When guerrilla groups lay down arms
Representative Image (AI)
PARIS: The
Kurdistan Workers' Party
(
PKK
), which on Monday announced its dissolution and the end of its insurgency against Turkey, is not the first group to end a decades-long armed campaign.
Here are some other key cases:
ETA
The Basque separatist group ETA, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty), waged a four-decade campaign of bombings and shootings for an independent Basque country in southwest France and northeast Spain.
It declared and end to its armed operations in October 2011 and announced its dissolution in May 2018.
FARC
On November 24, 2016 former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos signed a historic peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's biggest rebel group, in a bid to end a leftist insurgency that had lasted more than 50 years.
S
antos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
Some groups across the country rejected the demobilisation process and regrouped in two structures: Segunda Marquetalia and Estado Mayor Central (EMC), FARC's main dissident group.
Violence involving another powerful leftist group, the ELN, as well as rightwing paramilitaries and drug cartels has also continued.
Moro Islamic Liberation Front
A 2014 peace deal between the Philippines government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) ended a decades-long armed campaign for a separate state, and later for Muslim self-rule in the majority-Catholic Asian nation.
The deal ended a deadly armed rebellion which broke out in the 1970s in the southern Philippines.
But small groups of Islamist fighters opposed to the peace deal continued to operate on the island of Mindanao. Communist rebels also continue to fight in the region.
Tamil Tigers
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist group based in Sri Lanka and known as the Tamil Tigers, were crushed in May 2009 in a huge military assault, ending a 37-year civil war.
According to rights groups, up to 40,000 civilians were killed in the last weeks of the war, during the army assault that eventually crushed the Tamil Tigers' command.
IRA
After 35 years of efforts to find peace, the breakthrough Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998 ended a sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as the "Troubles".
In 2005, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) officially gave up its armed campaign. In practice it had laid down its arms in 1997 to take part in the peace talks.
It had ordered its members to use peaceful methods to achieve their goal of reunifying the island and ending British sovereignty over Northern Ireland.
Its weapons were decommissioned in September 2005.
Some paramilitary groups nevertheless remained active, including the New IRA.
Unita
Angolan forces killed Jonas Savimbi, leader of Unita (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) in February 2002, ending a 27-year civil war. A ceasefire was signed on April 4, 2002 in Luanda.
UNITA then became the main opposition party.
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