RIGHTS-GUATEMALA: Genocide Culprits Can Be Tried

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 1 1999 (IPS) - While suspected culprits of acts of genocide cited in a UN-backed report on Guatemalan atrocities have not been named, they can and should face trial say the authors of the report.

The three members of the Historical Clarification Commission in Guatemala released their report last week. In it they charged former Guatemalan officials with acts of genocide against the Mayan population.

Critics say, however, now that most of the government officials from the worst phase in the early 1980s are out of power and an amnesty prevents the arrest of suspected war criminals, the report likely will “die on the vine.”

The report blamed the government for killing some 90 percent of the 200,000 Guatemalans who perished in the conflict between the army and leftist rebels.

Yet the commission’s German chairman, Christian Tomuschat, argued here Monday that Guatemala’s amnesty largely is restricted to crimes committed during fighting – and explicitly excludes genocide. The genocide culprits, he contended, can always be tried by the Guatemalan Ministry of Justice, since those crimes have nothing to do with the military conflict.

“There was a massacre of entire villages, a policy of total destruction,” Tomuschat said. “(In some villages), every human being was killed, including women, children, babies and elderly people…Nobody can explain these atrocities (except) as an attempt to exterminate an entire group as such.”

Tomuschat acknowledged that the report named no individuals as criminally responsible for the acts of genocide.

In fact, the Oslo Agreement signed by officials of the government and of the National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unit (or URNG) in 1994 stated that “the Commission shall not attribute responsibility to any individual in its work, recommendations and report, nor shall these have any judicial aim or effect.”

Nevertheless, at least one commissioner argued that determining responsibility for the worst offenses should not be difficult.

“In 1981 (when the worst phase of killings began), everyone knows who the president of the republic was, and who was sitting as the army chief of staff,” argued Otilia Lux de Coti, one of the commission’s two Guatemalan members.

Although not mentioning him by name, Lux de Coti indicated the one man singled out by human-rights groups for orchestrating the worst atrocities during 1981-83: Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, then the country’s president.

It was during Rios Montt’s rule that the commission observed what Lux de Coti described as a transition from the government’s war with Communist rebels to its attack on the indigenous Mayan people.

The commission uncovered the existence of at least 630 massacre sites, she noted, and even saw some “planning documents” for the government’s 1982-83 campaign.

President Alvaro Arzu has been largely silent about the report’s findings, the severity of which reportedly took some Guatemalan officials by surprise.

But Arzu was present when the commissioners unveiled the report last Thursday, and Tomuschat praised his administration for letting the commission carry out its work “in full independence”.

The question remains whether the current civilian government will attempt to carry out any arrests or investigations into the actions of the military-backed regimes of the past. Many crimes likely fall under the amnesty, although the massacres of villages may not, as Tomuschat noted.

The United Nations, which helped fund the report and which was its official recipient, has not commented on whether further investigations are necessary.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a message delivered last week by Assistant Secretary-General Alvaro de Soto, argued that the report’s findings “must become a part of the nation’s history and culture”.

“Its widespread dissemination throughout Guatemala will allow for analysis, public debate and private contemplation of the chain of events and responsibilities that brought such tragedy to recent Guatemalan history,” he said.

Some of the report’s findings also embarrass other countries, notably the United States, which supported the Rios Montt government and its predecessors, and was involved in a 1954 coup which overthrew populist President Jacobo Arbenz.

“We did not wish to say that the U.S. government bears direct responsibility for any act of genocide,” Tomuschat said. “But the U.S. government knew perfectly well what was going on in the countryside” at the time when it supported the regime which carried out the worst massacres.”

Also, Tomuschat said, some U.S.-based companies like Coca-Cola have been involved indirectly in some of the incidents reported by the Clarification Commission. In particular, the report includes a lengthy annex detailing how Coca-Cola’s Guatemalan subsidiary “pursued mercilessly the trade union movement”, Tomuschat argued.

At the same time, UN officials privately have lauded the United States for providing a wealth of information about the Guatemalan government’s programme to “pacify” the countryside – even when that material reflected poorly on Washington’s policy.

UN officials also are hoping that the report can build momentum to create other bodies to help Guatemalan society deal with the legacy of the atrocities.

The UN Childrens’ Fund this week called for the establishment of a national commission to search for Guatemala’s disappeared children.

The report showed that “children were not only indirect victims of the conflict, but also direct targets of cruel violence”, the Fund’s executive director, Carol Bellamy, said.