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Colombian gov't, FARC rebels sign new peace deal

Xinhua, November 13, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Colombian government and the country's largest guerrilla group -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) -- on Saturday signed a new peace deal after nine days of intense negotiations in Havana.

In a joint statement issued by the two sides and presented by the representatives of the peace process' guarantor countries -- Cuba and Norway, the government and the FARC said they "have reached a new definitive peace agreement, with changes, corrections and modifications provided by the different sectors of the Colombian society."

"We invite the whole of the Colombian society and the international community to support this new peace accord. Peace cannot wait any longer," the Norwegian representative, Dag Nylander, said during the reading of the text, along with his Cuban colleague, Ivan Mora.

Ivan Marquez, chief negotiator of the FARC and his counterpart from the government, Humberto de la Calle, signed the document at a formal ceremony presided over by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez.

The initial peace agreement was rejected by a slight margin in an Oct. 2 referendum in Colombia.

The vote sent both sides back to the negotiating table, with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos insisting a new deal be readied as quickly as possible.

Those against the first agreement reached after nearly four years of negotiations are mainly conservatives led by former hardline President Alvaro Uribe, who said it didn't go far enough to hold the rebels accountable for past crimes.

Last week, Uribe and former Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who also criticized the first deal, gave Santos a list of over 500 proposed changes to 57 different issues. [ The new agreement will not be put to a referendum vote, like the one that sank the previous deal, but will be submitted to congress for approval, the Caracas-based TV news network Telesur reported earlier.

The two sides aim to put an end to five decades of fighting that has left more than 260,000 people dead and displaced millions of others since 1964. Endi