From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 19:03:59 -0000 ---------------- 1. THE PASTRANA-BUSH SUMMIT: A HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH BACKGROUNDER ON US-COLOMBIA RELATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, Friday, 23 February 2001 2. The Clinton Administration's Stealth Waiver of Human Rights Protections for Colomia, by Joanne Mariner, Thursday, Feb 8, 2 3. Americans Work in Colombia War Zone, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sunday, 25 Feb 2001 -------------------------------------------- _____________________________________ HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH Friday, 23 February 2001 For Immediate Release: For More Information, Contact Robin Kirk: 202-612-4321 José Miguel Vivanco: 202-612-4330 THE PASTRANA-BUSH SUMMIT A HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH BACKGROUNDER ON US-COLOMBIA RELATIONS (New York, February 23, 2001) -- When Colombian President Andrés Pastrana meets with President George W. Bush next Tuesday [February 27], the two leaders will discuss U.S. military aid to Colombia, including the issue of Colombia's progress on improving human rights. This background briefing outlines the key human rights problems in Colombia and includes sample questions to be put to the two presidents at their joint press conference. POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN COLOMBIA Political violence is dramatically up in Colombia, in part the result of efforts by all sides to gain territorial control, increase revenue to fund war, and influence talks between rebels and the government. This continues a disturbing trend from the year 2000, when the average number of victims of political violence and deaths in combat rose to fourteen per day according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists. Even by the Colombian National Police department's own estimate, there were twenty-three massacres by paramilitaries in the first seventeen days of 2001. Paramilitaries belonging to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC) committed the largest single massacre on January 17 in the village of Chengue, Sucre, with at least twenty-six people registered killed. [See Human Rights Watch's World Report chapter on Colombia at http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/americas/colombia.html] MILITARY-PARAMILITARY TIES Ties between paramilitaries and Colombian army and navy brigades remain strong and intimate. [See Human Rights Watch's 2000 report: The Ties That Bind: Colombia and Military-Paramilitary Links http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/colombia/]. These military brigades are deployed throughout the country, meaning that such relationships between the military and paramilitary groups are neither isolated nor unusual. They exist at the national level and include units in Colombia's largest cities. Paramilitary groups working with the tolerance or support of the Colombian military are considered responsible for nearly 80 percent of all human rights violations documented last year in Colombia. Ties means active coordination in the field with paramilitary units; permanent communication via radios, cellular telephones, and beepers; the sharing of intelligence, including the names of suspected guerrillas collaborators; the sharing of fighters, including active-duty soldiers serving in paramilitary units and paramilitary commanders lodging on military bases; the sharing of vehicles, including army trucks used to transport paramilitary fighters; coordination of army roadblocks, which are suspended to let paramilitary fighters pass; and payments made from paramilitaries to military officers for their support. Among them, the Army's Twenty-Fourth Brigade is slated to receive U.S. aid and training through the billion-dollar anti-drug strategy, Plan Colombia [see our joint report with Amnesty International and WOLA at http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/01/jointdoc.htm]. Human Rights Watch has plentiful and convincing evidence linking the Twenty-Fourth Brigade to direct support for and collaboration with paramilitaries under the command of Carlos Castaño. Although investigators with Colombia's Internal Affairs agency (Procuraduría) recommended investigating Colonel Gabriel Díaz, the former commander of this unit, five months ago for tolerating paramilitary activity, this officer not only remains on active duty, but is currently completing the course work necessary for a promotion to the rank of general. The Colombian government announced on January 15, 2001, the creation of an "Anti-Assassin Committee" (Comité Anti-Sicarial), with the stated goal of pursuing and capturing paramilitary groups. In the past, similar committees have been no more than paper tigers. A similar group announced on October 4, 1998, produced no visible improvement. Another, announced in February 2000 after a similar series of massacres, never even met. Human rights defenders remain in danger, despite government promises to take effective measures to protect them. Most attacks on human rights workers are perpetrated by paramilitary groups. On February 13, 2001, ten gunmen attacked and killed Iván Villamizar, the former Public Advocate in Cúcuta, Norte de Santander. During his tenure as advocate, Villamizar had been repeatedly threatened by paramilitary groups for his work documenting massacres carried out with Colombian army collusion in the La Gabarra region in 1998. Far from fortifying the work of human rights, President Pastrana has cut funding for key government investigators. The Attorney General reported in September 2000 that budget cuts implemented by President Pastrana are "dramatic" and threaten to "paralyze" the work of the Human Rights Unit, responsible for progress on important cases. Dozens of defenders have had to suspend their work or flee the country because of threats on their lives. Forced displacement is one of the most