REFUGEE DAY-COLOMBIA:
The Smell of
Panic
Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, (IPS) - Panic has a smell and even a sound of its own,
perhaps a heartbeat or a way of breathing, ''something you can't
explain,'' says United Nations official Alfredo Witschi-Cestari.
Witschi-Cestari, the United Nations resident coordinator in Colombia,
has learned to recognise that smell on two continents. And he ran into
it once again at a meeting of displaced trade unionists and social
activists in Soacha, a municipality south of the Colombian capital.
He first noticed this smell 27 years ago in Sabra and Shatila,
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where a family living in danger
was trying to decide whether committing collective suicide was
preferable to falling into the hands of the Christian militias.
The U.N. official never found out what happened to the Palestinian
refugee family in 1982, when the militias massacred 2,000 to 3,500
unarmed men, women and children in the camps.
He once again smelled panic late one night in 1981, in the Lacandona
jungle in southeastern Mexico, one hour from the Guatemalan border, when
4,000 Mayan Indians arrived, fleeing the Guatemalan army, and an
exhausted elderly man said ''If you don't want to let us stay here,
don't send us back. Shoot us instead, it's easier to die like that.''
The indigenous people had been living in hiding in the jungle for five
months, eating roots and leaves, because they did not dare light a fire,
which would have given them away.
Some 200,000 people -- mainly Indians -- were killed by the armed forces
in Guatemala's civil war from 1960 to 1996, when hundreds of villages
were entirely destroyed, down to the last baby.
The displaced people in Soacha ''are afraid because no one is protecting
them from the armed bands (involved in Colombia's four-decade civil
war). They are community organisers and activists who have decided to
take the lead, which is why they are at risk,'' said Witschi-Cestari
ahead of the fourth annual World Refugee Day, Sunday Jun. 20.
His central message was that the people displaced by violence ''are men
and women who have as much right to not feel panic as each one of us,
and to recover what they lost'' when they left behind their homes and
belongings to save their lives.
A week before World Refugee Day, the new Panamanian President Martín
Torrijos said the refugees who reach his country fleeing the war in
Colombia ''will be repatriated as part of a close, fluid collaboration
with the Colombian government.''
Some 60,000 undocumented Colombians live in Panama City and other urban
areas in Panama, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Of that total, 829 have applied for asylum and another 860 have
officially been granted asylum.
Some Panamanians believe that granting political asylum, especially to
Colombians, could endanger the economy of their country of three million
people, and that the borders should be closed.
''We are confident that the international law on refugees will continue
to be applied as has occurred until now, and that asylum will continue
to be granted, as it has been since time immemorial,'' and as is
established in the tradition of the major religions, said the
representative of the UNHCR in Colombia, Francisco Galindo.
According to the Consultancy for Human Rights in Colombia (CODHES),
40,800 Colombians fled to the neighbouring countries of Ecuador,
Venezuela and Panama in 2003.
In order to reduce the risk that the poorest refugees will be rejected,
the UNHCR border programmes include projects that also benefit the
recipient communities, which are often impoverished themselves, and
neglected by the state.
In the slums surrounding Colombia's large cities, experts talk about the
impact of the ''new poor'' (the displaced) on the ''historically poor'',
because both groups end up unemployed and competing for social services
that fall far short.
The UNHCR has registered 2,388 applications of asylum from Colombians in
Venezuela, only 20 of which have been granted.
Colonel José Uriana, director of human rights and international
humanitarian law for the Venezuelan army chief of staff, argues that
many Colombian asylum requests are aimed at obtaining official
recognition of refugee status in the United States, which is why
Venezuela is reluctant to accept them.
In Ecuador, of a total of 23,036 applications for asylum filed by
Colombians, 6,250 have been accepted. According to the UNHCR, since
2001, the civil war has worsened in southern Colombia, and the number of
asylum requests in Quito, Ecuador has increased twofold every year.
In 2003 there were 11,388 applications, which makes Ecuador one of the
countries most affected by Colombia's armed conflict between leftist
guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries, and the armed forces.
According to the UNHCR, from 1999 to 2003 a total of 81,921 Colombians
have officially applied for asylum, the largest number of them in the
United States, followed by Ecuador, Costa Rica, Canada, Spain, Britain,
France, Venezuela, Sweden and 15 other countries.
An expert who preferred not to be identified estimates that for every
asylum request that is accepted, 10 are rejected, and another 10
refugees did not even dare to file a request out of fear of reprisals,
or mistrust.
CODHES reports that 157 social leaders or activists fled Colombia in
2003, mainly trade unionists. ''They are leading labour activists, with
between 15 and 30 years of experience in the unions, who had to leave
their jobs, and that has a huge cost in terms of the cohesion of civil
society,'' CODHES director Jorge Rojas said in an interview with IPS.
''Many of these activists do not register as refugees, but travel under
programmes of international protection,'' he explained.
Meanwhile, there are two or three million Colombians who are considered
internally displaced, according to government source and CODHES,
respectively.
>From the humanitarian perspective, such massive displacement ''is a
socio-demographic disaster that implies atypical, chaotic and
unregulated growth in cities, and a collapse of the state's
institutional capacity to deal with these people,'' said Rojas.
''From the human rights perspective, it is a crisis of a government that
does not guarantee protection of people's basic rights before, during or
after the displacement; not only civil and political rights, but also
economic, social and cultural rights,'' he said.
Says UNHCR official Galindo: Massive displacements occur ''because (the
communities) are approached by groups that threaten them, that tell them
'get out!' and they have to go, because if the don't, the ones making
the threat will follow through and kill them, massacre them.''
''The other displacement has a first and last name, it is individual, a
death threat, and the person has to seek safety,'' he explained.
The majority among the displaced population are peasant farmers and
colonists who have carved farms out of the jungle, but Indians and
Afro-Colombians have also been targeted over the years.
The Indians ''have a unique link with the land, and when they abandon it
it's because they really can't stand the threats any longer.
Displacement is a last recourse,'' for the indigenous and black
communities who live off the land in the Colombian jungles, and their
communities are left in tatters, said the UNHCR representative.
In 2003, the trend that had been on the rise was reversed: the number of
new forcibly displaced persons plunged 52 percent compared to 2002,
according to government figures.
But the other side of this apparently good news is the increased
confinement of populations by military blockades, restrictions on
movement and control over supplies. The official explanation is that the
goods could end up in guerrilla hands.
Confinement ''is a term that the government doesn't like, but it is a
new element of the crisis, and today confinement is as serious as
displacement,'' said Rojas.
Jan Egeland, U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs,
expressed concern for the 10 regions of Colombia where there are large
indigenous communities blocked off from the outside world.
But Rojas is unable to give precise figures of how many people are
confined, because when CODHES tries to conduct field studies, ''we are
sent back because the paramilitaries don't let us enter.''
These days there is no way to know how much the smell of fear permeates
the town of Jiguamiandó, in the northwest province of Chocó. The
community is under siege, and ''anyone who tries to leave is a dead
man,'' Rojas said.
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