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This story is from February 5, 2018

Laura Restrepo: Conflicts, at the end of the day are a business, so it takes more than just peace talks to end them

Laura Restrepo: Conflicts, at the end of the day are a business, so it takes more than just peace talks to end them
A Peace Commissioner of her native country Columbia, a political journalist and an award-winning author, Laura Restrepo wears many hats. The journalist had played a crucial role in negotiating peace in her war-torn country between the government and guerillas. She also met Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez during her stint as a political journo before being forced into exile in Mexico for her staunch stand on peace in the South American country.

The multi-faced personality was in the city as one of the speakers at the recently-concluded 8th Hyderabad Literary Festival. In her first visit to India, which she describes as a magical and mythical place that all Colombians look forward to going, Laura opens up to Hyderabad Times about her views on public voice of women, women’s writing and peace. Excerpts:
You have emphasised on women’s role after war and in re-building the culture of justice, what draws you to believe women are pivotal in such situations?
Wars and conflicts can be very brutal, and most often takes away the men, and leaves behind women to manage the state of affairs. In such a scenario, when women are the ones leading the state, it’s necessary that they don’t invest in vengeance and focus on building a system of justice because justice is like a third mechanism between the victim and the propagator which ensures that the cycle of violence ends with the punishment.
You have been a champion of justice all your life and even served as the Peace Ambassador between the guerrillas and the Columbian government. Tell us about the experience?
It was a challenging time for me as a Peace Ambassador. For the first time, Colombia was giving a chance to the peace process after a lot of bloodshed. At that critical juncture, we planted the idea of negotiations through talks in both the groups. So, there I was, negotiating with two warring sides. Though there was a huge blowback in the first round, a few years later it did sprout again. Conflicts, at the end of the day are a business, so it takes more than just peace talks to end them.

Did your gender ever interfere with the peace talks?
In Colombia, women have a strong public voice. Though women never made it to the top ranks of decision-making authorities, the lower levels always have strong independent women. So in 1980s, as the Peace
Ambassador, even though sometimes I was the only woman in an army barrack, amid hundreds of guerrilla soldiers and government armies, trying to find a middle ground, I relied on my
inner strength and courage.
In India, women do have some voice, but in conflicts, mostly they are the victims. Does having a voice really helps?
Very often we think having a voice helps, but in Colombia, so many little girls are raped and killed and they are practically invisible in the country too. So, it’s right to say that having a voice is important, but what do you do when they aren’t even visible? So we need to push behind the muscular politics that thrusts women into invisibility and put more women under the system of justice.
You have an envious writing career mixed with some hard core political and crime novels, along with children’s literature like ‘Cows Eat Spaghetti’, how you manage to traverse among various genres?
I like to write from my experiences, from what I have seen and experienced as a journalist. So a lot of my political and crime novels are drawn from experiences and investigations that I undertook as a journalist. Fictionalising real life scenarios was my idea. But I also chose to write from my experiences in Colombo, Sri Lanka which is how I wrote ‘Cows Eat Spaghetti’.
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