visible symptoms of political violence. Human rights groups estimate that at least 317,000 Colombians became displaced in 2000; of those, an estimated 15,000 crossed Colombia's borders for an uncertain future as refugees. This represents an all time high for a single year. Human rights groups estimate that over 600,000 Colombians have become displaced since President Pastrana took office. DAMAGE BY THE U.S. HUMAN RIGHTS WAIVER The decision by the Clinton Administration to waive human rights conditions contained in Public Law 106-246 has been devastating. Judged by its behavior in the field - not by rhetoric or public relations pamphlets - the Colombian military understood the waiver as a virtual carte blanche for its strategy, which depends on continued, active coordination with paramilitary groups [see http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/08/colombia0823.html]. As long as Colombia's military high command understands that the United States will not enforce human rights conditions, we do not expect progress in the protection of human rights. The deterioration has been dramatic and devastating for Colombia, particularly since the waiver was invoked on August 22, 2000. High-ranking military officers continue to attack human rights groups, calling them guerrilla facades or even drug traffickers, in defiance of President Pastrana's explicit orders to respect the work of these groups. Recently, Air Force commander Gen. Héctor Fabio Velásco Chávez asserted that human rights are being "utilized by some ultra-Left movements, which wield as a facade the so-called non-governmental organizations and lend themselves warmly to dark plots." He went on to claim that human rights groups try to delegitimize us using the extortion [sic] of the truth, lies, and slander." U.S. funds meant to support the Human Rights Unit of the Attorney General's office have yet to be disbursed, a damaging delay that ignores the emergency nature of the human rights situation in Colombia. In addition, the Witness Protection Program continues to be seriously short of funds, limiting witnesses to only three months of protection. Once that period is concluded, witnesses are on their own again, exposing them to serious risk. GUERRILLA VIOLATIONS The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) and the Camilist Union-National Liberation Army (Unión Camilista-Ejército de Liberación Nacional, UC-ELN) violate international humanitarian law by killing civilians, kidnapping for ransom and using indiscriminate weapons, including propane tank bombs. Half of the over 3,300 kidnappings registered in 2000 by País Libre, a non-governmental organization that advocates an end to this violation, were attributed to guerrillas. Both guerrilla groups continued to use child soldiers. [see http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/11/grosch1128.htm] SAMPLE QUESTIONS FOR PRESIDENTS BUSH AND PASTRANA: Questions for President Pastrana: President Pastrana, you have announced three times the formation of a high-level government task force to target paramilitary groups. Yet there are no visible results despite the fact that information on the location, identity, vehicles and even telephone numbers of paramilitaries is widely known and is in the hands of the authorities. Indeed, most observers agree that the paramilitaries have gained strength over the last year. When will the government show real results in this fight? President Pastrana, you have vowed to get tough on military officers who work with paramilitary groups. Yet officers against who there is credible evidence of tolerating and working with paramilitary groups, including Colonel Gabriel Díaz, remain on active duty. What are the obstacles to dismissing these officers? Questions for President Bush In August 2000, President Bill Clinton invoked a waiver that allowed the U.S. government to send military aid to Colombia despite the fact that the Colombian military had not complied with human rights conditions, and continued to maintain close ties with the paramilitary groups responsible for most human rights violations in Colombia. Do you support Clinton's use of the waiver? Follow-up question for President Bush: (If President Bush does support the use of the waiver) Please explain how requiring the Colombian military to uphold human rights protections threatens the national security interest of the United States. ______________________________________________________________________ _ http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20010208.html THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S STEALTH WAIVER OF HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTIONS FOR COLOMBIA By JOANNE MARINER Thursday, Feb. 08, 2001 Paramilitary forces in Colombia committed twenty-three massacres in the first seventeen days of January, a shockingly high figure even by Colombian standards of horror. With 162 people known to have been killed, the death toll for the period was nearly ten people per day. On January 18, showing exquisitely poor timing, the Clinton administration announced that it was going ahead with its second tranche of military aid to Colombia, part of the $1.3 billion aid package passed the previous year. The administration decided to do so despite the fact that the Colombian military, due to receive the bulk of the U.S. funding, has notoriously close ties with the country's brutal paramilitaries. Not only do Colombia's armed forces frequently coordinate field operations with paramilitary units, share intelligence with them, and lend active-duty soldiers to paramilitary actions, certain military officers have even set up their own paramilitary units. The Calima Front, which began functioning around Cali in July 1999, is one such unit. In its first year, it was considered responsible for at least 200 killings and the displacement of over 10,000 people. Under these circumstances alone, the military funding decision would seem questionable, to