Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: Questions of ‘Truth, Justice and Reparations’ Surround Paramilitary Demobilisation

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Feb 28 2005 (IPS) - Talking about the need for “truth, justice and reparations” is important, but not sufficient, says Sergio Caramagna, the head of the Organisation of American States (OAS) mission that is overseeing the demobilisation of right-wing paramilitary militias in civil war- torn Colombia.

The Argentine OAS official was the last speaker at a recent conference organised by a number of Colombian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to discuss the legal framework needed to guide the process of disarmament of the right-wing United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), which represents 80 percent of the country’s paramilitary fighters.

Human rights groups and victims of the four-decade armed conflict are demanding that the paramilitaries confess their crimes, serve time in prison, give up their illegally acquired wealth and make reparations to their victims. They also want to know where the remains of the victims of forced disappearance have been buried.

But according to Caramagna, the question is “how much truth, how much justice, and what quantity of reparations are needed in order for those principles to be translated into reality.”

The OAS official arrived in Colombia last April, after right-wing President Alvaro Uribe signed an agreement with the OAS in January 2004 to set up a mission to support the negotiations with AUC, which began to demobilise last year. The process is to be completed in December.

In the ongoing negotiations in Santa Fe de Ralito in northeastern Colombia, AUC commanders have told the government that they will not go to jail. They have also refused to hand over property, including land, houses and other assets, that the paramilitaries have been accused of stealing.

In the Feb. 24 NGOs conference, Michael Frühling, director of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights office in Colombia, underlined one of the U.N. recommendations to the Colombian government and Congress: that the fundamental principles of truth, justice and reparations be fully honoured in talks and negotiations with the illegal armed groups.

The Colombian parliament will now begin to debate a framework law to guide the demobilisation of the paramilitary groups, a requirement set by foreign donors when they met in the Colombian resort town of Cartagena in early February to discuss financing the process.

The new law would also apply to an eventual demobilisation of the leftist insurgencies.

The first paramilitary militias in Colombia were created in 1982 by drug traffickers in response to a kidnapping by a former guerrilla group, M-19, which broke up after a 1990 peace agreement.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is the main rebel group today, followed by the National Liberation Army (ELN). Both have been fighting for four decades.

After the first paramilitary groups emerged in the early 1980s, others began to be created by active members of the armed forces, who expanded the militias to the central region of Magdalena Medio.

The paramilitaries received support from drug traffickers, landowners, and merchants. And as the armed conflict intensified, many men from lower-income strata were drawn into the ranks of these groups by the offer of a regular salary.

The paramilitaries are widely held responsible for the overwhelming majority of gross human rights crimes committed in this South American country of 43 million, which has the worst human rights record in the region.

“The very purpose of AUC is to commit crimes against humanity, because the security forces are not supposed to do so,” Gustavo Gallón, the head of the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), an internationally respected human rights organisation, told his listeners at the conference.

The close ties between the paramilitaries and Colombia’s armed forces have been amply documented by leading human rights watchdogs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“The FARC and the ELN also commit war crimes, but that is not their purpose, nor the reason they emerged,” added the activist.

The paramilitary demobilisation process has been heavily criticised by local and international human rights groups as well as a number of Colombian lawmakers for letting those paramilitary fighters who lay down their weapons off the hook, despite the atrocious crimes they are accused of, which include cutting up their victims – many of whom are civilian men, women and children – alive with chainsaws.

Referring to the criticism of the disarmament process, Caramagna told IPS that the OAS “is the only body that is doing this. Are we participating in impunity, in the crimes (that have been committed)? Is that the message? The answer is no.”

The three years of peace talks with FARC that were broken off by the government of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) repeatedly came up against the guerrillas’ demand that no progress towards peace was possible until the paramilitary groups were dismantled.

“Aren’t we paving the way for that? Why is the (demobilisation process) invalidated from the very start?” asked Caramagna.

When the OAS envoy reached Colombia, the government showed him a map of the conflict, which showed the enormous expansion of the paramilitary militias.

Since 2004, 4,699 paramilitary fighters have laid down their arms in collective ceremonies, promising that they will not continue fighting.

AUC says that number represents just over 20 percent of its members. And according to the government’s high commissioner for peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo, since the paramilitaries declared a unilateral ceasefire in December 2002, the number of murders blamed on AUC has dropped by 68 percent, and the number of massacres by 86 percent.

However, the CCJ reported that 1,889 people were killed by AUC between December 2002 and August 2004, despite the ceasefire.

The OAS mission, which was set up to verify the peace process, has received 600,000 dollars from the United States, nearly one million dollars from the Netherlands, and 1.2 million dollars from the Colombian government itself. In addition, the salary of one of the officials is paid by the Swedish government.

“That is all the financing we receive,” said Caramagna, who added that it was barely enough to pay 10 Colombian and 10 international officials, even though “three times that number are needed, as well as vehicles, communication media, and regional offices. The peace process is taking off, albeit imperfectly, in certain regions. And we don’t have the capacity to oversee it, which is really regrettable.”

“You have the (recently demobilised) Catatumbo Bloc (of AUC) in front of you, 1,500 men. What do you tell them? Don’t demobilise because there is no law, or the conditions are not in place because such and such a requisite has not been met?” remarked Caramagna.

“Or do you tell them: yes sir, lay down your arms and then we’ll see what to do. I without a doubt take the second stance. And that is what is being done. Amidst a storm of terrible criticism. They even call us paramilitaries,” he added.

Caramagna called the NGOs that criticise the demobilisation process “fundamentalists”, and accused them of carrying out international lobbying efforts to keep donors from funding the disarmament process. As a result, “we don’t have any support,” he complained.

Caramagna was designated by the OAS in 1990 to oversee the dismantling of Nicaragua’s U.S.-financed “contras”, who fought to destabilise the 1979-1990 government of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).

The OAS official was initially accused of being partial to the illegal contra fighters.

The victims of Colombia’s armed conflict are demanding truth and reparations, as well as the return of property that was stolen from them.

“We can work on truth if we do it with broad criteria, because this country does not have a single truth, it has many. And we can work on reparations,” said Caramagna, who failed to mention the question of justice, however.

Ana Teresa Bernal, the head of Redepaz, which groups 400 local NGOs, said the demobilisation process is not a “peace process”.

She told IPS that there has been no “compliance with the ceasefire, nor any concentration of forces, which means effective oversight and monitoring has been impossible.”