementing law for the agreement that was the product of many years of negotiations similarly to Colombia. The hope there was that there was built up so much momentum from the MILF side and a transition, what they call a normalization process that they had really committed to and done a lot of internal pedagogy with their own combatants, that really set forward a train that is moving in one direction and will then hopefully find another avenue to legitimize sort of that transition. And I can only suspect from little indications that the FARC would certainly, its leadership sees this as a really historic opportunity and would be committed to this. And the other thing is this plebiscite referendum may happen once we have 50% of the FARC disarms. It's gonna be a progressive disarmament by units and it's not all 100% of each unit will be disarmed. So they will still retain some weapons, but the disarmament process will be pretty well advanced. So that hopefully will play into their psyches in terms of their commitment. Obviously it doesn't help the degree of trust with the other counterpart on the other side of the table. But maybe Mark wants to add on that question. Mark. Wonderful, thank you all. Thank you all for very interesting presentations. Thank you for the interesting questions. And go break, have some coffee.