say the least. But to appreciate the full and utter shamelessness of the decision, a little more background is necessary. The Waiver of Human Rights Protections The Colombia aid legislation passed in 2000 included strict human rights provisions. The main purpose of these provisions - which human rights groups fought hard to introduce into the legislation - was to block all U.S. aid unless the Colombian armed forces ended their support of paramilitaries. The obvious reasoning behind the provisions is that U.S. funding should not go toward massacres, killings, torture and "disappearances." (Or didn't we learn anything from the 1980s?) But as finally agreed upon by the House and Senate, last year's aid legislation permitted a presidential waiver of the human rights provisions on U.S. national security grounds. Unfortunately, national security can be an extremely flexible notion. Indeed, some believe that the "drug war" - the stated justification for U.S. involvement in Colombia - is by definition a matter of U.S. national security. By this reasoning, our national security interests are always and inherently at stake in Colombia, making the waiver infinitely malleable. It was thus unsurprising that President Clinton invoked the waiver provision last August. By that time, just prior to his triumphant day-trip to Cartagena, it was clear that even under the most relaxed interpretation of the aid legislation's human rights protections, funding to Colombia would be barred unless the waiver was exercised. Attempting to Justify the Waiver Clinton's August 2000 reliance on the waiver garnered a good deal of critical media scrutiny. After all, under the relevant human rights provisions, he had to admit that he was allowing aid to go forward even as the Colombian forces receiving the funding maintained ties to paramilitary groups, engaged in serious human rights abuses, failed to suspend or prosecute officers implicated in abuses, and refused to enforce civilian court jurisdiction over human rights crimes. Given the number and severity of the atrocities at issue, it was not a pretty picture, even for those convinced of the wisdom of the administration's approach to stopping drug abuse. Granted, some administration spokesmen were unapologetic about the decision. Weighing the drug war against human rights considerations, a representative for the office of White House adviser and U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey stated bluntly: "You don't hold up the major objective to achieve the minor." But the Clinton administration's official line was that the Colombian government had not been allowed sufficient time to meet all of the human rights conditions laid out in the legislation. The legislation had only passed Congress in early July, they pointed out; the armed forces could hardly be expected to reform themselves in less than two months. As the State Department explained in announcing the August waiver: "Despite [Colombian] President Pastrana's commitment to improving human rights protection, more work needs to be done before the Administration can certify [that the human rights conditions have been met]." In other words, just give them time. Evading Human Rights Protections Again Five months passed, and this January, the second tranche of aid to Colombia was due to be dispersed. But, predictably, not only had the Colombian government shown no sign of complying with the aid legislation's human rights provisions over those months, the human rights situation in Colombia had actually deteriorated. As groups like Human Rights Watch had documented, paramilitaries continued to circulate unhindered throughout Colombia, often acting in collusion with armed forces' personnel. Worse, they were operating in areas controlled by U.S.-financed Colombian military units. Putumayo, the southern Colombian state that is the focus of U.S. drug-eradication efforts, was literally teeming with paramilitaries. As the aid legislation required, the State Department had consulted with human rights groups and obtained full information on the Colombian government's non-compliance with the human rights provisions. Three leading human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, unanimously agreed that Colombia had not only failed to meet every one of the legislation's human rights requirements, but had made absolutely no progress toward meeting them. Clearly, under these circumstances, the Clinton administration could not certify that the provisions had been satisfied. Yet Clinton - never one to face something head-on when a sneakier option was available - managed to avoid invoking the national security interest waiver. Asserting a dubious technical inter- pretation of the legislation, the White House legal staff said that no new human rights certification of Colombia was required. (Their argument hinged on the difference between supplemental and regular appropriations, an obscure legal distinction akin to that which distinguishes smoking from inhaling.) Meanwhile, Back in Colombia The Clinton administration announced that the human rights protections were inapplicable on January 18, the day after the most serious of this year's massacres in Colombia. According to an article by Scott Wilson in the Washington Post, an estimated fifty paramilitaries pulled men from their homes in the village of Chengue, Sucre. "They assembled them into two groups above the main square and across from the rudimentary health center. Then, one by one, they killed the men by crushing their heads with heavy stones and a sledgehammer. When it was over, twenty-four men lay dead in pools of blood. Two more were found later in shallow graves. As the troops left, they set fire to the village." Among the dead was a sixteen-year-old boy, said to have been decapitated. The day after the massacre - perhaps as the Clinton administration was divulging its creative interpretation of the aid legislation - Colombian paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño