“I’m tired, tired of Farc, tired of the people, tired of communal life. Tired of never having anything for myself. It would be worth it if we knew why we were fighting. But the truth is I don’t believe in this any more.”
So wrote Tanja Nijmeijer, a 29-year-old, middle-class Dutch woman who is among a handful of Europeans who joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), South America’s biggest, bloodiest and possibly last Marxist insurgent group.
Discovered by Colombian troops in a raid on a hastily abandoned camp in July, excerpts from the diary were leaked to the media to try to discredit the rebels as sexist, brutal, hypocritical and far removed from a Che Guevara-type mystique.
Nijmeijer, whose nom de guerre is “Eillen”, escaped with her comrades into the jungle and is still with Farc, but might have been punished for gifting a propaganda boon to a state the group has been fighting for decades.
With United States funding, President Alvaro Uribe’s forces have pushed the rebels out of cities and into remote redoubts.
From the entries, written in Dutch, English and Spanish, Nijmeijer emerges as a passionate left-winger who is occasionally homesick and has had second thoughts since joining the guerrillas in 2002.
“I don’t know where this project is going. How will it be when we come to power? The girlfriends of the commanders in Ferrari Testa Rossas, with breast implants, eating caviar? It seems like it,” said one entry last April.
Other entries, however, show a woman still committed to violent means and impatient for action. “Bored and hungry. We can’t find the enemy, and so I have to study Farc documents for the millionth time,” she grumbled in June. Another entry said: “Damn! I’ve been waiting three days for a helicopter to shoot it down, but it hasn’t flown over the area.”
Nijmeijer, who wrote her thesis on Farc at the University of Groningen, moved to Colombia in 2000. She taught English to wealthy children in Pereira and appears to have been radicalised by volunteer work in Âpoverty-stricken slums.
She joined a humanitarian aid mission into rebel-held territory in August 2001 and later joined the fighters, a force made up largely of peasants which professes a commitment to social justice. An international public relations campaign reportedly persuaded 18 other Europeans to join Farc.
The reality, say many Colombians, is an organisation less committed to ideology than cocaine trafficking and perpetuating its commanders’ wealth and power. Its methods include kidnapping, extortion and ambushes.
“In certain circles in Europe there still exists the romantic image of the guerrillas as Robin Hood, or Che Guevara, fighting the bad guys for the benefit of the poor,” Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos told the Associated Press. “Nijmeijer fell into this trap.”
The government has gleefully highlighted Nijmeijer’s complaints about commanders holding private parties and lording it over the rank and file.
She also wrote of romances between guerrillas that left some with sexually transmitted diseases, including Aids.
“I want to leave here, at least this unit,” she wrote last November. “But for the time being, you know that you’re more or less a prisoner. What can you do?”
She was permitted occasional emails and a visit by her mother in 2005. “Tanja’s mind was not to be changed,” the family said in a brief statement.
In a recent interview with Dutch television a rebel spokesman, Raul Reyes, rejected claims that Nijmeijer was a prisoner and said she was free to go on holiday with her family. — Â