Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: Gov’t Attempts to Dictate Terms to Int’l Aid Community

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 16 2005 (IPS) - The Colombian government has upset civil society with a document addressed to United Nations agencies, foreign ambassadors, development aid agencies and international humanitarian groups active in this country, asking them to avoid using certain terms, like “internal armed conflict.”

The government of right-wing President Alvaro Uribe has consistently denied that the violence that has dragged on in Colombia for more than four decades is a “civil war”, preferring instead to talk about the “terrorist threat” posed by leftist guerrilla groups.

The document distributed to the diplomatic community and aid organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Jun. 8 also asked them not to use terms like “armed actors” or “parties to the conflict” when referring to the security forces, or “non-state actors in the conflict” to refer to the left-wing rebels or ultra-right-wing paramilitaries.

The document, “Guidelines for the approach to be taken by international cooperation projects”, was issued by the office of the government’s High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo.

Foreign Minister Carolina Barco said the memorandum was distributed “by mistake,” because it was meant to be an “internal document,” a United Nations source told IPS.

But Restrepo told the local newspaper El Tiempo Tuesday that the idea was to reach agreement on the terms used by the international donor community when referring to the crisis in Colombia.

“It is a technical document that defines concepts and criteria to be used in projects involving the government, and which has been erroneously given a political interpretation,” said the peace commissioner.

“It is solely and exclusively addressed to those who put forth international cooperation projects,” he added.

The 22-point, four-page undated document states that “any kind of activity that could imply any contact whatsoever with the illegal armed groups is seen as unacceptable by the national government.”

But Restrepo said the document “is not related to the press.”

In Colombia today, the ban on contacting “illegal armed groups” is understood as referring to contact with the guerrillas, who are fought by the Colombian armed forces with heavy financial and military support from Washington.

The rebels’ bitter enemies, the paramilitary groups, whose ties to the armed forces have been amply demonstrated, have been negotiating the conditions for their demobilisation with the Uribe administration since July 2004.

A number of paramilitary factions have already turned in their arms under an amnesty-like deal, and the process is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.

In the view of Diego Pérez, a consultant to Suippcol – a network of Swiss NGOs that work with grassroots groups in Colombia – “in the context of a profound humanitarian crisis, international cooperation focuses, as a priority, on protecting the victims and providing them with humanitarian aid.”

“Assisting the direct victims of the conflict, who include, besides civilians, injured combatants or those who are no longer fighting, is a task that is impossible to carry out without making contact with all of the parties involved in the conflict,” he argued.

Jorge Rojas, with the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement, said “All that is lacking now is for the government to pressure the international aid community to stop granting funds to independent organisations like ours, which produce information that the administration doesn’t like…not because of what we might say, but because of what the government wants to cover up.”

This respected human rights group provides the most reliable figures on Colombia’s population of forcibly displaced persons, who number around three million.

One of the government’s guidelines states that all aid initiatives should be designed on the basis of “accurate official statistics.” But Rojas said that “700 people a day are displaced in Colombia,” while only half that number are acknowledged by the government.

Last Monday, Barco said she was not responsible for the decision to send out the guidelines, and told the press that while the government stands by the content of the document, its recommendations should have been “shared” in meetings with foreign diplomats to avoid misunderstandings.

She underlined, however, that no foreign “aid organisation or government should make contact with the illegal groups” on their own.

In July 2003, when France’s current prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, was foreign minister, high level officials from that country’s Ministry of Foreign Relations attempted to make direct contact with Raúl Reyes, spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group.

The planned meeting, which was to be held in the jungles of Colombia, was part of a humanitarian mission aimed at negotiating the release of the guerrillas’ most famous kidnap victim, former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen who was seized by the FARC in 2002.

But the negotiations were frustrated by the Uribe administration.

“There is a clear intent on the part of the high commissioner (Restrepo) to sow doubt about the possible existence of relations between international aid organisations and outlawed armed groups. His insistence on this issue, in each one of the points, seems obsessive,” Pérez said in a letter sent to IPS this week.

Last week, several foreign ambassadors and United Nations representatives asked the government whether the guidelines were meant to be obligatory, and the answer was no.

The international donors that have taken an interest in Colombia met Tuesday in Bogota to discuss the implications of the new guidelines. Barco announced that her ministry would meet next Monday with that group, which is made up of U.N. agencies, the European Union, the United States, Japan, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and multilateral lending institutions.

The ICRC stated this year that Colombia is in the midst of an internal armed conflict that is generating a serious humanitarian crisis, and that as a consequence the ICRC follows international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war.

Michael Frühling, the director of the local Colombian office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, noted in a news briefing Monday that the term “armed conflict” even appears in the “basic agreement on this human rights office between the Colombian government and the United Nations.”

“Relations between the United Nations and the Colombian government are at a very critical juncture, because of the government’s mishandling of public relations when it comes to the issue of the armed conflict, and the question of the applicability of international humanitarian law,” Rojas told IPS.

The activist predicted that the United Nations would soon reaffirm that “it is in Colombia specifically because there is an armed conflict, and that international humanitarian law and the fundamental principles of humanity, impartiality and neutrality – which the government wants to disregard – are absolutely applicable.”

The government’s guidelines recognise the “professional neutrality” of the ICRC and the Colombian Red Cross, but reject the concept of “political neutrality of civilians towards the legitimately constituted institutions.”

According to Pérez, the document throws into doubt the role played by U.N. agencies like the High Commissioners for Human Rights and Refugees and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as well as international humanitarian organisations.

A European diplomatic source who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity said Uribe apparently wants “to prohibit any project that does not support the government.”

The guidelines indicate that internationally financed projects cannot make any statement or carry out any activity that would compromise government efforts towards peace agreements.

But Pérez said this guideline runs counter to the donor community’s declarations of London (July 2003) and Cartagena (February 2005), “as well as the recommendations of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and statements by the European Union’s Council of Ministers with respect to cooperation with Colombia.”

“The international donors and the national government have agreed on a series of principles and criteria that focus on generating improved conditions for a negotiated political solution to the conflict and the construction of a lasting peace,” said the expert.

Ana Teresa Bernal, head of the Network of Peace Initiatives (Redepaz), which links more than 400 peace groups nationwide, said the guidelines are aimed “mainly against peace initiatives.”

The guidelines describe as “ambiguous” terms like “peace community”, “peace territory” and “humanitarian zone”, which have been adopted by many communities in Colombia that have declared themselves neutral in the armed conflict or have undertaken civil resistance actions.

By discrediting the work of NGOs and peace initiatives, the government “is trying to curb assistance to grassroots groups caught in the middle of the war,” Bernal told IPS.

“They want to take away our breathing-space. If they block our financing, they take away 80 percent of our ability to work. This is a document that directly forms part of the war.”