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COLOMBIA: Ethnic Groups Demand Respect for Their Neutrality in Conflict

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Nov 17 2005 (IPS) - In four open letters addressed to all of the armed actors in Colombia’s civil war, 47 organisations of indigenous people, afro-Colombians, peasant farmers, women, local residents and trade unionists from the jungle province of Chocó demand respect for their territory and their neutrality in the armed conflict.

The letters, which were released Monday by the seventh Interethnic Solidarity Forum of Chocó and published Tuesday, were addressed to the leaders of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, and the heads of the extreme-right paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).

Each letter clearly states that the groups expect a public response.

“War is not the way, and guns are not the solution,” say the letters put out by the organisations from the northwestern province of Chocó, which demand that “all of the parties involved in this conflict (the governments of the United States and Colombia, the paramilitaries and the guerrillas) bring an end to the confrontation, begin serious peace talks, and respect the civilian population.”

Colombia’s civil war broke out over four decades ago, when leftist guerrillas in rural areas took up arms. In the 1980s, private militias formed by large landowners began to fight the rebels. The ties between these paramilitary groups and government forces have been amply documented.

The armed conflict, which is fuelled by the drug trade, also involves land disputes, with the paramilitary groups using violence and terror tactics to force rural communities off of resource-rich land or property needed to carry out megaprojects like hydropower dams.

A report released in September by London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International, “The Paramilitaries in Medellín: Demobilisation or Legalisation?”, also noted that the “large-scale displacement of civilians has facilitated the illegal expropriation of land through which paramilitarism aims to launder the considerable wealth built up as a result of its reliance on drug-trafficking.”

The United States, meanwhile, provides abundant financial and military support to the Colombian state in its fight against the leftist rebels and the drug trade.

In the four open letters, the groups that took part in the Nov. 10-14 interethnic forum remind the FARC, ELN and AUC that “you have the obligation to respect and observe international humanitarian law in our territories, which prohibits the parties in conflict from involving civilians in the internal armed conflict.”

In their letter to the president, the organisations add that the police and army must “respect and guarantee human rights in our territories.” They also point to serious denunciations made by the interethnic forum and the Catholic Church in 2004 “with regard to the continuing collusion between paramilitary groups and public forces in the region.”

The organisations reaffirm their opposition to the cultivation, production, trafficking and consumption of drugs in their territories, and point out to Uribe that he has failed to address the complaints they set forth in 2003 about pressure from armed groups to get them to plant coca, the raw material used to produce cocaine, of which Colombia is the world’s top producer.

Thus, “we do not accept that indigenous people or black communities are being held responsible for crops that were violently imposed on them, or that the argument (that they are growing drug crops) is used to threaten us with the expropriation of our territories,” the letter adds, alluding to warnings that the president has issued.

The open letters warn the FARC and ELN that they must not remain in the territories of the black communities or in the indigenous reserves, while protesting that the AUC wants to settle many of the demobilised paramilitary fighters in the Chocó region.

The AUC began to disarm last year as a result of ongoing talks with the Uribe administration.

The groups say they support “the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration into civilian life of the irregular armed actors,” but “in a context of respect for truth, justice, reparations and the non-repetition” of war crimes.

The law passed by the Colombian legislature to govern the paramilitary demobilisation process has been widely criticised as an “amnesty” for paramilitary fighters who have committed atrocities.

The United Nations blames the AUC for 80 percent of the war crimes committed in the country, including torture, forced disappearances, targeted killings and massacres.

The groups from Chocó argue that the reinsertion of paramilitaries into civilian life must not become “a mechanism for the expropriation of our ancestral lands.”

Human rights groups have also expressed concern that the law outlining the rules for the paramilitary disarmament process does not guarantee that people who have been displaced from their land by the violence will be able to recover it.

The open letters additionally complain about the emergence of new AUC structures in the region.

In their message to the FARC leadership, the organisations from Chocó protest the insurgent group’s meddling “in the community and indigenous councils, which compromises our autonomy and our cultural identity, hinders us from freely going about our day-to-day activities, serves as a pretext for the state to refrain from making the social investments that it is bound to make.and affects our own security.”

Black communities in the jungles of Chocó began to organise 20 years ago in community councils to fill the gap left by the state’s neglect of the region, one of the country’s poorest.

“You single out and stigmatise our people with unfounded accusations that are impossible to counter and that cast a pall of suspicion on people who go back and forth between rural areas and the district seats, insinuating that they are army informers,” complains the interethnic forum’s letter to the FARC.

In their letter to the paramilitaries, the groups underline that “we do not accept the irrational exploitation of our natural resources that have been converted into war booty through megaprojects, as is occurring with the extraction of timber, gold, platinum and other mining resources, and the imposition of extensive livestock breeding” in the Chocó region, considered one of the parts of the planet with the highest levels of biological diversity.

The local communities and organisations add that “we do not share the AUC’s ‘development proposal’ for our region because after invading our territory and murdering and displacing our people, they want to impose a model that has nothing to do with our culture and our conception of ethno-development and plan of life.”

Colombia’s constitution and laws recognise communal ownership of ancestral land by indigenous and black communities through collective property titles. This land can neither be sold nor foreclosed upon. The national laws also establish the right of the ethnic communities to choose their own development model.

In the letters, the organisations reject “monoculture African palm plantations (promoted by the government and the AUC) which endanger our collective land titles, affect our fragile ecosystem.aggravate the food crisis and imply a lengthy process of accumulation of capital that will only benefit large investors, to the detriment of our communities.”

A recent government resolution ruled that local black communities no longer collectively owned 10,162 hectares along the Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó rivers to the east of the Atrato river, where killings by paramilitary groups had forcibly displaced the local residents. The land that they were forced to abandon is now being used to grow oil palms, in what the ombudsman has called illegal plantations.

The government and the AUC defend the plantations as a source of jobs.

The decision that the local communities in question no longer own their ancestral land “only benefits monoculture growers of African palms,” and violates the principle of private property, the interethnic forum warned Uribe in its open letter to the president.

In the letters, the groups also reject the government’s forestry bill, which is pending a final vote in the legislature, as well as a bill on water, and urged the president not to sign them into law if they are passed.

“Although water is a public asset according to the constitution, the bill would allow the state to grant rivers and other sources of water in concession,” economist Héctor Mondragón told IPS.

The forestry bill, meanwhile, would open the doors to logging in the country’s jungle regions. The Colombian Commission of Jurists, a highly respected human rights group, said the bill would lead to “the privatisation of Colombia’s forests and of the territories” belonging to indigenous and black communities.

The groups warn the president of the grave humanitarian and human rights crisis in Chocó, “which is manifested in communities that have been displaced.and cannot return to their territories” because of the war.

An estimated seven percent of Colombia’s 43.7 million people have been forcibly displaced. And although indigenous and black communities account for 11 percent of the population, they make up one-fourth of the displaced.

These communities depend on their relationship with land for their physical and cultural survival, stated the Switzerland-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), which said in a report this month that people are forcibly displaced in Colombia with the aim of expropriating their land.

Some 300 leaders of community and indigenous councils from the Chocó region took part in the seventh interethnic forum that ended Monday.