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Breaking rank for human rights | page 1, 2
Given such a bad record, many in the human rights community see no hope for the Colombian military to clean up its act. But Vivanco believes pressure from Washington could help the army become more professional. The Colombian armed forces have cleaned up their act in recent years, he says, and are responsible for only 2 percent of all human rights violations. The lion's share of the offenses have been carried out by the paramilitary gangs, which killed nearly 1,000 people in 125 massacres in 1999 alone, according to the Colombian prosecutor's office. "Some army officers have relied more and more on paramilitary gangs to carry out the abuses, and we would like the aid package to address that change," explains Vivanco. "Unless the U.S. forces an end to that relationship, they will continue it," he points out. A recent version of the aid bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee includes tougher human rights guidelines and ad hoc language that reinforces the 1997 Leahy Amendment, which bans all U.S. military aid to foreign military units accused of human rights violations. As it stands, the aid package is slated to provide $1 billion for military training, buying helicopters, spare parts and intelligence equipment to help the army destroy cocaine crops and retake guerrilla-held areas. The remaining $700 million would finance coca substitution programs, judicial system reforms and human rights protections. "Given our group's resources I thought we should jump into the area where we could get more for our efforts -- and that was in conditioning the human rights language in the package," Vivanco says. If Human Rights Watch has its way, the new bill will clearly call for an end to all connections between paramilitary groups and some sectors of the Colombian armed forces. It would require the U.S. Embassy in Bogota to report to Congress monthly on the Colombian government's efforts to disband paramilitary groups, and on investigations and prosecution of attacks against human rights defenders. It would also introduce the use of civilian courts to try all military officers accused of human rights violations. The Colombian army has said it will abide by human rights conditions attached to any aid package. But Vivanco says the army's narrow reading of the Leahy Amendment would result in nothing more than removing some bad apples from any unit. "They are not even thinking of prosecuting them," he says, "because their job is to make the most narrow interpretation." Indeed, the army denies that the collaboration is widespread. In a recent interview with Colombian journalists, the head of the Colombian armed forces, Fernando Tapias, said the paramilitary problem is not an institutional problem, just a problem involving a few individuals. With the right kind of influence from Washington, Human Rights Watch believes, the Colombian armed forces could clean itself up -- just as the Colombian police did. In the late 1980s, the police force was plagued with corruption, drug trafficking and human rights violations. When the U.S. began providing counternarcotics aid to the police in the early '90s, it attached conditions that the institution clean up its force. As a result, in the last five years, 11,000 policemen have been fired because of corruption, drug trafficking and human rights violations. The cleansing and U.S. training has turned the Colombian police into one of the best crime fighting groups in the hemisphere. Human Rights Watch has taken a difficult middle course on this issue, balancing politics in Washington with the realities of the Colombian conflict. Michael Shifter at Inter American Dialogue, a Washington policy group, said he was "heartened" with the position Human Rights Watch took on the aid. "It was a risk, but they created a space for themselves in the debate" said Shifter, whose group forms part of an independent task force set up to influence U.S. policy in Colombia. "Their decision to take a different approach to human rights work showed an understanding that we should not be willing to just stand around and see the war continuing as it is. The bad guys, the paramilitaries and the guerrillas, have enough money to wage a dirty war even if the United States doesn't get involved." "What does an advocacy group do when a no-aid position has zero chance of passage?" asks Cynthia Arnson, assistant director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, who faced that conundrum in the 1980s with the Nicaraguan Contra aid package. "Human Rights Watch would not have had the profound impact it is having on the debate if they had taken a no-aid position," she says. Vivanco also sees a parallel between this bill and U.S. policy toward the Nicaraguan Contras, and more recently toward Kosovo. He says the package's language must be precise in order to prevent U.S. involvement in Colombia from turning into a human rights fiasco. "We all know human rights protection is important in Colombia but we need to make sure [the Colombian Army, the U.S. Congress and the human rights community] are speaking the same language," he says. "The Colombian situation could always get out of hand, but at least you have a chance if you include all the necessary restraints."
- - - - - - - - - - - - Sound off Related Salon stories Drug money With our foreign policy toward Colombia hogtied by campaign finance and business interests, the war on drugs could be better waged against Washington.
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