By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Sep 23 2002 (IPS)

The intensification of the Colombian civil war in the past few months has forced the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to beef up its budget for attending to the humanitarian needs of the affected population.

With the radicalisation of the irregular armed groups involved in the conflict, the need for humanitarian assistance has increased, explained Yves Giovannoni, chief of Latin American operations for the Geneva-based ICRC.

The ICRC mission is to protect the life and dignity of victims of war or civil strife and to provide assistance.

“It is also our responsibility,” said Giovannoni, noting, “we are the only humanitarian organisation, whether national or international, that maintains contacts with all parties to the conflict, which allows us to go nearly anywhere in Colombia.”

The original Red Cross budget for its activities in Colombia was drafted based on estimates of 115,000 people newly displaced by the conflict, a figure similar to that of 2001. The year before, there were 124,000 internally displaced persons.

But the intensification of the civil war, particularly since the breakdown of the peace talks between the government and the leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in February, changed the panorama, as the number of displaced people reached 97,531 people in just the first six months of this year.

The revised estimate puts the total for 2002 at 195,000 Colombians who will have been forced to abandon their homes as a result of the armed conflict by the end of 2002, said Giovannoni.

As a result, the ICRC resources earmarked for Colombia will increase by more than three million dollars, boosting the original budget from 17.6 million to around 21 million dollars.

With these funds, and often in collaboration with the Colombian Red Cross, the ICRC attends to approximately 90 percent of the needs of the internally displaced population in the country’s rural areas.

Internal armed conflicts, such as Colombia has endured for more than 40 years, are characterised by the fact that their humanitarian consequences are disproportionate to the relatively low intensity of the conflict, commented Georgios Comninos, chief of the ICRC delegation in Colombia, based in Bogotá.

This trait is accentuated in the Colombian conflict because the parties involved do not make a clear distinction between civilians, who are protected in times of war, and the true combatants, stressed Comninos, who directs the 17 offices of the ICRC distributed throughout the country, with 59 delegates and 220 Colombian employees.

The ICRC tries to provide protection and assistance in the countryside in particular, says Comninos, because “the consequences of the conflict are much more acute in the rural areas.”

The humanitarian agency “develops its activities in rural areas, in proximity with the community affected and also in constant dialog with the different actors of the conflict… allowing us permanent access and a humanitarian response,” he said.

The ICRC official explained “there is massive displacement when a community is being affected by extrajudicial killings, or threats or military operations, because the residents tend, of course, to move towards an area that offers better security.”

Anywhere from one million to two million internally displaced Colombians have sought refuge in urban areas. That population, which are considered long term and with few prospects for returning to their places of origin, could soon become the country’s biggest humanitarian problem, commented ICRC Latin American director Giovannoni.

The problem of the internally displaced “is an issue that ought to be addressed as soon as possible because otherwise it will turn into a humanitarian time bomb,” he advised.

Comninos, meanwhile, made a distinction between massive and individual displacement, explaining that massive displacement is when “more than 60 percent of the people from a given area are moving towards small cities or even big cities.”

Individual displacement is limited to the family level, involving persons who have been threatened or directly victimised, “who tend to move in a more discreet way, in a more silent way,” to urban areas.

In more than 50 percent of the cases of massive displacement, the affected people have the opportunity to return to their place of origin within two or three months following displacement, said Comninos

But in the case of individual displacement, possibilities for return are much more reduced. “Only a very tiny proportion are considering that possibility,” he added.

The ICRC has declared its concern about the difficulties in protecting Colombian civilians because the actors in the armed conflict seem to have adopted the violation of international humanitarian law as a war strategy.

International humanitarian law, as stipulated in the Geneva Conventions, is a set of rules aimed at reducing the impact of armed conflict and protecting non-combatants, while also limiting the means and methods that may be used in war.

Another motive for ICRC concern is medical attention and medical access for the Colombian population. As head of the Bogotá office, Comninos complained of the lack of protection for medical personnel and medical infrastructure.

In these conditions, he warned, Colombia runs the risk of humanitarian problems of a different nature: epidemics.

In the northeastern department of Norte de Santander, bordering Venezuela, there was an epidemic of measles, a disease that had previously been eradicated in Colombia, Comninos said, blaming the outbreak on the vulnerability created by the armed conflict.

Excerpt: