RIGHTS: One Million Colombian Reported Displaced

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 1 1998 (IPS) - Rising political and drug-related violence in Colombia, which reached unprecedented heights in 1997, has forced more than one million Colombians to flee their homes and communities over the past decade, according to areport released here Wednesday.

The majority of the displaced are internally displaced – most of them barely subsisting in towns and cities. Tens of thousands more have fled to neighbouring countries, where their rights as refugees are not being respected, says the 44-page report by the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR), ‘Colombia’s Silent Crisis.’

All of the displaced, mostly women and children, are victims of one or more of the three major armed groups in Colombia – the military, paramilitary forces which have been linked to the army and the land-owning elite, and the three guerrilla groups.

“Colombia is being ripped apart, its people butchered and uprooted, by sweeping brutal violence associated with multiple conflicts; rampant institutionalised human rights abuse; impunity; private groups’ (including narco-traffickers) efforts to expand their economic power; and lawlessness,” says the report’s author, Hiram Ruiz.

The report’s release follows a much shorter study put out by Amnesty International last September. It marks the launch of an USCR information to focus public attention on the displaced in Colombia and press the U.S. administration to address their plight.

In recent years, the United States has limited its aid to Bogota almost entirely to anti-drug efforts, mostly through the supply of equipment and training to the Colombian military and police. Washington is providing more than 80 million dollars – including 36 million dollars for three new Blackhawk helicopters – in such aid this year alone. Colombia has been the top Latin American recipient of U.S. security and military assistance since 1989.

The administration of President Bill Clinton plans to increase aid next year, largely due to the assessment that the Colombian military is losing its generation-old war with the insurgents who, according to some officials, are increasingly tied to narcotraffickers.

Officials currently are mulling over the army’s request to buy 12 Cobra attack helicopters, an acquisition that would greatly increase the military’s firepower. It would make Colombia the first South American nation to receive top-of-the-line aircraft since a ban on such sales was lifted by Clinton last year.

That decision is part of a larger and increasingly intense debate that pits Republican anti-drug hawks in Congress and senior military officers in the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) against more dovish forces among Congressional Democrats and within other administration agencies.

“There is a real policy debate underway,” said Colletta Youngers, a Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) at Wednesday’s conference at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) here.

For now, Washington seems to be going in both directions at once. In this year’s foreign aid legislation, hawks prevailed in getting an explicit earmark for the Blackhawk helicopters, while doves persuaded Congress to adopt the “Leahy Amendment” which bans aid from going to any units believed to have been involved in human rights abuses.

“More aid, tighter conditions” is how one Congressional aide described the policy.

But Youngers and others at Wednesday’s conference believe that the trend is in favour of greater militarisation. “The bottom line is that U.S. policy is fuelling war in Colombia instead of fuelling peace,” she said.

That alarms the USCR and groups who work with the displaced and other victims of the many conflicts which have afflicted Colombia for almost 50 years. Among other recommendations, they call on Washington to suspend all military aid until the armed forces in Colombia clearly sever their links to the paramilitaries who, in recent years, have displaced the guerrilla forces as “the main agents of displacement” in Colombia.

The rise in the paramilitaries has coincided with the increase in displacements from an estimated 130,000 people in 1995 to 250,000 last year, according to Gustavo Gallon, director of the Colombian Commission of Jurists, who also addressed Wednesday’s conference.

These groups have deliberately depopulated areas – sometimes with the tacit or active backing of the army – to benefit wealthy backers, including large landholders, business people and narco- traffickers, many of whom have bought up large tracts of lands in recent years and used private armies to evict small farmers living on or near their properties, according to the report.

In some cases, notably in Choco and Uraba regions near the Panamanian border, paramilitary groups have forced thousands of residents to flee to make way for “mega-projects” planned for the region by business interests, including the proposed “dry canal” between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of Colombia, said Ruiz. In addition, parts of the region are believed to hold mineral deposits, coal, hardwood, and even oil.

The rise in the paramilitaries also has resulted in increased brutality by guerrilla forces, according to the report which quotes the leader of a human rights group as saying that, in the last five years, the insurgents “have adopted the tactics of the paramilitaries and are targeting civilians they think aid the military or paramilitaries.”

“Paramilitaries not only kill and injure; they torture and maim, sometimes forcing loved ones and neighbours to watch them do so as a way of terrorising and intimidating them,” according to the study. “Such tactics have met with tremendous success. Virtually every individual or community that guerrillas or paramilitaries target flees when warned or ordered to do so.”

The fear that drives them from their homes stays with them when they arrive in towns and cities where they are reluctant to make demands for services and help on the local authorities. Many today live in shantytowns, called ‘invasiones’, where they have little or no access to electricity, running water, sanitary facilities, health care or even public education for their children, according to the report.