By Mairead Maguire
BELFAST, Aug 18 2014 (IPS)

I once asked Dan Berrigan, the great American anti-war activist, for some advice to me in my life as a peace activist. He replied “Pray and Resist”.But I would like to ask how serious we are about resistance? What is our vision? And how does resistance fit into this? What do we need to resist? How can we resist effectively? And what methods are allowed? In resisting, what are our aims and objectives?

Mairead Maguire

I would like to propose that the world’s peace movement adopt a vision of the total abolition of militarism. Such a vision would empower us to know where we are going. It would inspire and energise each of us to pursue our different projects, be it the fight against the arms trade, nuclear abolition, non-killing/non-violence, the culture of peace, the abolition of arms and drone warfare, human rights and environmental rights.

We will know, as we work towards this vision of a demilitarised, disarmed world, that we are part of an ever-growing new ‘consciousness’ of men and women, choosing to uphold human life, the right to individual conscience, loving our enemies, human rights and international law, and solving our problems without killing each other.

Why resist militarism? We are witnessing the growing militarism of Europe, and its role as a driving force for armaments, and its dangerous path, under the leadership of the United States/NATO towards a new ‘cold war’ and military aggression.

The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflicts, particularly allegedly peaceful countries like Norway and Sweden, are now among the most important U.S./NATO war assets.“The greatest danger to our freedoms being eroded by governments and endangered by ‘armed’ groups is a fearful, apathetic, civil community, refusing to take a stand for human rights and real democracy, and against violence and war”

The European Union is a threat to the survival of neutrality, as countries are being asked to join NATO, and forced to end their neutrality and choose (unnecessarily) between West and East.

Many nations have been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on, Germany, the third largest exporter of military hardware in the world, continues to increase its military budget and is complicit with NATO, facilitating U.S. bases, from which drones leave to carry out illegal extrajudicial killings on the order of the U.S. president, in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Germany has also provided Israel with its nuclear submarine and continues to be complicit under the Geneva Convention in Israeli war crimes against Gaza and in the illegal occupation of Palestine.

We need to abolish NATO and increase our task of dismantling the military-industrial complex, through non-violent and civil resistance.

The means of resistance are very important. As a pacifist deeply committed to non-killing/non-violence as a way to bring about social/cultural/political change, I believe that we need to use means consistent with the end, and it is wrong to use violence.

Our message that militarism and war do not solve our problem of violence challenges us to use new ways and that is why we need to teach the science of peace at every level of society.

We are all aware there are forces at work which are determined to continue their agenda of the militarisation of our societies and there are governments/corporate/media attempts to make violence and war acceptable.

The greatest danger to our freedoms being eroded by governments and endangered by ‘armed’ groups is a fearful, apathetic, civil community, refusing to take a stand for human rights and real democracy, and against violence and war.

We can take hope from the fact that most people want peace not war. However, we are facing a civilisation problem. We are facing a political/ideological challenge with the growth of what president Ike Eisenhower warned the U.S. people against ­– the military/industrial complex. He warned that it would destroy the United States.

We know now that a small group made up of the world’s military/industrial/media/corporate/academic elite – whose agenda is profit, arms, war and
valuable resources – now holds power and has a stronghold on our elected governments. We see this in the gun and Israeli lobbies, among others, which hold great power over U.S. politics.

We have witnessed this in ongoing wars, invasions, occupations and proxy war, all allegedly in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention and democracy’. However, in reality, they are causing great suffering, especially to the poor, through their policies of arms, war, domination and control of other countries and their resources.

Unmasking this agenda of war and demanding the implementation of human rights and international law is the work of the peace movement. We can turn away from this path of destruction by spelling out a clear vision of what kind of a world we want to live in, demanding an end to the military-industrial complex, and insisting that our governments adopt policies of peace.

We, the Peace Movement, are the alternative to militarism and war, and because we want a different world, we must be part of building it. We must not be satisfied with improvements to and reform of militarism but rather offer an alternative.

