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RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: A Special Case for the UN

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Dec 10 2008 (IPS) - Whether for its extreme violence, its potential for undermining order in a large part of society or its effects on the United Nations human rights system, Colombia is at the centre of attention of the international community.

The former U.N. Commission on Human Rights expressed concern as far back as 1984 over the forced disappearances, summary executions, torture and multiple violations of the fundamental rights of Colombian citizens.

Now it is the task of the Human Rights Council, which replaced the Commission, to examine the current state of human rights in a session Wednesday that will hear statements by the Colombian government of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe and civil society.

Lawyer Gustavo Gallón, representing the Colombian Commission of Jurists, described a high level of violence and human rights violations.

Since August 2002, when the first Uribe administration took office, 14,000 people have been murdered or disappeared for socio-political reasons, an average of seven people a day. Some 1,400 victims, that is, 10 percent, were women, while 700 children were killed – equivalent to five percent of the murders – and 1,500 people were forcibly disappeared, Gallón said.

Another 12,000 people were killed in combat during the same period, bringing the combined death toll to 26,000.

In the 14,000 deaths and disappearances, the state appears to bear responsibility for 75 percent of them, while the rest are attributed to leftwing guerrillas.

Of the victims attributed to the state, 17.5 percent were related to crimes perpetrated directly by state agents. Criminal responsibility for the rest is attributed to the actions of far-right paramilitary groups that work in collusion with the state.

Trade unionists have been a favourite target of violence. Since 1986, 2,674 workers’ representatives have been killed, an average of one every three days. So far this year, 40 have been murdered, while in 2007 there were 39 killings.

Eric Sottas, secretary-general of the World Organisation against Torture (OMCT), an international coalition of non-governmental organisations, said that human rights defenders and people fighting for their rights have also been targeted.

Sottas said that in the case of Colombia, which has been in the throes of civil war for over half a century, it is often forgotten that the conflict is, above all, about land. Between 3.5 and four million small farmers have been displaced from their plots of land.

The Justice and Peace Law passed in 2005 to regulate the demobilisation of paramilitaries after negotiations with the government allows them to keep lands taken during the conflict, the OMCT secretary-general told IPS.

The law only provides for compensation to the peasant farmers, out of a fund that is insufficient to make reparations to all of the displaced, he said. Cash payments made by those who stole the land will not go into the compensation fund.

In addition, the present owners of the land, who say they bought it in good faith from the groups who took it by force, have completely transformed agricultural production patterns.

This shows that behind the conflict, there is a plan to appropriate land and change its use, said Sottas. In fact, in Colombia a huge process running counter to land reform and a redirection of agricultural production are happening, he stressed.

In “Vivir para contarla” (Living to Tell the Tale), the first volume of his autobiography, Colombian Nobel Literature Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez tells of the killings of peasant farmers in the northwestern region of Uraba in order to seize their lands and grow bananas on a large scale, Sottas said.

The banana plantations remain, but on the lands the campesinos used for growing subsistence crops like maize and beans, there are now plantations of African palm trees, which render the soil unfertile, and also maize – both of which are used for the production of biofuels.

Uribe’s plans to direct agricultural production towards biofuels have been criticised by experts and have created controversy at Latin American summits, Sottas said.

In Sottas’ view, the debate at the Human Rights Council on the situation in Colombia, which forms part of the Universal Periodic Review Mechanism, may set a precedent for the U.N. agency.

Human rights violations in Colombia have been analysed by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and other special mechanisms “of the highest quality,” such as the special rapporteurs on torture and extrajudicial executions, as well as by the conventional committees on human rights and torture, he said.

It is possible that the Universal Periodic Review may water down a process that should emphasise above all the measures that need to be taken to defend human rights in Colombia, Sottas said.

The goal is no longer to review the state of human rights in Colombia in a consensual manner, the expert warned.

Colombia is appearing before the Human Rights Council on the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly.