Viewed from the Middle East, 2015 has been a year of raging battles amid a contest for dominance among regional powers. But that is not the story of the whole world. Shift the focus away from the Middle East and it is clear that violence does not have to last forever. In Colombia, the longest armed insurgency in the Americas is close to reaching a peaceful conclusion. Rebel leaders may soon be throwing down their rifles and running for election.
The insurgency by the Farc (which stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) began in the 1964, when South America was peppered with far-left rebellions. But only in Cuba did Fidel Castro’s Marxists seize power through the barrel of a gun.
The Marxist historian EJ Hobsbawm believed that the Cuban revolution was doomed to be an isolated affair, because it took place on an island close to the American shore. If Colombia, a pivotal country forming a strategic link between the Caribbean, Central America and the Andes, had gone communist, much of the rest of the continent might have followed suit. That did not happen.
Though Hobsbawm’s dreams of Latin American revolution were dashed, the Farc rebellion continued into the current century. Fuelled by kidnappings, the drug trade and illegal mining, it battled on through the collapse of the USSR, the conversion of the Chinese communist party to state capitalism and the ascent to power by democratic means of former revolutionaries such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But it could not survive the incapacity of Fidel Castro, which has led to Washington restoring diplomatic relations with Havana.
In March, the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, and the Farc leader, Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, signed an agreement to terminate the conflict. If things proceed smoothly, the peace deal will be put to a referendum. The peace process is not hidden from public view: it sets great store by truth-telling: those who admit their crimes – whether guerrillas, military or paramilitaries – will receive reduced penalties from a special court. But there will be no general amnesty.
If such a long and bitter struggle stretching over two generations with 220,000 dead can be resolved, why should it be different in Syria, Iraq or Yemen? Colombia is no paragon of good government: in a system dating from colonial times, the countryside is dominated by big landowners and criminal bosses with their own private armies, with half of the country effectively beyond the reach of the state. The peace deal requires addressing the terrible inequality suffered by the indigenous people and those of African descent and the ravages of the cocaine trade.
Four elements have been crucial in Colombia. The first is the international context. Throughout Latin America armed insurgencies have faded away, into the era of black and white photos. Farc was a rare holdout. The second is that both sides in the conflict have to be convinced that they cannot win. This message may be obvious to outsiders, but may take a decades for the belligerents to internalise it. The Colombian army moved on to the offensive under the previous president, Alvaro Uribe – Mr Santos was his defence minister – with US intelligence and technical support. The Farc guerrillas hung on in the jungle and probably could have survived for many more years. But it was clear that it was never going to be marching to victory in Bogota.
At the same time, Farc’s brutal tactics alienated even the peasantry, which had been oppressed by local kingpins and their armed militias. It became impossible for trade unions and civic forces opposing the Colombian elite to see Farc as any kind of liberators.
But the guerrillas still needed the blessing of their ideological mentors, the Cubans, before making a historic compromise. Which is why the peace negotiations were held in “revolutionary” Havana, even as the Stars and Stripes was hoisted again over the US embassy building.
If all goes well, Mr Santos, the defence minister turned peacemaker, should merit a Nobel Prize. In the Middle East, however, it is still hard to find evidence of the four key elements of the Colombian settlement.
In Latin America since the 1990s, superpower tensions have given way to compromise. In the Middle East the opposite is true. In Syria, Russia and the US are once again at odds. Their rivalry is overlaid on the contest between an over-ambitious Iran on the one hand and Saudi Arabia and its allies on the other, which is increasingly expressed in sectarian terms. At almost five years old, the Syrian war is still too young for the warring parties to be convinced they cannot win. The Syrian army may be shaky and lacking recruits, but now that it has the support of the Russian bombers in the air and advisers on the ground, there is more confidence in Damascus that the Assad regime can survive.
It is possible that the cutthroats of ISIL may go the way of Farc and alienate the people living in their so-called state on the borders of Iraq and Syria with their high taxes and harsh codes of justice. But we are a long way from that. Most of the Syrians who have fled their homes are in terror of the regime, not ISIL. ISIL propaganda still manages to attract deluded volunteers from around the world.
And where is the single authority which could bless a compromise involving all the strands of the Syrian opposition to compromise for peace? The Colombian state has modernised over the years; it is hard to imagine the Syrian regime, however it develops, being more than an empty shell supported by Iran and Russia. The first step must be fixing the regional context – reducing tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Today that sounds naive, with a more muscular tone being expressed by Saudi Arabia under King Salman, while Iran is dreaming of itself as a resurgent power with horizons expanded by the lifting of sanctions. But this unpromising basis is where the solution must start.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter: @aphilps