told the media that he had ordered an investigation into the incident because some of the deaths may have been "unnecessary." But he did, at least, acknowledge responsibility for the killings. Here, in contrast, the whole question of responsibility for death and destruction in Colombia has been dodged. ------------------------------------ ASSOCIATED PRESS Sunday, 25 February 2001 Americans Work in Colombia War Zone ----------------------------------- By Jared Kotler BOGOTA -- Flying missions over guerrilla-infested coca fields or manning remote radar stations in the jungle, private American citizens are working perilously close to the front lines of the drug war in Colombia. Referred to as ''contractors'' by the Washington agencies who hire them and ''mercenaries'' by critics, they are supposed to number no more than 300 at a time in the South American country. Yet with the U.S. government ''outsourcing'' much of its drug war aid to these contractors, officials are already indicating that the ceiling needs to be raised. As Colombian President Andres Pastrana travels to Washington to meet with President Bush on Tuesday, worries are mounting about the danger the U.S. contractors face and whether their presence and that of U.S. troops could lead to deeper involvement in Colombia's decades-old civil war. ''Once this juggernaut starts rolling it's extremely difficult to put a stopping point on it,'' said Robert E. White, a former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador who heads the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank. ''Once there are a few Americans killed, it seems to me that things begin to unravel,'' he added. ''And then you can find yourself, indeed, fully involved.'' Some of the riskiest jobs in a $1.3 billion U.S.-financed counterdrug offensive have been contracted to companies including DynCorp, of Reston, Va., whose employees last weekend flew into a firefight involving leftist guerrillas to save the crew of a downed Colombian police helicopter. The company provides rescuers, mechanics and helicopter and airplane pilots for aerial eradication missions over cocaine and heroin-producing plantations that are ''taxed'' and protected by the rebels. Because they are kept away from the media, it is difficult to know whether DynCorp's employees live up to their image as a rowdy group of daredevils and combat veterans. Janet Wineriter, a DynCorp spokeswoman, said that under terms of the company's contract with the State Department, she could not discuss DynCorp's operations in Colombia. Some critics charge the contractors are being used in dicey areas to avoid the scandal that would erupt if U.S. soldiers began returning from Colombia in body bags. Some worried about the growing U.S. role in Colombia have compared it to Vietnam, where an initially small U.S. involvement ballooned. Eventually, scenes of U.S. soldiers dying abroad helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam war. Using contractors will ''reduce the potential fallout when mistakes happen or Americans are caught in harm's way,'' said Tim Reiser, an aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), an opponent of U.S. military aid to Colombia. While pointing out that no Americans have been killed by enemy fire on spraying missions, a U.S. Embassy official admitted they regularly come under attack. ''Sure the Americans get shot at,'' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''We had 125 bullet impacts on aircraft last year, and I'm sure there were Americans who were flying some of those aircraft.'' In addition to the roughly 300 U.S. troops currently in Colombia, the Pentagon employs some 70 Department of Defense contractors, according to Steve Lucas, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which heads military operations in Latin America. They are among a larger group of contractors, whose precise number was not available, but apparently is approaching 300. The contractors include radar technicians and a private company operating reconnaissance planes. Military Professional Resources Inc., of Alexandria, Va., has about 15 of its staff providing general military expertise to Colombia's defense ministry, Lucas said in a phone interview from the Southern Command's Miami headquarters. U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson recently told visiting members of Congress that the ceiling of 300 U.S. contractors established by Congress last year including those retained by the Pentagon, State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development may need to be raised soon. Colombia lacks qualified pilots to operate fumigation aircraft and helicopters to be delivered, and additional contractors are needed to manage aid to human rights groups, the justice system and for voluntary drug crop eradication programs, embassy officials said. Bush told a Washington press conference on Thursday that he would not want U.S. troops to go beyond their current role of training Colombian forces. ''I know we're training, and that's fine,'' Bush said. ''But the mission ought to be limited to just that. And so I share the concern of those who are worried that at some point in time the United States might become militarily engaged.'' The current cap on the number of U.S. military personnel in Colombia is 500. Journalists are generally barred from interviewing or photographing the American soldiers and contractors. About a third of the U.S. troops here are Green Berets training Colombian soldiers at Larandia army base, a sprawling cattle ranch located a two-hour drive from the stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Colombia's biggest rebel group. They are authorized to carry sidearms for self-defense, but are prohibited from joining operations. ''That's the rule. That's the law,'' Lucas said. ''Ours is a supporting role only.'' Copyright 2001 Associated Press ---------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
