Civil Society, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Victims Speak Out and Demand Respect

Helda Martínez

BOGOTÁ, Jul 28 2007 (IPS) - “One encounter, many paths: united against forgetting,” the placards read, as 3,500 victims of the civil war in Colombia demand recognition and respect, from the authorities and society.

Women, small farmers, Afro-Colombians, indigenous people, displaced people, trade unionists, relatives of the victims of murder, kidnapping or forced disappearance – all of whom have suffered at the hands of ultra-rightwing paramilitaries, leftwing guerrillas or state security forces, have come to Bogotá from Thursday to Saturday to meet and get to know each other, and to seek ways to solve their problems.

“We want to make the victims visible, and we want Colombian society not to tolerate, or encourage, any apologetics on behalf of criminal actions, whoever commits them,” activist Iván Cepeda told IPS.

Eighty civil society organisations from all over the country are taking part in the meeting, at which it was announced that 31,656 people were killed or disappeared for political reasons between June 1996 and June 2006, according to figures from the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), a non-governmental body with consultative status at the United Nations.

The CCJ said that those responsible for 20,352 of these deaths had been identified. “Direct or indirect agents of the state, that is, government officials and paramilitaries” perpetrated 16,064 of the crimes, and the guerrillas were responsible for the remainder, according to the highly-respected human rights group.

Meanwhile, the non-governmental National Trade Union School reported that 2,515 labour union leaders and activists have been killed since 1986.

The Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP), for its part, said that 157 journalists had been killed in the armed conflict since 1985, and the non-governmental National Federation of Municipal Councils said that 251 town councillors had been killed since 2000.

Eye-witness accounts drove the statistics home. Indigenous Wayuú women from La Guajira, in the extreme north of Colombia, wearing long colourful tunics and headscarves, told how more than 200 members of their community had to cross the border into Venezuela, terrorised by the crimes that police officers were committing with total impunity in their village.

And the central Andean mountain department (province) of Quindío “was traditionally a peaceful backwater, but now the Black Eagles, a re-emerging paramilitary group, have started to commit crimes there,” a small farmer from the region told IPS.

“I have been displaced since 1997. My brother was killed, and I went to work the land in Quindío. But two years ago the paramilitaries arrived, and in the time they’ve been there they have carried out a plan involving murder and persecution. In the community of La Tebaida alone, they killed at least 150 people, and 130 families had to flee,” he said.

“That’s why I’m here, so that the whole world hears about what is going on in Colombia,” he added. “I want the world to help us, because the displaced people are hungry and sick and need help.”

Also at the meeting are Afro-descendants from the Pacific coastal region in the west, indigenous people from Cauca in the south who arrived in “chivas” (brightly painted minibuses with no glass in the windows) bearing their symbolic staffs of authority, indigenous people from the Sierra Nevada in the north wearing white tunics and carrying traditional woven backpacks, and people from many other departments.

“The massive attendance shows that people have been killed, kidnapped and disappeared throughout the length and breadth of this country,” Jesuit priest and sociologist Javier Giraldo, who works with communities in conflict areas and founded the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, told IPS.

“I think we have taken too long to organise an event like this, because the country has been full of victims for many years now, but only recently have they begun to come out and meet each other, and seeing them together now makes a huge impact,” the priest said.

Marleny Orjuela, the president of ASFAMIPAZ, the association of relatives of army and police officers held hostage by the guerrillas, was also invited. She is a tireless campaigner for a negotiated humanitarian swap of hostages for imprisoned insurgents, and demonstrates every Tuesday in front of the Congress building.

“We hope Professor Moncayo will be able to make it to the event,” said Cepeda, referring to Gustavo Moncayo, who has been walking from his birthplace Nariño, on the southwest border with Ecuador, since mid-June, appealing for freedom for his son, who was kidnapped by the main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1997.

The human rights group Corporación Reiniciar pointed out that in 1993 it had presented the case of the leftwing party Unión Patriótica to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, with an initial list of 1,163 of the party’s leaders and activists killed between 1985 and 1993. Today the number of those murdered is “close to 5,000,” they said.

“What’s the reason for all this?” Cepeda wondered. “This Saturday we are holding a public hearing in the presence of state officials such as deputy prosecutor general Guillermo Mendoza, ombudsman Volmar Pérez, and a representative from the Internal Affairs agency, whose name we haven’t yet been given.”

“We will ask them to adopt educational programmes and a draft law making it an offence to connive at crime in any of its forms, and we’ll ask them to present it to Congress as many times as necessary until it is approved,” he said.

At the public hearing, victims will proffer due recognition to the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court for having “set limits to the excessive demands for leniency of the paramilitary groups (in return for demobilising), and to the impunity for them sought by politicians linked to the paramilitaries,” Cepeda added.

Young people, theatre and community cultural groups are engaged in parallel activities, like the “live graffiti” workshop entitled “Echoes and Traces of Memory,” at which works alluding to truth, justice and reparations are being painted on canvases, which will then be displayed in an exhibition.