Militarism is an aberration and a system of dysfunction. Militarism should be outdated and disappear – like hanging and flogging! (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Jun 1 2014 (IPS)

Erwin Sperisen was chief of Guatemala’s National Civil Police from 2004 to 2007, when he left the country for Switzerland. In August 2010, the Guatemalan authorities issued an international arrest warrant, accusing him, among others, of extrajudicial executions in the prisons of Pavon and Infiernito.

The authorities of the canton of Geneva arrested him on August 31, 2012, but he could not be extradited to Guatemala because he also holds a Swiss passport. He is now standing trial in Switzerland and risks life imprisonment. The verdict in the trial, which started on May 15, is expected to be handed down on June 6.

Philip Grant

TRIAL (Track Impunity Always), an NGO that brings international crimes to justice in Switzerland and before international institutions, played a major role in bring Sperisen before the court. IPS talked to TRIAL director, Philip Grant.

IPS: What is at stake in this trial?  

Philip Grant: The capacity of the Swiss judiciary to judge facts or crimes committed thousands of kilometres away, in a completely different context and culture. Switzerland has not held such a criminal trial since 2000, when a Rwandan mayor was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for his participation in genocide and crime against humanity.

More broadly, there is a wider trend that is pushing states to handle cases where the crimes are committed abroad and the links to the country are very weak or possibly not existent, except that the suspect is caught on the territory.

The legal basis is universal jurisdiction. International law, particularly the Geneva conventions and the Convention against Torture, require the international community to investigate and judge those crimes.

IPS: Is this a new trend?

Philip Grant: No, but it is growing rapidly. There have been dozens of cases, starting with the Eichmann case in Israel in 1961, then Pinochet in 1998 and now there are more and more cases. In Great Britain the Home Office indicates that hundreds of suspects have entered the country from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sierra Leone and elsewhere."Nineteen people were indicted for extrajudicial killings around Sperisen. A lawyer has been assassinated, at least one witness has been assassinated and the mother of one of the victims may be in danger" - Philip Grant

No other country compiles similar figures, but the Netherlands has mentioned that dozens of suspected Rwandan genocidaires are present on its soil, and in France alone, more than 25 criminal complaints have been filed by NGOs against Rwandan suspects.

Several countries have set up war crimes units. The Dutch war crime unit has 35 investigators who regularly arrest people. The French one was created two years ago and a first trial earlier his year has ended in the conviction of a Rwandan man to 25 years in prison.

IPS: Is this limited to Western countries?

Philip Grant: No. Cases are currently being investigated also in Senegal – against Hissène Habré, a Chadian citizen, and in South Africa, against Zimbabwean suspects. Argentina tried to open up cases linked to Franco’s crimes in Spain.

Many countries may not be ready to investigate, but most of them have a criminal code that gives them the capacity to investigate and judge international crimes.

Another trend is that Northern prosecuting authorities start judging also their own nationals and not only people from the global South.

IPS: Does that refer also to economic crimes?

Philip Grant: Timidly. In Switzerland, the Swiss General Attorney opened a criminal investigation into the Swiss company Argor, one the most important gold refiners in the world, for its alleged complicity in the pillage of gold in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In France, prosecutors are investigating a company that sold surveillance material to Libya that allowed the former regime to track down and torture opponents.

The rationale is to judge not only the perpetrators of the crimes, but also those who profit from them.

The Netherlands investigated a Dutch company, Riwal, which contributed to erecting the separation wall between Israel and Palestine, a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The offices were raided by the Dutch police. The case was later halted, but the company had stopped its business around the wall.

When the decision was made public, another company working in the Occupied Territories put an end to its collaboration with Israel, fearing that it might be breaking international law.

So it is beginning to have real effects.

IPS: Could Erwin Sperisen have been tried in Switzerland even if he had not been a Swiss national?

Philip Grant: If you don’t have any close link to a country like nationality, the threshold to risk prosecution is the level of crimes you commit. For stealing a car, there is no universal jurisdiction.

You can become a target of universal jurisdiction if you commit human rights violations that amount to international crimes – like genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The system was not used very much in the past, but now more and more NGOs are working on this issue. In Switzerland, TRIAL is the only one that goes to the field to investigate such cases and comes back to file complaints.

