POPULATION-COLOMBIA: Cities Unable to Handle War’s Displaced

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jun 5 2002 (IPS) - Colombia’s big cities lack the resources necessary to help the thousands of people who have been displaced from rural areas by the civil war, as municipal governments are unable to meet the basic needs of the poor already living in the urban centres, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Most of Colombia’s two million displaced persons are concentrated in the country’s 16 largest cities, none of which has the necessary conditions to take care of them, UNICEF representative for Colombia and Venezuela, Manuel Manrique, said Wednesday.

The people displaced by the Colombian armed conflict, 45 percent of whom are under age 18, face a severe humanitarian crisis as they do not receive basic health “or any other basic services,” said Manrique.

The biggest urban centres – Bogotá, Medellín and Cali – have enough difficulty in attending to those known as “the traditional poor”, the people already living in the cities with low or no income.

“Local governments cannot even provide basic services to the traditional poor,” the UNICEF official said.

“When these displaced populations come to the city, they arrive under the worst conditions because it is difficult to enrol in school, find housing, obtain health care or any other basic services,” said Manrique.

This is evident in the southern districts of Bogotá, where people coming from rural areas are concentrated, and in other Colombian cities, including some of the smaller ones, he added.

This phenomenon is the result of the decades-long conflict between government forces and leftist guerrillas, which in the last few years has escalated with the emergence of right-wing paramilitaries.

The displaced do not have access to employment because they tend to lack training. Furthermore, there are no job opportunities in this country of 42 million people where unemployment reaches 20 percent.

Under these conditions, displaced families “do not have any income at all.” And the local governments do not have the resources to help them.

These deficiencies especially hurt children under 18, a population totalling 16 million in Colombia. They are the sector with lowest school attendance, worst immunisation coverage and nutritional problems, said Manrique.

And the panorama grows worse as the number of people displaced by the armed conflict continues to rise. From 2000 to 2001, the total rose 48 percent. There were 120,000 newly displaced in 2000, while the figure reached 190,000 in 2001.

This will be another of the serious problems the new Colombian government will have to confront, the UNICEF representative pointed out. President-elect Alvaro Uribe is to take office Aug 7.

Sixty percent of the Colombian population lives below the poverty line, said Manrique, adding that the economic situation will worsen due to the military spending hike and as a result of the irregular armed groups’ destruction of infrastructure.

Violence has been on the rise since the government took back the 42,000-square km demilitarised zone, a Switzerland-sized area, that the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) occupied for the three years of peace talks, which were broken off in February.

Since then, the violence that had been mostly limited to the countryside expanded and shifted to urban areas, Manrique told a press conference at the UN headquarters in Geneva.

Approximately 7,000 children can be found in the ranks of the illegal armed groups, mostly in the three main organisations: the leftist FARC and National Liberation Army (ELN) and the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defence Units of Colombia.

A 1999 study conducted by UNICEF and the Ombudsperson in Colombia “found that 84 percent of the children that entered the armed groups did so on their own, they were not forced,” said Manrique.

In some cases the irregular armed organisations offer money in exchange, and in others, the fact that the child has no other opportunities plays may lead to a decision to join one of these groups.

He pointed out that the idea of “having a uniform and using a gun,” and participating in what they might see as an adventure, may attract children to join the ranks of the guerrilla or paramilitary groups.

There have been reports that children have died in combat, but UNICEF does not have detailed information about such deaths or how they are divided as far as gender and age groups, said the official.

President-elect Uribe announced that he plans to offer the UN a role as mediator in efforts towards peace. The negotiations between the FARC and the government that were broken off in February had been conducted directly, without intermediaries.

Uribe plans to visit the UN headquarters in New York in the next few days and will meet with Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said Manrique.