RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Activists Warn that President’s Remarks Heighten Danger

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Sep 10 2003 (IPS) - Human rights groups warned that hostile remarks by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe targeting human rights groups put activists in even greater danger in this civil war-torn country.

In a statement Tuesday, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said that in a ”stunningly strident speech,” the right-wing president implied that local human rights advocates had ties to terrorism.

Addressing a military ceremony Monday, Uribe lashed out at local human rights organisations that released a report assessing the government’s first year in office from a human rights standpoint.

He accused them of being ”at the service of terrorism” and of ”copying many of their criticisms from the web site” of the country’s main rebel group, the 17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In his 25-minute address, which was broadcast on national television, he repeated the words ”terrorism”, ”terrorist” or ”terrorists” 55 times.

But WOLA pointed out that the term ”terrorist” was only used to refer to guerrilla forces, while right-wing paramilitaries, which are widely blamed for a large majority of the atrocities committed in Colombia, were referred to as ”private justice groups.”

”If the government has evidence to suggest that any particular organisation is engaged in illegal activity under Colombian law, that evidence should be presented to a court of law and judged accordingly,” WOLA underlined.

”In the absence of such judicial action, statements characterising human rights organisations as linked to terrorism are simply irresponsible and place the lives of all Colombian human rights defenders at risk,” the organisation warned.

In a communique Tuesday, the London-based Amnesty International also noted that human rights defenders in Colombia ”have been the victims of extrajudicial executions and the targets of threats from the security forces and their paramilitary allies, who label them subversives to silence their campaigns in defence of human rights and justice.

”It is regrettable that the government is launching a campaign that leaves human rights advocates at even greater risk,” the international watchdog group added, warning that ”Intolerance toward criticism leads toward an authoritarian society”.

The human rights report to which Uribe was referring was released Monday by the Colombian Platform for Human Rights, Democracy and Development, an umbrella group of 80 local non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The report, ”The Authoritarian Spell: the First Year of Government of Alvaro Uribe Vélez”, makes a critical assessment of the government’s policies, pointing to shortcomings in the areas of education, health, labour, housing and food security.

The report says Uribe is dismantling public policies designed to prevent and tackle the problem of forced displacement. As many as three million people have been forced to flee their homes due to the four-decade civil war.

In the chapter dedicated to the trade union movement, the authors acknowledge that the number of targeted killings, forced disappearances, and kidnappings of labour activists has gone down, but points out that arrests, death threats and searches without a warrant have increased.

The report also complains that Uribe has no land reform policy aimed at curbing the expansion of the ”latifundia” – large landed estates -, and points out that large landholders owned 44 percent of the country’s arable land in 1996 and 62 percent in 2001.

While the concentration of land ownership grows, 12.4 million of Colombia’s 42 million people live in poverty in the countryside, said the local human rights groups.

The impact of Uribe’s speech was even greater because it came on the eve of an international meeting on human rights in Bogota, in which prominent figures like José Manuel Vivanco, the head of the Americas division of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, Susan Lee, Amnesty International’s director for the Americas, French magistrate Philippe Texier, and Robert Goldman with the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights were taking part.

Michael Frühling, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia, said the Uribe government has not yet taken concrete steps towards compliance with the human rights recommendations set forth by the United Nations in April.

In a communique, the EU delegation in Colombia reiterated its support for civil society groups committed to the defence of human rights and democracy, values that it described as ”the essence” of the bloc’s foreign relations.

In his speech, Uribe said the authors of the human rights report belonged to ”the politicking human rights sector” which is ”at the service of terrorism and cowardly hides behind the banner of human rights.”

The groups that put out the report include Colombia’s most prestigious human rights organisations, such as the Jesuit-affiliated Centre for Popular Education and Research (CINEP), whose databank is the leading source of statistics for journalists and academics on human rights violations in this country.

The authors also included the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective, which won the Martin Ennals human rights prize this year, granted by institutions like the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

The Bogota newspaper El Tiempo said the report’s criticism contrasted with Uribe’s high popularity ratings.

Referring to the report, Uribe said ”public opinion will always be on our side, despite the voices that try to disorient it.”

The latest opinion polls show that the far-right Uribe enjoys approval ratings of around 73 percent one year into his four-year term, which began on Aug. 7, 2002.

Since July 2002, there have been at least 7,000 politically motivated killings, said Gustavo Gallón, director of the Colombian Commission of Jurists, another of the organisations that produced the book. The Commission has consultative status with the United Nations.

”That figure is twice the number of deaths reported five years ago, at the start of the government of Andrés Pastrana” (1998-2002), said Gallón. Only 25 to 30 percent of the deaths occurred in combat.

Gallón said the human rights situation in Colombia is ”extremely dire,” and that Uribe’s national security policy ”has given rise to systematic human rights violations.” He added that some of the government’s statistics ”are not correct.”

Uribe was elected on promises of a strong-arm approach to cracking down on ”terrorism.” He is creating an ”army” of civilian informers who assist the security forces with intelligence gathering, passed a war tax, and strengthened the army.

In an earlier statement, Amnesty International stated that ”we are dismayed to see that many of the measures adopted to guarantee greater security are not aimed at illegal armed groups, but rather at the majority of Colombians, whose rights are restricted and whose security against abuses of power and arbitrary actions is undermined.

”The measures that Amnesty International is particularly concerned at include attempts to undermine the human rights guarantees contained in the 1991 Constitution.”

WOLA said Tuesday that ”Uribe lashed out at critics of his security and social policies, and defended the government tactics, including the granting of judicial police powers to public security forces, arbitrary detentions, and raids of civil society organisations”.

In defence of his government’s ”democratic security policies,” Uribe provided an unconventional definition of terrorism Monday: ”This government is making a big effort to confront a clinical diagnosis of terrorism: high fiscal deficit, high unemployment, acute poverty and high indebtedness. That cannot be corrected overnight.”

”Uribe took his mask off in front of the entire country,” said Agustín Jiménez with the Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners, an organisation that receives special protection from the state on orders from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. ”This is the true face of Uribe,” he added.

Alirio Uribe with the Lawyers Collective, a group that provides support for victims of human rights violations and the families of murdered reporters and labour activists, challenged the president to prove which part of the text quotes the FARC.

He said the president’s remarks could be seen as giving the go-ahead to paramilitary groups to attack human rights advocates. ”The lives of human rights defenders lie in the hands of the president” said Uribe (no relation to the president).

The activist lamented that the president ”will not accept judicious criticism from the NGOs. He should read the report, because he hasn’t done so, given that it is just now being presented.”

Labelling someone a guerrilla sympathiser can amount to a death sentence in Colombia, activists pointed out, and the president’s failure to specifically identify which groups he was talking about put the entire human rights community in danger.