The Colombian government has accepted a trial ceasefire proposal by the rebel National Liberation Army (ELN), Luis Carlso Restrepo, the nation's visiting high commissioner for peace said on Wednesday in Cuban capital Havana.

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe "has asked me to tell the ELN we accept their experimental and transitory ceasefire proposal," said Restrepo, leader of a government delegation that has held exploratory conversations with the rebel army, in a bid to begin a formal peace process.

ELN delegation leader, best known by his alias Pablo Beltran, had on Monday proposed an immediate end to hostilities, on an experimental and temporary basis, to create an atmosphere of peace to help negotiations in this round: the sixth since talks began in December 2005.

This declaration "helps (us) enormously in beginning the debate on the complete halt to hostilities, a topic the government has insisted on and which we consider to be of the highest importance," Restrepo said.

The beginning of the ceasefire and how it will be checked remain to be agreed, however.

The ELN, Colombia's second-largest anti-government organization after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, has been fighting the government since the 1960s. But its forces have dwindled to fewer than 2,000 fighters from some 4,500 after a series of military offensives by government forces in recent years.

The country has been locked in a four-decade civil war, the longest in Latin America, in which government forces, guerrillas and paramilitaries are fighting one another. The conflicts kill more than 3,000 people every year.

(Xinhua News Agency April 19, 2007)