IPS: What are the main difficulties in this kind of procedure?

Philip Grant: The protection of the witnesses and the victims. Nineteen people were indicted for extrajudicial killings around Sperisen. A lawyer has been assassinated, at least one witness has been assassinated and the mother of one of the victims may be in danger. She is the only plaintiff in this affair.

Though it involves ten cases of extrajudicial killings and ten families could potentially have filed a complaint, some were afraid, others are living abroad. The Swiss judiciary faces difficulties in ordering protection measures that would apply in Guatemala.

IPS: How do you work with organisations in Guatemala?

Philip Grant: By working with local NGOs and human rights defenders, or with the Procuradoria de los Derechos Humanos, we were able to gather evidence against Erwin Sperisen.

The United Nations established the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala to investigate crimes committed by illegal security forces because the national investigators themselves were considered too corrupt and unreliable. We also talked to them, even though they could not share the results of their investigations with us.

Although we have filed the initial complaint with other fellow NGOs, we are not party to the case. What we did for instance was to feed information to the authorities and to put them in contact with witnesses. During the trial, only the plaintiff is represented in court. If Erwin Sperisen is sentenced, she can ask for reparation.

TRIAL has filed many other cases, of which a few are still under investigation. Others are closed: when George Bush announced that he was coming to Geneva in 2011, we started working on a complaint for torture. At some point it was made public and suddenly he decided not to come.

Currently we are investigating a small number of cases of citizens of Western countries as well.

IPS: The verdict will come on June 6. What will be the consequences of this affair?

Philip Grant: Sperisen’s direct superior, the former Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann, is in Spain under investigation. If Sperisen is convicted, it will trigger strong calls to have Vielmann also judged there.

I can imagine that effects will also be felt in Guatemala. I assume that the current chief of police of Guatemala must be following the trial. If Sperisen is sentenced, I bet there will be changes in the way the Guatemalan police operates.

But whatever the verdict, it will be a further step in the fight against impunity across the board.

Excerpt:

Navi Pillay at a press conference in the Palais des Nations, Geneva. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

The Colombian army killed Marta Díaz’s son Douglas in 2006, dressed him in combat fatigues and reported him as a FARC guerrilla killed in a shootout. Díaz searched for him everywhere, in prisons, hospitals and morgues, until she finally managed to track down his remains in 2008.

Douglas was just another “false positive” – the euphemism used in this South American country to describe army killings of young civilians passed off as guerrilla casualties.

Since then, Díaz, an activist with the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), has helped hundreds of other mothers who have lost their sons.

“Last year I received 27 death threats. And there have been seven so far this year,” she told IPS.

On Wednesday, Díaz was at the Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá, established by the city government to promote debate and actions to document what is happening in Colombia’s decades-long civil war.“Last year I received 27 death threats. And there have been seven so far this year” -- Marta Díaz.

Seven human rights umbrella groups representing more than 400 organisations met this week with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay and Anders Kompass, her director of field operations and technical cooperation.

Many victims like Díaz were in the packed auditorium. Pillay and Kompass heard more than 100 three-minute speeches.

Closing the office

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced Tuesday that he would close the Colombia office of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Díaz said the fact that the announcement was made just when Pillay was starting a four-day visit to Colombia indicated that it was aimed at “confounding her and all of us human rights defenders, to get us all to fight to prevent the OHCHR from pulling out.”

The strategy was to divert attention from denunciations of human rights violations, which would be overshadowed by the news, Díaz said.

“It surprised me as much as it did the rest of you,” Pillay said on Wednesday, referring to the president’s announcement.

“We don’t need a U.N. human rights office in our country anymore,” Santos stated in an address given in Bogotá, which reached Pillay when she was in Santander de Quilichao, in the war-torn southwestern province of Cauca.

Pillay travelled to Cauca to meet for several hours with leaders of black, indigenous and rural communities who had plenty to say about the need for multilateral bodies to continue monitoring human rights in this country.

The OHCHR office in Colombia opened in 1997, and each renewal of its mandate has been preceded by a quiet diplomatic tug-of-war.

