Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Survivors Refuse to Give Up Struggle for Justice

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 29 2005 (IPS) - In response to a new law that is to govern the demobilisation of extreme right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia, survivors of atrocities and human rights organisations have made it clear that they will not sit back and wait for truth and justice, but will continue their struggle.

The "law on justice and peace" passed by the Colombian Congress last week lays down the legal groundwork for the disarmament of some 10,000 paramilitary fighters grouped in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).

But victims of the violence, opposition politicians, United Nations agencies and human rights groups complain that the new law lacks mechanisms for establishing the truth about the attacks on civilians carried out since the paramilitary militias first emerged in the early 1980s, in the context of Colombia’s four-decade civil war.

In response to the new law, the president of the Permanent Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, psychiatrist and writer José Gutiérrez, and lawyer Alirio Uribe with the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective presented a report to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Tuesday.

The human rights groups are calling on the ICC, which was set up to try crimes against humanity and war crimes that countries themselves are unable or unwilling to prosecute, to investigate the human rights violations committed by AUC.

"The struggle for truth and justice in these past few decades" has been sustained by survivors of attacks, torture and forced displacement, families and communities of victims of targeted killings, massacres and forced disappearance, human rights activists, and social and political organisations, said Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo, who runs the databank at the Centre for Popular Research and Education (CINEP), a widely respected local human rights group.

The report presented to the ICC, "Colombia: Debt to Humanity – State Paramilitarism 1988-2003", was published by the CINEP databank in December 2004 and lists 12,398 extrajudicial executions, 2,121 forced disappearances and 1,339 cases of torture allegedly committed by the paramilitaries over a 15-year period.

Other non-governmental organisations have reported that 2,000 people have been killed by the paramilitaries since they declared a ceasefire on Dec. 1, 2002, as required by the government of right-wing President Alvaro Uribe as a condition for negotiating the disarmament of AUC.

Although human rights, labour and social activists are frequently the targets of selective killings in Colombia, the human rights community has waged an unceasing struggle for justice.

Activists and victims have played an instrumental role in pushing for the signing and ratification by Colombia of international treaties that today serve as support for their demands, such as the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, ratified by Colombia in April.

Survivors of human rights crimes also hold up as an achievement the fact that Colombia is a signatory of the Rome Statute, which entered into force in July 2000, creating the ICC.

In addition, activists say the Colombian office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights was opened in 1997 thanks to their efforts.

They also point to the annual reports put out on Colombia by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which are used by foreign donor governments and agencies to set conditions on aid.

Victims and survivors have also brought cases before the Constitutional Court that resulted in verdicts which set important legal precedents in the struggle for human rights and protection from abuses.

For instance, the Court upheld guarantees for the victims of forced displacement, who number over three million in Colombia, established the right of relatives of victims to form part of the preliminary investigations in legal prosecutions, and has ruled that local authorities shared direct responsibility, out of omission, for many political crimes and crimes against humanity.

Further, the Court set restrictions on verbal attacks on human rights defenders by government officials last year.

And in 2001, the Court ruled that the crime of "genocide" also included the elimination of political organisations, even though international law limits the definition to "the destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

The ruling referred to the murders of some 4,000 members of the Communist Party and the leftist Patriotic Union, a case that is in the midst of a "friendly settlement" proceeding between the state and spokespersons for the victims, as mandated by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The IACHR and Inter-American Court for Human Rights "have issued many resolutions that have helped us, especially orders for precautionary measures that…have forced the government to create internal inter-institutional mechanisms" for working with victims, said Giraldo in a national conference that culminated Saturday in the creation of the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MVCE).

Resolutions by both the Inter-American Commission and the Inter-American Court have given rise to the establishment of local commissions of inquiry into crimes. However, these have failed, according to Giraldo, whenever the national justice system has been left to come up with solutions and mete out punishment.

The only one that made some headway was the Trujillo Commission set up to investigate the killings of around 300 rural residents of the municipality of that name in the western province of Valle del Cauca between 1988 and 1990.

For three months in 1994, the Trujillo Commission brought together delegates from 11 government and seven non-governmental bodies, under orders from the IACHR.

Because it operated outside of the justice system, the commission was able to conduct an in-depth analysis of the cases in which the killers had already been absolved, and reached "conclusions that were diametrically opposed" to the earlier legal system verdicts, Giraldo said.

The Trujillo Commission held the state responsible for the killings, and then President Ernesto Samper (1994-1998) ordered reparations, which have been partially met.

But the Commission made "a contribution to truth, mainly, rather than to justice," because the murders have gone unpunished, "despite the recommendations of the Commission, which outlined concrete steps for overcoming impunity," said Giraldo.

During the administration of President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002), Colombian authorities did not accept the creation of mixed commissions operating independently of the judicial system.

Another instrument for establishing the truth is public tribunals of opinion, about a dozen of which have been set up to allow victims, survivors and witnesses of atrocities to speak out, and to gather evidence and draw public attention to human rights crimes, although their decisions are non-binding, Giraldo pointed out.

For example, a group of 12 Latin American countries organised a tribunal against impunity for crimes against humanity, which met in 1989 and 1991.

And in 2000, a tribunal of opinion held in Chicago, Illinois to investigate and discuss a massacre of 20 civilians in the village of Santo Domingo, on the border with Venezuela, in a 1998 bombing by the Colombian armed forces helped bring about the removal of several military officers.

In 1992, 10 European non-governmental organisations and the Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared compiled a registry of "more than 300 Colombian human rights abusers – members of the army or the national police – with their curriculum vitae and a list of the crimes in which they took part," said Giraldo.

"Many embassies used that book as a reference guide when the Colombian government recommended military attachés," he added. "We are aware of many cases in which the book has been used to deny approval of appointments."

In a more recent development, rural communities that have declared themselves neutral in the armed conflict have begun to consider refusing to cooperate with Colombia’s justice system.

That was the reaction of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community after the courts failed to bring a single person to justice in connection with more than 500 human rights crimes, Giraldo noted.

"We must not wait for the states, the victimisers themselves, to convert the truth into the official truth, to anoint it and make it valid," said the Jesuit priest. "Let us salvage the truth ourselves," he added, proposing "social sanctions and ethical sanctions."

The "law on justice and peace" that has yet to be signed into law by Uribe offers paramilitary fighters heavily reduced sentences in exchange for confessions of their crimes, while establishing a fund for reparations for the victims and survivors.

But the law’s critics say it gives a group of 20 prosecutors just 60 days to investigate the crimes committed by 10,000 members of AUC, and has no mechanisms for ensuring that the demobilised combatants do not take up arms again.

They also complain that the law fails to create instruments for clarifying the origins of the paramilitary groups, their structures and sources of financing, and their ties to the drug trade, different economic sectors or the security forces, in order to effectively dismantle them.

In Giraldo’s view, it is time to seek solutions above and beyond the justice system. "The truth about the victims lies with the victims, and nowhere else," he argued.