Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Migration & Refugees

COLOMBIA: Displaced to March Against “Senseless War”

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Feb 28 2008 (IPS) - A statement issued by a number of organisations of internally displaced persons in Colombia calls the country’s four-decade armed conflict a “senseless war” and announces their participation in a national and global demonstration scheduled for Mar. 6.

In 2007, the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes and land increased 38 percent with respect to 2006. According to independent estimates, four million people have been displaced in the past 20 years in Colombia, which has one of the biggest populations of displaced persons in the world.

On Mar. 4, some 1,000 displaced persons will throw flowers into the Magdalena river, which runs across Colombia from the southwest to the north, in memory of the thousands of victims of forced disappearance whose remains are in secret common graves or were thrown into rivers by the far-right paramilitary militias.

United Nations officials and international human rights groups blame the paramilitaries – which partially demobilised in controversial negotiations with the rightwing government of Álvaro Uribe – for the lion’s share of the atrocities committed in Colombia’s civil war.

The demonstrators will then travel to the Plaza de Bolívar, a square in central Bogotá, to join the Mar. 6 demonstration convened by the National Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE) in homage to the thousands of people tortured and killed in the war. The displaced persons’ associations say they will be marching for “land, dignity and peace.”

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents 168 million workers in 155 countries, has also called on all of the countries where its member unions are located to hold demonstrations that day outside of Colombian consulates and embassies.

The war costs Colombia 6.5 percent of gross domestic product – similar to the amounts spent on health, education and sanitation together, researchers José Fernando Izasa and Diógenes Campo said in a study published in December.

“The country is fed up with the violence,” says the call issued by the displaced persons, more than 70 percent of whom live in extreme poverty.

The roots of Colombia’s armed conflict, in which leftist rebel armies that emerged in 1964 are fighting state security forces and their paramilitary allies, date back to the 1940s.

“After 60 years, it is clear that the war waged by the state has not solved the armed conflict and the guerrillas’ weapons have failed to overcome the causes of the war…This is a senseless war that no one wins in military terms and in which everyone loses, in social and humanitarian terms,” says the statement released by the displaced persons’ associations.

Their invitation to take part in the Mar. 6 demonstration calls for “putting an end to the war and displacement” by means of “serious talks and political negotiations that lead to peace and social justice.”

Aerial bombing and strafing, recruitment by the guerrillas and the paramilitaries – who are reemerging after the partial demobilisation that ended in 2006 – landmines laid by the insurgent groups, and the forced eradication of drug crops without providing farmers with legal alternative livelihoods are the main causes of the growing displacement crisis.

Last year, 305,966 people were forcibly displaced, according to the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), the leading non-governmental source of information on the question, which bases its estimates on Catholic Church statistics.

That is 84,328 more than in 2006, when 221,638 people were displaced.

The government’s Social Action office puts the 2007 number at 211,467 so far. However, the figure is not yet complete, because people still have several months to officially register as displaced persons, and their names will be included in last year’s total.

But both government and independent entities say that as many as 40 percent of the country’s displaced persons are not in the official registry.

CODHES also warns that its figures underestimate the real numbers.

The NGO says the main reason for the increase in the number of displaced persons in 2007 was “the intensity of armed clashes in the areas of implementation of Plan Consolidation,” the phase of the war that followed Plan Patriot and that began in August 2006, incorporating an additional 40,000 troops last year in the offensive against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

The southern provinces have been most heavily affected by the forced displacement associated with Plan Consolidation, which reverted the shrinking of the numbers of people displaced as recorded by CODHES between 2003 and 2006.

(The FARC, the country’s main rebel group, controls an estimated 40 percent of the national territory, mainly in rural, sparsely populated areas in the south.)

The second reason is “the action of paramilitary groups – or whatever you want to call them,” CODHES director Jorge Rojas told IPS, alluding to government claims that the paramilitaries demobilised and no longer exist.

