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REPORTS: COLOMBIA |
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Thursday 18
September 2003
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Group
Outraged at Colombia Plan to Amnesty
Paramilitaries
Jim
Lobe
WASHINGTON, (IPS) - A Colombian
proposal to amnesty leaders of
right-wing paramilitary groups
responsible for some of the worst
massacres of the country's
decades-long civil war has been
strongly assailed by a major U.S.
human-rights researcher.
In a release issued by Human Rights
Watch (HRW), Robin Kirk, the author of
'More Terrible Than Death: Massacres,
Drugs and America's War in Colombia',
called on the administration of U.S.
President George W. Bush to cut off
aid to the South American country if
the proposal is adopted.
Washington currently provides Bogotá
more than 700 million dollars a year
in mostly military aid, more than it
gives any other country except Israel
and Egypt.
”Washington's response should be
unequivocal,” Kirk said Monday.
”If Colombia is serious about human
rights and wants to continue receiving
millions in aid, it cannot allow known
criminals to escape justice by, in
effect, writing a cheque,” added the
researcher, who has monitored abuses
in the country for both HRW and
Amnesty International.
The Bush administration, Uribe's
biggest foreign booster, has not
commented publicly on the proposal,
but the 'New York Times' reported
Monday that it had provided advice to
Bogotá on drafting legislation that
would implement the scheme's main
components, which it sees as a way of
reducing violence and a step toward
ending South America's oldest civil
war.
In exchange for amnesty, the
paramilitaries would have to disband
and pay fines or make other acts of
contrition.
Colombian human rights activists, as
well as the United Nations special
envoy for human rights in the country,
Michael Fruhling, have opposed the
initiative. ”The bill opens the door
to impunity because it throws out jail
time and allows those responsible not
to serve a single day in prison,”
Fruhling said.
Tensions between human rights
activists and Uribe are currently high
after the president twice last week
accused local rights groups of
defending terrorism.
The war, which dates back to the
1960s, has pitted two major left-wing
guerrilla groups against the
government and the army. To complicate
matters, Colombia's drug traffickers
have also entered the fray from time
to time and helped finance the
right-wing paramilitaries, who have
also enjoyed the support of individual
military commanders, according to
independent experts and human rights
groups.
In addition to receiving backing from
the traffickers, the paramilitaries,
who unified as the Self-Defence Forces
(AUC) in the mid-1990s, also moved
into the drug trade themselves.
Indeed, Carlos Castano, a top AUC
leader, has admitted publicly that
much of their financing in recent
years has come from trafficking.
Colombian intelligence sources
estimate that paramilitaries control
about 40 percent of the country's
cocaine exports, and Castano, as well
as two other paramilitary leaders, has
been indicted for importing cocaine
into the United States.
Washington has charged that the two
guerrilla groups are also dependent on
cocaine cultivation and trafficking.
The State Department also considers
both the AUC and the two leftist
insurgencies terrorist groups,
although the paramilitaries are
notorious for mass killings of rural
villagers suspected of links to the
guerrillas.
The AUC has also been accused of
thousands of assassinations,
particularly of union and peasant
organisers, but also of judges,
prosecutors, and even two presidential
candidates.
Many of the killings have been
shockingly brutal. Kirk cited one case
where the paramilitaries, with the
apparent cooperation of army units
stationed nearby, carried out a
massacre in the central village of
Mapiripan in 1997.
At dawn, they rounded up residents and
took them to a slaughterhouse, where
they bound and tortured the captives
and slit their throats. The first
person killed was hung from a meat
hook; at least two others were
decapitated. More than 30 others were
slaughtered. Castano himself claimed
responsibility and promised ”many
more Mapiripans” in the future.
Castano himself has been sentenced by
Colombia judges to 102 years in
prison, but, despite frequent
statements to the press and
circumstantial evidence of close ties
with some military commanders, he has
never been arrested.
Since last year's election of Uribe,
whose governorship of a northern
province drew widespread charges of
condoning paramilitary activities
there, Castano and other paramilitary
leaders have insisted they are willing
to lay down their arms and enter into
peace talks with the government.
It appears that the proposals put
forward by Uribe are an effort to
strike a deal, the basic elements of
which include an amnesty for past
crimes on condition that paramilitary
leaders admit their crimes and make
symbolic acts of contrition, such as
community service, compensating the
victims, or paying fines.
”Rather than serving time in a
prison, there are alternative
sentences,” according to the
government's peace commissioner, Luis
Carlos Restrepo, ”and the
individuals will be allowed to pay
reparations”.
They would also lose their right to
bear arms and to hold or run for
public office.
The proposal could also be made to
apply to guerrilla leaders, according
to the government. But the two
insurgencies have rejected Uribe's
peace offers.
”This shows what we have always
affirmed, that Uribe's commitment has
always been with the
paramilitaries,” Wilson Borja, a
leftist congressman who was seriously
wounded in an assassination attempt,
apparently by paramilitaries, told the
'New York Times'.
Aside from granting immunity to
perpetrators of atrocities, observers
have also expressed concern that drug
traffickers will associate themselves
directly with the paramilitaries in
order to qualify for amnesty.
Kirk calls the plan ”chequebook
impunity” and says it evokes
”disturbing memories”, as when
Colombia's most brutal drug
traffickers, including Pablo Escobar,
offered to turn over their
billion-dollar assets to the state in
1984 in exchange for immunity from
prosecution and extradition to the
United States. The deal fell through
after a public outcry.
She said the Castano family entered a
similar arrangement in 1992, agreeing
to fund a family-run ”charity”
with millions of dollars in land and
cash for former guerrillas to set up
small businesses, schools and training
programs. It was a time when Castano's
elder brother Fidel was tied to the
Medellin Cartel.
”As a strategy for peace, the
arrangement was an utter failure,”
Kirk said. Only two years after their
surrender, many of the guerrillas
turned up as Castano's paramilitaries,
and in 2001, prosecutors charged the
family ”charity” with financing
paramilitaries.
”Impunity does not promote peace,”
Kirk said. ”It erodes the rule of
law and encourages further violence.
In Colombia, the history is stark.”
Writing for the New Mexico-based
Inter-Hemispheric Resource Centre,
policy analyst Virginia Bouvier also
called for Washington to oppose any
scheme that would confer immunity on
the paramilitaries.
Some 97 percent of crimes in Colombia,
she wrote recently, go unpunished.
Future peace, according to Bouvier,
depends on a system of accountability.
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