BELFAST — One night in December 1974, when Juan Manuel Santos was a student living in London, the future Colombian president was walking past the Naval and Military Club in Piccadilly when a bomb exploded in a nearby bin. He was thrown off his feet but otherwise unharmed. The blast had been planted by the Irish Republican Army.

This unexpected brush with “the Troubles” stayed with Santos. The Colombian leader followed the Northern Irish peace process from afar during the 1990s, and, when time came to negotiate with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), looked to Belfast for inspiration.

For almost five years, politicians, trade unionists and human rights activists traveled between Northern Ireland, Bogota and Havana to assist in peace talks. “We brought the formula that worked to a fashion for us and let them take what they wanted,” said Conor Murphy, a Sinn Féin minister for regional development in Northern Ireland’s devolved parliament at Stormont, outside Belfast.

“We were out offering our experiences of negotiations, our experiences of the factors that we considered were necessary parts of establishing a negotiated peace process.”

In 2013, Murphy was part of the first international delegation to visit the FARC during nascent talks with the Colombian government. These discussions eventually produced a peace deal. While that agreement was surprisingly rejected in an October referendum, negotiations are still going on to bring to a close a 52-year conflict that has left at least 220,000 people dead.

If, as both Santos and the FARC still maintain, an agreed transition from war to peace is the only option, Colombia might eventually look a little like Northern Ireland.

"The FARC are an unknown entity, they had been dehumanized, they were 'narco-terrorists,' they were 'drug dealers'" — Conor Murphy

For 50 years, the austere neoclassical buildings of Stormont housed a one-party Protestant state that often discriminated against Northern Irish Catholics. Now it is the seat of a power-sharing government. Murphy — who joined the IRA as a teenager during the 1981 hunger strikes — sits around a cabinet table with Irish republicanism’s ideological nemesis, the Democratic Unionist Party. From his window, he has a view of unionist leader Edward Carson, whose statue looms over east Belfast.

Murphy believes that FARC has a "genuine" commitment to peace and he is “disappointed but not despondent” about the Colombian referendum. But just as Sinn Féin prioritized a political strategy from the 1980s onwards — a lesson learned directly from the African National Congress in South Africa — FARC need to come out of the jungle, both literally and metaphorically.

Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and many other republicans had prominent media profiles long before the peace process began in the 1990s. Until recently, FARC leader Rodrigo Londono, better known under his nickname Timochenko, and the rest of the guerrilla hierarchy were more easily recognized by their beards and fatigues than by their political views.

"In our peace process you had people who are readily identifiable and the public could make a judgment on them as to whether they are sincere or not," said Murphy. "The FARC are an unknown entity, they had been dehumanized, they were 'narco-terrorists,' they were 'drug dealers.' And then suddenly the public are presented with a deal and asked to vote on it.”

* * *

Almost four decades after escaping a republican bomb, Santos returned to London in 2011 to meet Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief negotiator in Northern Ireland. In a meeting at the Ritz Hotel, the Colombian president asked Powell to put together a team of experts to produce a road map for talks and tips for Colombian officials based on his interactions with the IRA.

Around the same time, Justice for Colombia, an NGO founded by British trade unionists in response to government repression in Colombia, started looking to Belfast for peace process lessons, too. In November 2012, representatives of every mainstream Northern Irish political party visited Colombia — just as secret talks between the state and FARC were taking place in Havana.

“We weren’t trying to interfere. What we were trying to do was point out some of the problems and the issues that we had,” said John McCallister, a former deputy leader of the Ulster Unionists from near the Irish border.

Traditionally, Irish republicanism has been closely linked to left-wing international guerrilla groups. Before he visited Colombia, McCallister had “very much a one-sided view: The FARC was this evil group.” But his opinion changed as he spent time in Colombia.

“I realized, yes, [the FARC] have done some evil acts but you still need the peace to work,” he said. “Making peace with your friends isn’t difficult, but you need to bring in all the protagonists and that’s difficult.”

Although Northern Ireland is now at peace, its politics remain divided along sectarian lines. Somewhat ironically, Colombia was a place where nationalists and unionists had an opportunity to meet in ways that can still be difficult in the hot-house atmosphere of Stormont.

