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September 13, 2006
"Longing for Home"
The Latin America Working Group has just released an important report on a critical but often overlooked facet of the paramilitary demobilization process. "Longing for Home" (PDF in English and Spanish) explores the many difficulties facing people who lost lands after being displaced by violence - even after those who took their property demobilize and re-enter society.
The sheer scale of the problem is shocking - estimates of stolen land run from 2.6 million hectares (the size of Massachusetts) to 6.8 million hectares (bigger than West Virginia). The complexity of determining what belonged to whom is daunting. "Former" paramilitaries can be expected to resist efforts to recover all that was taken. The "Justice and Peace" law will make victims jump through difficult hoops to reclaim their land.
Meanwhile, Colombian government agencies responsible for returning victims' property, such as the new Reparations and Reconciliation Commission, have barely begun to function, will be starved for resources, and may run up against a lack of political backing. The international community's role will be crucial, as a source of both funding and pressure.
The report explains this complex problem in plain language, includes many vivid pictures, and presents a detailed set of recommendations. It is very much worth making time to read.
While visiting the LAWG website, we also recommend their new page about the U.S. government's regular certifications of Colombia's human-rights performance. It gathers, in one single place, all official and non-governmental documents about the past six years' certifications. Note the wide chasm between how the State Department and the human-rights community perceive Colombia's human rights situation - it's almost as though they are discussing different countries. The page tells the definitive story of what has been a difficult, often contentious, but ultimately very necessary process. (Incidentally, on Friday, the State Department will be holding its next quarterly certification consultation meeting with U.S. human-rights groups in Washington. These meetings are required by law - they don't necessarily mean that frozen military aid is about to be given the green light. Though some in the past have preceded certification decisions by a few weeks.)
Posted by isacson at September 13, 2006 11:43 AM
Comments
The LAWG report on displacement and the issue of land does a good job when representing much of the complexity of the problem and what would be needed for its eventual solution. Achieving that won't be easy at all, but at least having a detailed diagnosis is a good starting point.
As for the second subject, it is no less important in its own right, but at the same time the differences in focus and interest are evident.
While the U.S. and Colombian government focus on cases (or aspects of cases) where, in their opinion, there has been progress, the human rights community focuses on cases where they believe that there hasn't (or, again, on aspects where there hasn't). Obviously, such views will directly contradict each other, but often they don't even meet eye to eye.
In other words, they don't necessarily address the same cases when they make their respective evaluations, nor do they even refer to the same aspects of them, as a quick look at the documents provided shows.
Strictly speaking, however, it is clear that the government has not made significant progress, at least not in absolute terms. Whether there's been progress in relative ones is debatable (I believe that there would be, especially when the comparison is made over a longer period of time than on a year-to-year basis), but the fact is that abuses persist and that impunity is still commonplace, more often than not. Given that situation, decertification would be a viable conclusion.
Posted by: jcg ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 13, 2006 1:00 PM
Thanks again for pointing out this important document.
One thing to keep in mind--while it may be quite some time before the millions of hectares of stolen lands are sorted out, there are some 300,000 hectares of land seized from narco-traffickers under INCODER's control, which are, as I understand it, more or less "ready to go." That is, if government-seized land is going to be used in rural productive projects, it would be these 300,000 hectares, not the millions of hectares of IDP land (although there may be some IDP land among INCODER's 300,000 hectares, I'm not sure--it's usually characterized as having been seized from narco-trffickers).
Posted by: rainercale at September 13, 2006 2:40 PM
It's tempting to excoriate the Colombian government for its human rights violations. However, when one considers the apparent U.S. disregard of such rights with respect to the Guatanamo detainees, one is tempted to conclude that ALL governments have a tendency to trample on such rights.
If the U.S. were to decertify Colombia and scrupulously observe the Geneva conventions governing prisoners of war, it would be an affirmation of the highest principles of our democracy.
Posted by: richtiger at September 14, 2006 7:02 AM
Rather than ALL governments per se, I'd say that "most armed forces engaged in prolonged operations against insurgencies eventually tend to committ some sort of abuses".
Not as a way of justifying such actions (that's an entirely separate debate), but as a description of what seems to be the specific trend (think about the insurgencies that several European colonial forces faced in the later stages of the Cold War, for example).
And yeah, one could say that the U.S. isn't exactly in a position of total moral superiority in the first place either: Actually resolving Guantanamo's situation in a more humane way, not to mention Iraq's, continues to be necessary.
Posted by: jcg at September 14, 2006 10:40 AM
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