Thursday 28 August
2008, San José, Costa Rica
COLOMBIA:
International Criminal
Court Scrutinizes
Paramilitary Crimes
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA (IPS) - The
International Criminal
Court’s (ICC) chief
prosecutor ended a
three-day visit to
Colombia Wednesday,
where he has been
investigating who is
ultimately responsible
for the human rights
crimes committed in this
civil war-torn country.
In the scenario of
Colombia’s internal
armed conflict, where
"we have an enormous
number of crimes and a
massive number of
criminals," the criteria
being followed is "to go
after the people who may
be considered among
those most responsible,"
ICC prosecutor Luis
Moreno-Ocampo said in
Bogotá during his
three-day visit to the
country this week.
In Colombia’s
decades-long civil war,
appalling human rights
crimes are committed by
all sides: the leftist
guerrillas who took up
arms in 1964, the
security forces and the
far-right paramilitary
militias.
But the latter, whose
leaders are drug
traffickers or have ties
to the drug trade, are
blamed by the United
Nations for 80 percent
of all killings, while
the insurgents are held
responsible for 12
percent and the security
forces are blamed for
the rest.
Some say today’s
paramilitary groups
emerged in the early
1980s, when drug
traffickers turned
landholders organised
private militias to
combat the guerrillas,
who had started
kidnapping wealthy
landowners and their
family members.
But others say the
extreme-rightwing groups
were created to do the
dirty work in the
counterinsurgency war
when Colombia’s
international image
began to be hurt by the
widespread human rights
abuses committed by the
security forces.
In any case, the
paramilitaries worked
closely with the
authorities, according
to numerous rulings
against the Colombian
state handed down by the
Inter-American Court of
Human Rights.
This is the second visit
to Colombia by Moreno-Ocampo,
an Argentine lawyer who
first gained renown
outside his country for
his work as assistant to
prosecutor Julio César
Strassera, in the 1985
trial that convicted
nine members of the
military junta that
ruled Argentina during
the 1976-1983
dictatorship for crimes
against humanity.
Moreno-Ocampo’s first
visit was in October
2007, when he announced
that he had been keeping
a file on Colombia for
the past three years.
He also said he was
closely following the
judicial processes held
under the Peace and
Justice Law, which
governs the partial
paramilitary
demobilisation process
negotiated behind closed
doors with the rightwing
government of Álvaro
Uribe.
The Peace and Justice
Law offers legal
benefits, like short
sentences, to
paramilitaries who
provide full information
about their crimes and
make reparations to
their victims.
The ICC, based in The
Hague, was set up to
investigate and
prosecute war crimes,
crimes against humanity,
and genocide in cases
where countries directly
connected with such
crimes are not able or
willing to carry out
prosecutions themselves.
The ICC prosecutor’s
visit to Colombia
coincided with a growing
uproar around what has
been dubbed the "parapolitics"
scandal, in which the
public prosecutor’s
office and the Supreme
Court have arrested or
are investigating some
70 legislators -- nearly
all of them Uribe allies
-- for alleged ties with
paramilitary groups.
The Supreme Court
investigates and tries
sitting members of
Congress, while the
public prosecutor’s
office brings former
lawmakers to justice.
One of the latest
developments in the
ongoing scandal is the
removal of senior
regional prosecutor
Guillermo Valencia, the
brother of Interior and
Justice Minister Fabio
Valencia, for alleged
ties with "Don Mario", a
fast-rising drug kingpin
and paramilitary chief.
But the underlying
battle involves
repeated, veiled
government attacks on
the Supreme Court,
especially associate
Justice Iván Velásquez,
the Court’s chief
investigator in the
parapolitics scandal.
Witnesses who accused
Velásquez of trying to
dig up evidence to
implicate President
Uribe in the scandal,
but later confessed that
they were pressured or
deceived into doing so,
are feeding the spiral
of the "clash of
powers."
So is last Sunday’s news
that two senior
executive branch
officials have held
meetings over the past
year, in the
presidential palace,
with emissaries sent by
a druglord who claimed
he had evidence to
undermine Justice
Velásquez.
Just before Moreno-Ocampo’s
visit, the issue heated
up when the president of
the Supreme Court,
Justice Francisco
Ricaurte, referred to "a
strange alliance," in
which the government and
the paramilitaries were
making common cause
against the Supreme
Court.
Ricaurte repeated what
he said several months
ago: "There is a plot
against the Supreme
Court to discredit its
magistrates and
undermine the legitimacy
of the reports of
wrongdoing."
"There is a plot here.
The public prosecutor’s
office should
investigate," said
Velásquez himself.
Prosecutors who have
been taking the
confessions of
demobilised
paramilitaries under the
provisions of the Peace
and Justice Law have all
been threatened, as have
the magistrates of the
Supreme Court’s criminal
chamber.
And in the meantime,
Interior and Justice
Minister Valencia is
pushing for changes in
the justice system which
could limit the power of
the Supreme Court to
investigate and try
legislators implicated
in the scandal, and for
political reforms that
would only go into
effect shortly before
the current legislature
ends in 2010, thus
prolonging the status
quo.
Iván Cepeda, spokesman
for the Movement of
Victims of State Crimes
(MOVICE), said the ICC
should be alerted to how
the politicians caught
up in the scandal "have
begun to be absolved."
Among those implicated
in the scandal is Mario
Uribe, the president’s
cousin and close
political ally, who
stepped down as senator
to avoid being
investigated by the
Supreme Court and to
fall instead under the
jurisdiction of the
public prosecutor’s
office, which is headed
by a former deputy
minister of the current
government, Mario
Iguarán.
Before being arrested in
April, Mario Uribe
attempted to seek
political asylum in the
Costa Rican Embassy.
The Supreme Court began
to investigate him in
July 2007 for allegedly
receiving support from
the paramilitaries in
his election campaign
and for the purchase of
5,000 hectares of land
reportedly acquired by
means of threats against
the owners.
But the former senator
was released from prison
on Aug. 20 after the
public prosecutor’s
office said there was
insufficient evidence to
hold him.
And although the
investigation of Mario
Uribe continues, it is
not including a 2000
land deal with one of
the paramilitary chiefs
extradited to the United
States on drug charges
in May, according to the
Bogota magazine Semana.
Three other former
lawmakers who quit
Congress have also been
released from prison in
the last few weeks,
after witness testimony
was dismissed by the
public prosecutor’s
office.
"The government
coalition is made up of
parties whose leadership
has been implicated in
the parapolitics
scandal. The parties’
presidents are under
prosecution, and between
30 and 70 percent of the
votes the parties won
are compromised because
the legislators are
either on trial or in
jail," former minister
Camilo González Posso,
the head of the
Institute for Peace and
Development (INDEPAZ),
told IPS.
This is "a governing
coalition that has won
power by the use of
violence. They share the
responsibility for the
appalling crimes for
which the paramilitaries
are being tried," he
added.
"How will impunity be
avoided, and what kind
of reparations will be
demanded of the
‘parapoliticians’ who
contributed to murders,
massacres and the forced
displacement of three
million people in
Colombia?" asked
González Posso, alluding
to the provisions of the
Peace and Justice Law.
The same questions are
being asked by the ICC
prosecutor, according to
a letter to the
Colombian government
from Moreno-Ocampo,
dated Jun. 18 but kept
secret until Aug. 15,
when it was published by
the Bogota daily El
Nuevo Siglo.
"How will the trial of
those most responsible
for crimes under the
jurisdiction of the ICC,
including political
leaders and members of
Congress presumably
linked to demobilised
groups, be ensured?"
asked Moreno-Ocampo.
"The parapolitics
scandal is a key issue
for us, because those
who are ultimately
responsible should be
tried and convicted," he
added in the letter.
Cepeda pointed out to
IPS that since the Rome
Statute, which created
the ICC, went into force
in July 2002, elections
have been held in
Colombia "in which
mechanisms of armed
pressure and territorial
control were used, which
can be linked to crimes
against humanity."
IPS learned that the ICC
prosecutor is not
pleased with the fact
that the legislators
investigated in the
parapolitics scandal are
accused only of
conspiracy to commit
crimes, with aggravating
circumstances, and not
of crimes against
humanity.
One possibility is that
the most heavily
implicated legislators
will be sentenced in
Colombia on charges of
conspiracy to commit
crimes, and could face
possible prosecution
before the ICC for
crimes against humanity.
"Parapolitics is the
main front in the
struggle today in
Colombia," said Cepeda.
"The possibility of a
way forward to democracy
depends on how this
struggle between hopes
for impunity versus the
search for truth and
justice in the
parapolitics cases plays
out," he said.
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