Colombia FARC rebels: We'll never disarm (2nd Roundup)

Jul 21, 2008, 21:36 GMT

Bogota - Colombia's largest leftwing rebel force FARC Monday declared it would never lay down weapons and stop fighting - an answer to demands by millions of demonstrators worldwide that such groups release nearly 3,000 hostages, held often for years.

While the demonstrators concentrated on demanding hostage release, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez added a call for rebels to lay down weapons and stop fighting.

The response from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was signed by FARC commanders Rodrigo Granda and Jesus Santrich and was delivered via the ABP news agency, often used by the group to make announcements.

'We will never be the ones - never, a thousand times never - to lay down our weapons,' they wrote.

FARC will continue unchanged in its fight 'for communist ideals and against imperialism,' they proclaimed in the text.

ABP reported that Granda und Santrich, two top ideologists of the 44-year-old guerrilla group, submitted the declaration after internal debate over demands by Chavez to release all hostages and lay down their weapons.

Chavez, who has tried to help mediate a solution, told FARC and other rebel groups that there was no room in today's world for guerrilla warfare.

Granda is also known as FARC's foreign minister - freed by the government of conservative President Alvaro Uribe last year at the behest of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. France had hoped the gesture would pry loose Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian citizen and one-time Colombian presidential candidate, from captivity by FARC.

After nearly seven years in captivity, Betancourt was rescued on July 2, along with 14 other high profile hostages, through a Colombia commando mission that used a ruse to trick the rebels into releasing them.

Sunday's demonstrators used the occasion of Colombia's 198th independence celebrations from Spain to protest FARC and other groups.

Three South American presidents marked the day in Leticia, Colombia, in the Amazon jungle near the border with Brazil and Peru. Uribe was joined by Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Peru's Alan Garcia.

FARC has been weakened in recent months by a series of Colombian government coups, including the killing of one FARC leader and the death of another, and the successful rescue of Betancourt, three American security contractors and some other high profile hostages that FARC wanted to exchange for some of their own in prison.

But the end of four decades of civil conflict in the South American country is hardly in sight, and rebels receive fresh recruits daily from the poverty-stricken rural areas where they rule.