These groups “continue to operate in different regions of the country, where there have been threats and murders by paramilitaries, especially against leaders of the civilian population,” said Rojas.

Another factor in the displacement crisis is the aerial spraying of coca crops, the raw material of cocaine, of which Colombia is the world’s leading producer.

Government spraying with high-concentration glyphosate solutions “is leading to the displacement of many families, who become pariahs. Coca farmers and ‘raspachines’ (coca leaf pickers) have no one to defend them,” he said.

“The guerrillas pursue them, the paramilitaries pressure and attack them, the security forces violate their rights, and the state does not recognise them as displaced persons, even though they are displaced from their homes and land in the midst of military operations,” said Rojas.

He added that the aerial fumigation is carried out “basically in areas under guerrilla influence; very little spraying is done in areas under paramilitary control. With this I am not saying that there is bias, but the question arises as to what areas are mainly targeted by the spraying.”

The fumigation also destroys food crops.

Forced manual eradication of coca plants, a strategy that was introduced in the last year and is carried out by a large squad of hired workers who pull up the bushes by the roots, under heavy security provided by the police, “generates less displacement, but the people are deprived of their livelihood, pursued, become outcasts, and are given no alternatives” for survival, said Rojas.

As a result of the lack of alternatives, displaced coca farmers have three possibilities: join one of the armed factions in the civil war; find a new place to live, often in the slums ringing the major cities, or flee the country; or plant coca in more remote areas – a kind of forced displacement of coca production.

“If their livelihoods are taken from them, they join the war. Spraying or manual eradication without the provision of alternatives broadens the social base of the armed conflict,” expanding the ranks of the security forces and their network of paid informers as well, said Rojas.

ENDLESS RECRUITMENT

“Recruitment is the main problem in the conflict today, because it ensures that the war will continue,” he said.

The security forces grew from 220,000 members in 2002 to around 500,000 today, and the number is expected to increase to 560,000 by 2010, without counting the network of paid informants whose creation has been promoted by the government throughout this South American country of 43 million people.

Because of the casualties and desertions caused by the Plan Consolidation offensive in the south, the FARC “is recruiting massively in several regions, without regard to gender or age, and especially recruiting adolescents” – a phenomenon that has prompted many parents to flee to keep their children from being recruited.

The Defence Ministry reports a decline in the number of FARC combatants, from 16,900 in 2002 to 11,000 in 2007.

But after running across different figures from the same source, Isaza and Campo, who are mathematicians, said that “a simple calculation shows that for every 100 subversives who deserted or were killed, the guerrillas were able, in the 2002-2007 period, to recruit 84 new combatants.”

The paramilitaries, meanwhile, are “remobilising” their old combatants “by means of threats, intimidation and killings, as has occurred in the (northwestern provinces of) Córdoba and Chocó,” said Rojas, whose assertion concurs with observations by a source with the Organisation of American States (OAS) Mission to Support the Peace Process in Colombia.

“In Córdoba the paramilitaries have threatened demobilised fighters who refused to join up again. They killed one and threatened others,” Rojas added.

But they are also “expanding their base to new sectors, mainly in urban areas, where they are recruiting widely,” especially in cities like “Bogotá, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Barrancabermeja, Villavicencio and Montería,” he said.

GOVERNMENT REPORTS IMPROVEMENT

On Tuesday, the Colombian government reported “major advances in terms of displacement” with respect to the outlook in August 2002, when President Uribe first took office.

At that time, “more than 450,000 people were displaced every year,” but a “50 percent decline” has been registered in the last three years and half a million people have returned to their homes, according to Social Action.

The government office also reported that in six years, health coverage expanded from 30 to 80 percent of internally displaced persons, and basic education from 60 to 84 percent, while 250,000 displaced families receive a subsidy of seven dollars a month through the office’s Families in Action programme.

And last year, the Uribe administration decided to increase spending on the internally displaced population, through all of the government institutions that attend to them, from 70 million to 500 million dollars a year.