The authorities’ dislike of the U.N. office peaked after the May 2002 massacre in the village of Bojayá, where 119 people were killed and 98 injured after villagers took refuge in the church.

Shortly before they fled, the leftwing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), who were lobbing homemade mortars at far-right paramilitary fighters who had set up camp behind the church, hit the building with a gas cylinder bomb that veered off course.

Kompass, the OHCHR representative in Colombia at the time, went on a mission to the village of Bojayá, on the Atrato river in northwestern Chocó province.

In his report, Kompass said all of the armed parties to the conflict had to answer for the massacre: the FARC guerrillas, who bombed the church; the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) – since demobilised in talks with the government – which had occupied the village; and the state itself.

The government of then-President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) criticised the report, and the army’s Fourth Brigade said it did not “share unfounded versions which are aimed at showing possible ties between the army and navy and the illegal (paramilitary) self-defence groups.”

From Geneva, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson intervened in support of Kompass.

But on Jun. 14, 2002, Kompass’s mission in Colombia was abruptly cut short. His removal was the condition set by the government to keep the OHCHR office open.

Kompass is now the person who names the directors of the OHCHR country offices. For example, he designated Todd Howland to head the Colombia office, who at the start was seen by activists as too quiet.

But on Jul. 10, Howland issued a harshly worded report on what happened during protests by peasant farmers in Catatumbo, an impoverished area in northeast Colombia on the border with Venezuela.

The peasants in Catatumbo, who have been protesting for over a month, are demanding that the area be declared a “peasant reserve” and that a scheme be adopted that would allow them, in an organised manner, to stop producing coca – their main livelihood in the isolated, roadless area — and switch to alternative crops.

But no progress has been made towards an official declaration of the peasant reserve, and the government instead ordered the eradication of coca crops by force in June. The crackdown on the protests has left four dead and 15 injured.

Howland reported grave violations of economic, social and cultural rights in the Catatumbo region. He also said that during the crackdown on the protests shots were fired from high-powered rifles that are usually used by the security forces, which indicated “excessive use of force” against the demonstrators.

High-level Colombian officials accused the OHCHR office of exceeding its mandate, just a few days ahead of the second visit to the country by Pillay, who before being named to her current post served as a judge on the International Criminal Court, which has Colombia under observation.

Body count scandal

Pillay’s first visit was in October 2008, when the “false positives” scandal broke out, involving the killings of at least 1,416 people by the security forces as a result of the “body count” system. This army strategy used incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to reward soldiers and officers for “results” in the counterinsurgency effort.

The bodies of the victims, some of whom were lured from poor neighbourhoods by false job promises and then killed, were presented as guerrillas killed in combat.

Although extrajudicial executions have been committed for over three decades in Colombia, the statistics show that the number of “false positives” shot up during the government of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

According to Javier Giraldo, the priest who directs the human rights and political violence data bank of the Jesuit Centre for Popular Research and Education (CINEP), it is “very worrisome that the peak in false positives killings occurred from 2006 to 2008 – just when President Santos served as defence minister.”

Santos was defence minister from July 2006 to May 2009. The CINEP data bank documented 918 “false positives” between 2006 and 2008.

Reports of killings of this kind dropped to 18 a year in 2009 and 2010, before increasing to 85 in 2011 and falling again to 52 in 2012.

Santos claims that he worked to put an end to the practice when he was defence minister. “We changed the doctrine,” he said on Thursday – thus acknowledging that there was a specific “body count” strategy.

But according to the president, “the country’s need for a United Nations Human Rights Office…has gradually disappeared.

”I’m going to tell (Pillay) that we are discussing whether extending the mandate is really worth it. Or, if it is extended, it would be for a very short time, because Colombia has made enough progress to say: ‘We don’t need any more United Nations human rights offices in our country’,” he added.

Various U.N. sources, as well as international affairs expert Laura Gil, have been telling IPS over the last three years that the government was hoping to close down the U.N. office.

The sources said Santos wanted to shed Colombia’s reputation of having the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere, in order to request admission to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the 34-member-strong nations club, which aims to sets high human rights standards.

They explained that being under OHCHR monitoring was not compatible with membership in the OECD.