Speech by CIP President Robert E. White, on receipt of the Louis B. Sohn Human Rights Day Award from the United Nations Association, Capital Area, December 10, 2002

Speech by CIP President Robert E. White, on receipt of the Louis B. Sohn Human Rights Day Award from the United Nations Association, Capital Area, December 10, 2002

SEEKING PEACE WITH JUSTICE IN COLOMBIA

It is my pleasure to be with you as we celebrate Human Rights Day. My profound thanks for honoring me with the Louis B. Sohn Human Rights Award. Professor Sohn was a great force on behalf of international law. As our country moves away from membership in the family of nations towards the role of empire we would all do well to review his writings and his vision of a world organized on behalf of peace and human rights.

In the mid-1970’s President Richard Nixon declared the first war on drugs. At that time, I was serving at our Embassy in Bogotá as deputy chief of mission. The ambassador gave me the additional responsibility of counter narcotics coordinator. You can see what a wonderful job I did by the results.

I had a first class team of four DEA professionals plus the cooperation of other sections of the embassy. I authorized operations that endangered the lives of the DEA agents. Indeed one was murdered by an informant some time later. Yet all the skills and dedication that went into this counter-narcotics effort went for naught. The chief of the national police of Colombia and the general in charge of counter narcotics operations were both in the pay of the drug traffickers. The drug cartels knew every move we made in advance.

In 1998 the Colombian people elected Andres Pastrana to the presidency because he promised to bring a negotiated end to the war. His strategy, called Plan Colombia, rested on four pillars: negotiation, political reform, tolerance and citizen security. Pastrana understood that the campesinos produced illicit crops in the desperate struggle to survive. Therefore, Plan Colombia emphasized land reform, farm to market roads, health centers and bringing civilization to rural areas. There was no mention of crop eradication by spraying or any other method injurious to the environment and no mention of any role for the army. Plan Colombia was designed to end the national security state in which dissidents are treated as subversives.

When Colombia approached President Clinton, he responded that there was no money to nourish civil society, but unlimited amounts for the drug war. President Pastrana, desperate to involve the United States, accepted.

There are many bad ways to make foreign policy but surely one of the worst is to take a complex challenge and reduce it to a single issue. Colombia is not just the place that feeds America’s voracious appetite for illegal drugs. It is a country almost as large as France, Germany and Italy combined with 40 million people and a tangled, brutal history.

Over much of the last half century, democratic governance has failed to provide minimal standards of equity, stability and justice for the Colombian people. The violent and massive expulsion of campesinos from their lands over the past 30 years gave rise to a broad-based rural insurgency.

The FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, along with the much smaller army of National Liberation, or ELN controls huge areas of rural Colombia. It should be obvious that an insurgency which has acquired the strength and cohesion necessary to dominate more than one third of the national territory represents something authentic in the history of Colombia, something not adequately explained by references to narco-terrorists.

The FARC have little in common with the Central American revolutionary movements or for that matter with Fidel Castro. The bulk of the FARC leadership are campesinos whose distrust of the Colombian elites is near--total. They are insular--the founder of the FARC Manuel Marulanda has never been outside Colombia, never even seen Bogotá. With 18,000 men and women under arms and millions of dollars flowing in to their war chest from drugs and kidnapping, they appear to be in no hurry for peace. Perhaps most discouraging the FARC seems bereft of ideas and lacks any clear strategy to achieve their political objectives. Frequently they appear to act against their own best interests. President Pastrana gave the FARC important concessions- including their own territory- a Switzerland-size area into which the Colombia army could not enter. Yet the FARC leaders simply did not respond constructively to President Pastrana. They continued and ratcheted up the violence

As a result, the Colombian electorate swept into office Alvaro Uribe, a hard-liner who promised to mobilize the country to defeat the revolutionaries. In contrast to President Pastrana, President Uribe is a strong and decisive leader. Working closely with the Pentagon and the CIA, Uribe is carving out a military strategy which, within the confines of the Colombian reality makes some sense in the short term.

There are three major armies cris-crossing Colombia. The military of Colombia, the revolutionaries, and the 10,000 strong right -wing para-militaries, known as the AUC. The FARC and the AUC are deadly enemies. In theory, the Colombian army is fighting both these irregular forces but in fact the paramilitaries and the army frequently cooperate against the revolutionaries.

The joint strategy of Colombia and the United States is, I believe, to disband the para-militaries and then integrate some of these experienced fighters into the Colombian military and others into the new intelligence and civilian defense network now being established.

The Bush administration has widened and deepened our commitment to Colombia. Our assistance is no longer confined to counter narcotics but is now a straight forward counter insurgency program as well. The prospect then is for war and more war. The Bush administration no longer even speaks about negotiations and compromise. Yet despite certain gains the strategy is deeply and irrevocably flawed.

To target the campesino coca growers protected by the FARC is to go after the least important factor in the supply chain. The drug barons simply build in a margin of safety by financing campesinos in other areas of Colombia and in other countries to produce coca leaves. Illegal drugs are Colombia’s leading export –bigger than oil, bigger than coffee. No enterprise of that magnitude can prosper without the participation of business men, bankers, transportation companies and government, military as well as civilians. Drugs in Colombia involve the entire society not just the FARC and campeseno growers.

If you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there. Nowhere in the official statements of either the Clinton or Bush Administration will you find any discussion of risks versus rewards, or any measurement of objectives in relation to resources. The territory under FARC control is 20 times as large as El Salvador, where it took the United States more than a decade to fight the revolutionaries to a draw.

My colleagues at the Center for International Policy Adam Isacson and Ingrid Vaicius and I make frequent trips to Colombia to communicate with all sectors of Colombia society, the government, the business community, the NGO community, the FARC and the ELN. We have taken delegations that included Congressional representatives to Colombia and to other countries to meet with the revolutionaries. These meetings have at a minimum increased mutual confidence and we trust will open the way to serious dialogue in the near future.

Let me close by citing a few principles that we would all do well to remember as we confront the crisis in Colombia, as well as crisis that are sure to arise in other countries in the future:

Foreign policy can only affect other societies at the margins. Remaking and reforming their society is the task of the Colombians.
Revolutions based on the heaped-up injustices of decades cannot be defeated from the outside. Military action only metastasizes revolution and spreads it to other countries.
All civil wars end either in the overthrow of government or through negotiations. For negotiation to appeal to the insurgents, the minimum demand is that the rich and powerful open up the exclusionary society to profound reform.
Foreign intervention only convinces the rich that they do not have to change – that they will be salvaged by an outside power.
Once a society decides it wants peace, then foreign governments can provide it with diplomatic assistance.

I close with this thought: the elites of Colombia are sitting out this war. Colombia has a draft but most privileged youth escape military service. If you are drafted you are exempted from combat if you are a high school graduate. The sons of workers and campesinos who have been deprived of education may be semi-literate but they understand that in the Colombian army, as in Colombian society, the system is rigged against them. Should we not question a policy that sends our highly trained young men and women in uniform to risk their lives for Colombia when privileged Colombians refuse to risk their lives in that cause.

My thanks to the United Nations Association of the National Capitol Area. To its President, Andrew Rice, and to the co-chairs of the Human Rights Task Force John Salzburg and Luke Lee and to all of you for your participation in the common cause of a more just and peaceful world.