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May 25, 2005

Funding for the OAS Verification Mission

U.S. funding for the Organization of American States’ Mission to Support the Peace Process in Colombia (MAPP-OAS, the OAS mission to verify negotiations with, and demobilization of, paramilitary groups) will be up for renewal in June. This deadline offers an important opportunity to redirect U.S. financial support to strengthen the mission’s verification work, which is critical to the national and international credibility of the paramilitary demobilization process.

To date, the OAS mission has been the most visible indicator of international community support for the process. On January 23, 2004, President Álvaro Uribe and OAS Secretary General César Gaviria (a former Colombian president) signed an agreement, later approved by the Permanent Council, defining an OAS mission to monitor the process. Despite a severe shortage of funds and staff, the OAS announced its intention to establish monitoring offices in the region where demobilizations were to occur.

The mission has received much of its funding from the Colombian government (almost US$1.2 million), although it also receives approximately one million dollars from the Dutch government, and the Swedish government has funded a staff member and provided some logistical support. As of January, USAID had provided US$585,000; additional funds are “in the pipeline.” All U.S. funds are restricted to verification and cannot be used for the permanent staff presence that is observing negotiations in Santa Fe de Ralito.

The mission’s unorthodox creation, its reliance on funding from the Colombian government, and its lack of staff have all generated credibility problems. International officials from UN, U.S. and European agencies recognize the mission’s importance while expressing frustration with its failure to fulfill its mandate. “The OAS is not up to [international] standards,” one senior official told me. “They don’t have the resources – they haven’t verified anything.”

In addition to observing the discussions, the mission is charged with verifying the process and the paramilitary ceasefire. Verification at both ends of the process – demobilizations and cease-fire violations – have been extremely limited.

In conjunction with an International Organization for Migration program funded by the United States, the OAS mission ensures that demobilizing individuals match their official identification cards. However, there is no effort made to verify that these individuals – who are eligible to demobilize if they appear on lists created by paramilitary commanders – are actually paramilitary fighters.

In the first and most extensively studied demobilization to date – that of 864 members of Cacique Nutibara Bloc in Medellin in November 2003 – the International Crisis Group and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (itself an OAS body) both reported that many of the individuals participating in the process were petty criminals, not hard-core paramilitary fighters. Local human rights groups, religious leaders, and the Campaign to Stop Child Soldiers all report recruitment of small-town youth specifically to pose as paramilitaries in demobilization programs in order to swell the paramilitary ranks, ensure that experienced combat fighters remain in active units, and to benefit from government subsidies. While verifying paramilitary membership would undoubtedly be extremely difficult, for the OAS mission to claim that it is verifying participants’ identities gives a misleading impression of certainty over who exactly is demobilizing.

Similarly, cease-fire violations are extremely difficult to verify. Some analysts point out that illegal groups escalate violent attacks in an attempt to negotiate from a position of strength. Cease-fire violations can also be viewed as failures of political will to negotiate in good faith, or lack of centralized control. Violence away from the negotiating table has been used in the past as an argument in favor of ending talks, including the frustrated process with the FARC.

AUC leaders declared a “unilateral” cease fire in December 2002. Despite this, paramilitary incursions have continued, including massacres and assassinations, generating real questions about the viability of the process. During the first months of 2004, the conversations reached a crisis point because of increasing domestic and international criticism of cease fire violations. The Defensoria del Pueblo, a government agency, released a report documenting more than 300 violations of the cease fire. The Colombian Commission of Jurists, a noted human rights group, has collected a list [PDF format] of 1,899 homicides allegedly committed by paramilitary groups between December 2002 and August 2004.

According to a transcript released by Colombian newsweekly Semana in September, High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo told the paramilitary leaders his team had downplayed complaints of murders in the Ralito zone: “Homicides are being committed that compromise those who are inside the zone. It’s a matter we’ve handled very carefully to avoid a public scandal that would harm us.” Observers, including former Colombian Commissioner for Peace Daniel García-Peñ a, have a noted a similar reluctance on the part of the OAS mission to criticize the paramilitaries and investigate paramilitary violence.

In its yearly report, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ office in Bogotá concurred that “paramilitary groups failed to respect the cessation of hostilities.”According to the State Department’s annual assessment of the human rights situation in Colombia, paramilitary violence has declined. The report notes, however, that “paramilitaries continued to commit numerous political killings,” and went on to note kidnapping, torture, extrajudicial executions, the forcible displacement of thousands of “innocent civilians,” and “military operations that endangered civilian lives,” as well as attacks against human rights workers and journalists and the use of child soldiers.

New kinds of human rights violations, apparently designed to allow perpetrators to escape the scrutiny of international reporting, have been on the rise. These include incidents of “multiple homicides,” designed to prevent the label of a massacre (defined as the killing of four or more individuals in a single incident and at the same location), killing people over a period of several days, scattering the bodies or dumping corpses in different locations. Similarly, the issue of forced displacement has emerged as a central international concern; according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees, Colombia has one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world. In part in response to international attention, some communities are now reporting the new phenomenon of “confinement,” where paramilitary forces are refusing to allow community members free passage or travel, thus preventing international assistance from reaching these communities while consolidating their political control. Verification of any ceasefire agreements must include these and other new forms of political violence.

Credible verification of who is participating in the process, and of violence committed by participants, is critical for the long-term viability of the process. The renewal of funding for the OAS mission should not be a rubber stamp that throws good money after bad. Any funding for the OAS verification mission should be contingent on a thorough and independent review of the mission, its accomplishments to date, and the criteria for establishing credibility in verifying the current cease-fire agreements in Colombia. If the OAS is unable to meet the current requirements of its mission statement, its mandate should be adjusted to reflect the mission’s lesser capacity.

Posted by Winifred Tate at May 25, 2005 09:55 PM

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