COLOMBIA: Putting a Price on Human Rights

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Feb 2 2005 (IPS) - As international donors are preparing to meet in Colombia this week, activists and other critics of right-wing President Alvaro Uribe have expressed fears that demands for respect for human rights will be watered down, and support will be offered for a heavily questioned paramilitary demobilisation process.

In a previous meeting held in London in July 2003 – to which this week’s gathering is a follow-up – the international community established conditions for maintaining aid flows to Colombia, based on compliance with United Nations human rights recommendations.

But a statement released this week by human rights watchdog Amnesty International says "the Colombian government has not only failed to comply with U.N. recommendations but has sought to implement policies which run counter to them."

"The human rights and humanitarian crises in Colombia remain critical with civilians targeted by all sides in the conflict – soldiers, army-backed paramilitaries and the guerrillas", adds the Amnesty communique.

The final statement emerging out of the 2003 donors meeting in London, which also underlined the need for renewing peace talks to put an end to Colombia’s four-decade armed conflict, was seen as a setback for the Uribe administration.

The document called on the government to take measures to protect human rights groups and other civil society organisations and to allow them to carry out their work, and to take action against impunity, since the vast majority of human rights abuses in this South American country of 43 million go unpunished.

But just two months after the London meeting, Uribe caused a scandal when he publicly criticised human rights activists, twice in one week, accusing them of "being at the service of terrorism" and labelling them "traffickers in human rights".

High level officials from 20 EU member states, the European Commission, the United States, Canada, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, and international organisations like U.N. agencies, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank will be taking part in the official meeting on international cooperation Thursday and Friday.

Like the final document released in 2003 in London, the declaration that will come out of this week’s donors meeting in the coastal city of Cartagena will outline an international policy of assistance for Colombia, which will shape concrete decisions on cooperation and aid.

The Uribe administration is anxious to secure international approval, in order to win financial assistance for its social policies, because it estimates that it will need to assign 5.3 percent of gross domestic product to the military offensive against the country’s leftist insurgents.

Eleven percent of Colombia’s budget goes towards national security, and 36 percent towards servicing the public debt, according to Professor Ricardo Bonilla at the National University of Colombia.

Development cooperation arising from this week’s meeting would complement military aid from the United States, which has totalled 3.3 billion dollars since 2000, making Colombia the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt.

By contrast, development assistance from the EU amounted to 120 million dollars in 2003.

In the view of Uribe, the George W. Bush administration’s main ally in Latin America, the international community fails to comprehend that in Colombia the state is under attack, and is thus a victim.

Discrepancies over whether to use the term "internal armed conflict" instead of "war on terrorism" or "humanitarian crisis" were at the core of the diplomatic dispute over the final text to be approved by the donors meeting in Cartagena.

Agreement has already been reached on the draft declaration, although it could still undergo a few changes.

According to reports leaked to the press, the declaration will recognise Uribe’s efforts against "terrorism" and drug trafficking.

In addition, it will grant support to the process of demobilisation of the paramilitaries currently underway as part of negotiations with the government, on the condition that it entails clear rules with respect to "truth, justice and reparations" to victims of human rights abuses.

Although human rights defenders agree that a demobilisation process is necessary, they say the form it is taking will virtually guarantee impunity.

United Nations agencies hold the paramilitaries responsible for at least 80 percent of the atrocities committed in Colombia’s armed conflict.

Although the paramilitary groups declared a unilateral ceasefire in December 2002, they committed 1,889 homicides between that date and September 2004, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists.

Under the demobilisation agreement, the paramilitary fighters who have laid down their weapons and are not currently facing legal charges are free to go home, and a weak and ineffective justice system is unlikely to track them down later to hold them accountable for their crimes, say critics.

In addition, the Amnesty International communique adds, "demobilised paramilitaries are also being ‘recycled’ into the conflict, often by being required to serve as informants to the security forces. Many social and human rights activists have been detained on the basis of often spurious evidence from these informants."

According to press reports, the final statement adopted in Cartagena will acknowledge that the government has made some progress in compliance with the U.N. human rights recommendations.

It will also set six overarching themes as priorities in development aid and cooperation: forests; the reincorporation of fighters into civilian life; development, infrastructure and alternative development projects; the need to strengthen the state of law and respect for human rights; regional programmes for development and peace; and humanitarian assistance and measures to address forced displacement.

Colombia has one of the world’s biggest populations of internally displaced people – nearly three million.

But while the government announced Monday that forced displacement diminished 37 percent in 2004, the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement, the main non-governmental source of statistics on the phenomenon, reported Tuesday a 38.5 percent increase in people fleeing the war.

The donors meeting will base its evaluation on the reports of international bodies like the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

A gathering was held Wednesday, prior to the official meeting, by the Alianza for peace and development, made up of 125 Colombian non-governmental organisations, including a number of trade union federations and umbrella groups like the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia, the Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres – a coalition of women’s peace groups – and the Network of Peace Initiatives.

The social movements want the international donors meeting to send a strong message to the Uribe administration, urging it to live up to human rights recommendations and curb impunity as a condition for receiving assistance.