COLOMBIA: Time Is Running Out for Hostage-Prisoner Swap

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Dec 16 2003 (IPS) - The families of politicians, police and soldiers held hostage by Colombia’s main rebel group say they cannot wait any longer for a government decision to their call for a humanitarian accord on a prisoner-for-hostage swap with the guerrillas.

Their request that the government seek an agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to secure the release of the hostages, some of whom have been held captive for over six years, has strong local and international political support.

The relatives of the hostages are awaiting a response from the right-wing government of Alvaro Uribe to a proposal presented last week after they called off their occupation of the Bogota cathedral and the main church in Cali, the capital of the western department of Valle del Cauca.

The families, including several children, had occupied the cathedral and church to press the government to negotiate an agreement to swap imprisoned guerrillas for the hostages held by the FARC.

They want Uribe to immediately set up a commission to negotiate with the rebel group.

Although the details of the proposal have not yet been divulged, it is based on the argument that international humanitarian law, as outlined in international conventions signed by Colombia, provides the legal basis for negotiating a humanitarian exchange.

According to the Geneva Convention, swaps of prisoners of war can be carried out on humanitarian grounds. But while taking civilian hostages is a violation of international humanitarian law, kidnapping for ransom is a common crime.

The families are demanding the release of 37 soldiers and police officers who were captured by the FARC in combat, some of them over six years ago, as well as 21 politicians, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, kidnapped in February 2002, and 12 provincial lawmakers seized nearly two years ago from the local parliament in downtown Cali.

The FARC is also holding three U.S. citizens whose plane, a U.S. army Southern Command aircraft on an intelligence mission as part of the U.S.-financed Plan Colombia anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy, was captured by the guerrillas in February.

But the FARC has repeatedly stated that the hostages will only be released when all of the guerrillas are freed from prison. ”Other options are unviable and unacceptable,” said FARC spokesman Raúl Reyes in an interview granted to IPS correspondent Kintto Lucas in Ecuador last November.

However, the Uribe administration has consistently refused to negotiate a humanitarian swap.

In Uribe’s view, there is no civil war or armed conflict in Colombia, which means the guerrillas are not combatants, but ”terrorists,” and no negotiations are possible.

That argument forms the backbone of the administration’s ”democratic security” policy, criticised as draconian by human rights groups.

Uribe says ”The state is willing to seek peace, but on the condition that the terrorists stop kidnapping people, release the hostages, and demobilise.”

Taking part in the occupation of the cathedral last week was Betancourt’s mother, Yolanda Pulecio, Betancourt’s husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, and Marleny Orjuela, president of ASFAMIPAZ (the ”association of relatives of military and police prisoners of the FARC”).

The families also have the support of all former Colombian presidents alive today with the exception of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002), as well as the Roman Catholic Church, political parties, trade unions, academics and civil society movements.

A committee of mediators set up on the families’ request included French Ambassador Daniel Parfait, Mexican Ambassador Luis Ortiz, Swedish Ambassador Olaf Skoog, and Michael Frühling, the director of the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Also participating were former Colombian president Alfonso López (1974-1978), Cardinal Pedro Rubiano, former foreign minister Augusto Ramírez, the director of the communist weekly publication Voz, and prominent human rights activist Ana Teresa Bernal.

Not until Cardinal Rubiano announced that Uribe would meet with a delegation of family members did the families decide to leave the cathedral and the church on Dec. 10.

The first reaction by Uribe, who has taken a hard-line stance against the rebels since he took office in August 2002, was that the mediating committee’s suggestion of setting up a commission to negotiate a humanitarian swap ”hurt the morale of the troops.”

Colombia, which is in the midst of a four-decade armed conflict, is the world leader in kidnappings. Some of the victims are taken as ”hostages” and ”prisoners of war”, while others are seized with the aim of demanding ransom.

The Free Country Foundation holds the groups involved in the armed conflict responsible for 60 percent of the 1,652 kidnaps reported between January and September.

Of that portion, 55 percent were blamed on the FARC, 29 percent on the second-largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the rest on the right-wing paramilitary groups.

On Monday, the ELN announced that it would release four Israelis and a British citizen, backpackers who were seized on Sep. 12 in the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern Colombia.

While the FARC has long called for a humanitarian swap of hostages for imprisoned rebels, it has not offered to include in the negotiations those people who have been kidnapped for ransom, whose families often pay small fortunes for their release.

On Dec. 4, U.S. Ambassador William Wood announced that Washington was increasing the reward for information leading to the release or rescue of the three U.S. hostages to five million dollars.

Some 2,500 Colombian soldiers and 49 U.S. military advisers have been looking for the three hostages for the past 10 months.

But the lives of all of those held captive by the FARC are put at risk by any attempt to rescue them by force. Those guarding the hostages and kidnapping victims have strict orders to shoot them if the army closes in.

On May 5, the governor of the northwestern department of Antioquia, Guillermo Gaviria, his peace adviser, former defence minister Gilberto Echeverry, and 10 soldiers held by the guerrillas were shot and killed by their captors when the army tried to rescue them.

Marleny Orjuela and the rest of the relatives of the hostages are opposed to rescue attempts, which have often ended in tragedy, and want the government to negotiate a humanitarian accord immediately.

”It is time that is killing them,” she said, pointing out that grandparents, fathers, mothers, and even children have died in the years that the soldiers have been held captive by the FARC.

The other side of the coin are the country’s overcrowded prisons, where hundreds of guerrillas are housed alongside dozens of their enemies, the paramilitaries. A former combatant who spent six years behind bars told IPS that ”everyone is armed” in prison.

In 2000, 47 inmates were killed and 17 wounded in three days of fighting that broke out in the Modelo prison in Bogota. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the deaths occurred when paramilitary prisoners armed with ”long-range rifles” attacked a group of political prisoners.

FARC chief Manuel Marulanda has been calling for a prisoner-for-hostage swap for five years, pointing to the anguish of the families of those held captive on both sides. This year he named a commission of three rebel leaders to negotiate with the government, and asked Uribe to set up his own commission.

The FARC carried out prisoner-for-hostage exchanges with the governments of Ernesto Samper (1994-1998) and Pastrana.

Samper withdrew security forces from a 13,000-sq-km area to pave the way for the release of 70 soldiers held by the FARC, and Pastrana swapped 14 guerrillas for 297 soldiers and police officers held captive by the rebels.

The most optimistic of the activists pressing for a humanitarian swap hope the president will respond this week to the proposal set forth by the families of the hostages.

But Jairo Ramírez, the head of the Human Rights Committee, is sceptical. ”There’s no chance for an exchange under this government,” he commented to IPS, ”because that would mean the administration would have to break with its ‘democratic security’ policy.”

In the name of the hostages’ families, Orjuela said ASFAMIPAZ would continue to take actions like the occupation of the cathedral.

”Our pain and anguish drive us to this kind of action,” said Fabiola Perdomo, spokeswoman for the families of the provincial legislators from Cali held captive by the FARC.

”If the government fails to come up with a solution to this situation, these actions will continue to be repeated around the whole country,” she warned.