By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 15 2003 (IPS)

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Colombia recently warned of the growing threat posed by the armed conflict to the country’s 86 indigenous groups.

The UNHCHR office reported that Colombia’s Indians are the targets of massacres, selective killings, threats, intimidation, collective displacement, forced recruitment by armed bands, blockades of food supplies, and attacks on cultural and sacred sites.

According to the Office of the People’s Defender (ombudsman), 106 Indians were murdered in Colombia between January and May, in the context of the armed conflict that has been raging since the 1960s.

The UNHCHR office described the impact of the war on indigenous communities, who account for 1.5 million of a total population of 42 million, as ”an extremely painful reality.”

The National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC) complained that the security forces, right-wing paramilitaries and leftist guerrillas ”abuse the territories and the structure of the indigenous peoples with their armed arrogance and ideologies, and fail to respect the traditional authorities.”

Around 80 percent of Colombia’s indigenous peoples exercise self-government over their traditional territory, legally demarcated in reservations.

But activists warn that the remaining 20 percent are in an especially vulnerable position, as their relationship with the land, the basis of indigenous culture, is not protected.

Human rights groups in Colombia and abroad point out that journalists, trade unionists, social activists, human rights defenders and indigenous people are among those at highest risk in Colombia, where thousands of people are killed every year.

But there is an added dimension to the impact of the violence on indigenous communities, Armando Valbuena, the president of ONIC, pointed out.

”If there is a murder in Riosucio, well, the Embera-chamí number more than 65,000,” said the indigenous leader. ”But a killing among the Siona people, for example, who number just 1,400, has a bigger impact. And one single murder among the Sáliba has a completely different political significance.”

Natural resources and the ownership of land and property are among the factors leading to violence against Indians.

A particularly gruesome killing took place in May in the northeastern department of Arauca, an oil-rich region along the border with Venezuela, where the Sikuan Indians live on the Parreros reservation.

On May 1, a pregnant 16-year-old Sikuan Indian was killed in front of the entire community. Omaira Fernández was seven months pregnant when she was raped and murdered. Her belly was cut open, and the body of her unborn child, like her own, was cut into pieces, stuffed into a bag, and thrown into the Cravo river.

Fernández’s husband had been killed on Dec. 31, and her two- year-old son Nilson is still missing.

The day Fernández was killed, three other members of the Sikuan community went missing. The word among local residents was that they were also ”cut up like animals” and dumped into the river, according to ONIC.

Oil-rich Arauca is the focal point of right-wing President Alvaro Uribe’s security policy. A recently created special army brigade, which was financed by the United States and trained by U.S. advisers, has been assigned to protect oil drilling operations and a pipeline that runs to the Caribbean sea.

Uribe even temporarily transferred his government headquarters to Arauca for three days in July.

ONIC maintains that the May 1 killings were committed by ”members of the national army wearing AUC and ACC armbands.”

The AUC (United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia) is the country’s main paramilitary umbrella, while the ACC (Peasant Self- Defence Forces of Casanaré) is a paramilitary group that operates in the region of Arauca.

A total of 43 Indians from the Parreros reservation have disappeared, including the two highest-level local authorities. And in the neighbouring Betoyes reservation, 545 Sikuan Indians have been displaced from their land.

ONIC’s Valbuena complained to the UNHCHR that Colonel Montoya Sánchez, assistant commander of the army brigade based in Arauca, made the ”rash, irresponsible statement that displaced indigenous people and peasants are obeying orders from the National Liberation Army (ELN),” the country’s second-largest rebel group.

The director of the UNHCHR office in Colombia, Amerigo Incalcaterra, said ”We are aware that in many cases the abuses, such as homicides, of which indigenous people are the targets have been carried out thanks to the connections between members of the security forces and paramilitary groups.”

In the case of the Sikuan Indians, he added, ”government authorities have that information.

”We are waiting for them to duly investigate the incidents in order to determine whether public officials or agents were responsible due to omission or direct participation,” said Incalcaterra.

With regards to the paramilitaries, which are blamed for the lion’s share of gross human rights violations committed in Colombia, ”a change has been noted in certain regions since the government began to talk to them,” said the UN official.

The government and the AUC are negotiating the eventual demobilisation of the paramilitary group.

But ONIC complained that in the talks, Uribe has remained silent about an important question: the kidnapping of indigenous leader Kimy Pernía Domicó 26 months ago by the AUC.

”For us, Kimy is still alive,” Valbuena tersely told reporters last week.

Any attack on a spiritual leader is considered an attack on the memory that keeps an indigenous culture alive, he underlined.

The forced disappearance of Pernía Domicó, the spiritual leader of the Embera-katío people in Tierralta, in the northern department of Córdoba, shook all of Colombia’s indigenous communities.

Pernía Domicó is the grandson of the great Embera chief and shaman (indigenous priest) Jaibaná.

AUC’s central headquarters is located in the department of Córdoba, where the Embera-katío protested the impact on fishing, their main source of food, from the construction of the Urrao hydropower dam on the Sinú river, a huge internationally-financed project.

”There has been an unjustified delay in investigating” Pernía Domicó’s disappearance, said Incalcaterra.

Only the Chimila people, who number less than 2,000, have had good news lately, said Valbuena.

Thanks to the local and international impact of complaints by the UNHCHR and human rights organisations, the Chimila people can now move about freely within and outside their territory, after being sequestered for seven years, cut off from the outside world, and from food supplies, by the armed conflict.

Talks between the group’s leaders and leftist insurgents have also led to a reduction in tension in some parts of the territory where they live.

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