“It pushed me to a place I never thought I’d be,” recalled McCallister. “I never thought I’d be sitting in a Colombian prison with a Sinn Féin MP talking to FARC guerrillas. And I was the one raising issues about the prisoners’ health!”

* * *

The Colombian agreement — signed in the presence of dozens of heads of state in Cartagena just days before the plebiscite — has clear parallels with the deal that ended the 30-year Northern Irish conflict. As in Belfast in 1998, the tension between justice and peace dominates.

Under the Cartagena plan, FARC would have a guaranteed presence in parliament. Rather than extensive jail terms, rebels who confess their crimes would face several years of “effective restrictions on their liberty.” Former president Alvaro Uribe — the figurehead for the campaign against the peace deal — called for FARC leadership to serve jail time.

Prisoners were a sticking point in Northern Ireland, too. Under the Belfast Agreement, all political prisoners were released within two years. This divided unionism — just over a majority of Protestants voted for the agreement — was widely seen as crucial to the successful transition to power-sharing.

“You need to convince political prisoners coming out that there is a dividend for peace,” said Michael Culbert, a coordinator with Coiste na n-Iarchimí, a network for former republican prisoners based in West Belfast. “You need to convince them that they have a life and a role in the new situation.”

“We were saying, 'get the community dialogue going, get people discussing," — Michael Culbert

Having visited Colombia as part of an earlier peace delegation, in May of this year Culbert traveled to Havana to meet Timoshenko and the FARC hierarchy. The Belfast man’s message was clear: Discuss the negotiations with the rank and file.

After decades of largely urban guerrilla war, the IRA spent years preparing its membership for the ceasefires and eventual disarmament. The FARC’s 5,000-strong standing army is overwhelmingly rural, with less experience of internal debate.

“We were saying, 'get the community dialogue going, get people discussing.' We had to do all that. We did that for years. We spoke to the families of the dead, to all those with an investment in the struggle,” Culbert said.

John McCallister believes that not enough was done to sell the peace deal across all sections of Colombian society ahead of October’s referendum.

“There seemed to be a whole civil society in Bogota and other cities that weren’t affected by the whole thing. There was a disconnect there. That disconnect was reflected in the turnout out. Less than 38 percent of Colombians cast a ballot. A country of almost 50 million rejected the peace deal by less than 60,000 votes. The “No” vote was strongest in the areas furthest from the fighting.

* * *

Northern Ireland’s peace is far from perfect. The Democratic Unionists, the largest party, did not even support the 1998 agreement, and tensions with its Sinn Féin partners in government are rarely far below the surface, not least over Brexit.

But the main orders of business in Stormont — welfare reform, the state of the health service — attest to a politics that is, slowly, moving towards something akin to normality.

Last April, Barack Obama visited Belfast. The U.S. president pointedly drew attention to Belfast’s role in the Colombian peace process. “They've actually brought people from Northern Ireland to come and describe how you overcome years of enmity and hatred and intolerance and try to shape a country that is unified,” Obama said.

Critics say that Northern Ireland has cultivated a “peace industry.” Its leaders travel the world talking about dialogue, while Protestants and Catholics are still separated by corrugated iron walls. But Mariela Kohon, director of Justice for Colombia, says that Northern Irish involvement in the peace process was not just symbolic.

"I am very confident that things will be resolved" — Mariela Kohon

“They have shared not only the successes but also the challenges that still remain. We have discussed issues around the decommissioning of weapons, political prisoners, transition from armed group to political participation, negotiating tactics and strategies, the reforms to policing, legal advice around the victims and transitional justice agreement, women’s role in peacemaking, dismantling of paramilitary groups.”

Kohon is currently in Havana, advising FARC negotiators specifically on international issues. She is still hopeful that a lasting peace agreement can be reached, pointing out that the areas most affected by violence voted "Yes" in October.

“I am very confident that things will be resolved. There is a clear commitment from both sides to reach a conclusion as soon as possible, and what we need to see urgently is an implementation of the agreements so the Colombian people can finally begin to live in peace after 52 years of war.”