COLOMBIA-RIGHTS: One Million People Deliberately Displaced

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Oct 1 1997 (IPS) - The rights watchdog organisation Amnesty International accused Colombian armed forces, paramilitary groups and guerrillas Wednesday of violating human rights and deliberately forcing one million people to flee their homes.

Amnesty presented its new report on displaced people in Colombia at a ceremony held in the ‘Casa de America’ in Madrid.

Susan Lee, the author of the study, said “the solution to the violence in Colombia is not military, but political.” But, she added, human rights must not be neglected while peace is being sought.

Colombia’s armed conflict has been fed by nations which supply arms to the various protagonists, “whose contempt for human rights is well-known,” says the report.

Asked to identify those nations, Lee only mentioned the United States, “although there are other countries,” she added. While, Washington supplies weapons to Colombia’s armed forces for the fight against drug trafficking, demanding that they not be employed for other ends, in practice that demand is simply not met, she maintained.

Lee also pointed to the interest in the displacement of peasants shared by the counterinsurgency forces and powerful economic groups. Thousands of peasants are forced to leave their homes under the argument that it is necessary to the counterinsurgency struggle – and their land is later sold by right- wing paramilitary groups to the same big companies that finance them, she said.

The report says one million Colombians – one out of 40 – are living as refugees within their own country, “often due to a deliberate strategy implemented by the army, the paramilitary forces or the guerrillas, as well as to economic interests.”

The main cause of the displacement, according to Amnesty, is persecution by paramilitary organisations (35 percent), “armed opposition groups” (24 percent), and the armed forces and the police (seven percent). In the remaining cases the cause was not identified.

The areas where the displacements are concentrated shift constantly, due to the gravity of the armed conflict. “The only constant are the victims: peasants and workers who live in the disputed areas and whose neutrality as civilians is not recognised” by those involved in the conflict, the report underlines.

The resultant economic problems are aggravated by the “stigmatisation” of the displaced, who are often dubbed “guerrillas or guerrilla sympathisers” by authorities in the areas to which they flee, it adds.

Lee points out that although the armed conflict in Colombia is not only the oldest in Latin America but one of the oldest in the world, the human rights situation has taken a drastic turn for the worse since 1987.

In the past 10 years, some 30,000 people have been killed due to political motives. Torture is also widespread, says Amnesty.

The report stresses the Colombian government’s responsibility to live up to national and international laws that guarantee the basic human rights of all citizens, and urges the administration of Ernesto Samper to put an end to counterinsurgency practices and techniques that lead to displacement, torture, disappearances and extrajudicial executions.

It also calls on the government to live up to its reiterated promise to take measures to dismantle paramilitary organisations, put an end to the impunity enjoyed by human rights violators, promote effective action by the judiciary, end harassment of human rights activists and immediately apply United Nations resolutions.

The report urges the guerrillas or “armed opposition groups” to make a public commitment to respect international human rights law.

It is time for the international community to tackle the problem of protecting displaced people in Colombia, says Amnesty, which calls on all governments to suspend military equipment and training that are used to commit or facilitate abuses.