March 21, 2017
Disarmament
“There is now an inventory of 14,000 FARC weapons that will soon pass into the UN Mission’s hands,” President Juan Manuel Santos tweeted shortly after Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas announced that figure. Villegas added that around 11,000 of the arms that the FARC will “leave aside” are rifles. The UN verification and monitoring mission has so far received 507 arms, most of them from FARC members who have been authorized to act as the organization’s representatives outside the disarmament zones. The FARC has also turned over to the UN the coordinates of its arms caches and stockpiles. A new overview (in Spanish) of how the “laying aside” of weapons is to occur, produced by the Bogotá-based Fundación Ideas para la Paz, points out that the process is likely to take more than the originally planned 180 days.
Construction continues to go painfully slowly at the 26 zones where 7,200 FARC members are gathered to turn in weapons over six months. The UN mission reported [PDF] March 14 that no zone has reached 90 percent completion, and 13 are still at less than 10 percent. “Despite months of planning,” the Miami Herald’s Jim Wyss reported, “many of the camps don’t have adequate potable water, bathrooms, cafeterias, recreational facilities and other amenities that the guerrillas say they were promised,” which is hurting morale at the sites. Poor conditions at the zones appear to be causing a trickle of guerrilla desertions, which is in danger of becoming a flood.
“There is still time to correct the government’s inability to implement the accords,” Sen. Claudia López said. “There seems to be no problem introducing legislation, but to carry something out 200 kilometeres away from Bogotá seems to be too much to ask.”
Uncertainty meanwhile surrounds how the demobilization process will incorporate somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 FARC militias—part-time support personnel—whom the revised peace accord expects to report to the 26 concentration sites for up to a week of registration. About 700 have already done so. The actual number of militia members is unknown, and as most live in cities, it is unlikely that many will bother to emerge from clandestinity and journey to the FARC’s remote rural sites.
Transitional Justice
Defense Minster Villegas announced that he has signed a list of 817 imprisoned members of the security forces who are to request parole under the transitional justice system foreseen in the FARC-government peace accord. Contagio Radio obtained a list of 150 of them that includes some generals and colonels notorious for high-profile cases of human rights abuse.
Much press coverage during the week surrounded the 72 changes that Colombia’s Senate made to a bill creating a transitional justice system to judge guerrillas, military personnel, and civilians who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Reaching agreement on this topic was the most difficult part of the four-year negotiation between the government and the FARC.
The Senate did a favor to civilians accused of contributing to war crimes by making their participation in transitional justice “voluntary” and raising the threshold of evidence needed to bring cases. The Senate did a favor to retired military officers by redefining commanders’ responsibility for their units’ behavior in a way that might allow many to avoid punishment. And it upended the accord on political participation by banning ex-FARC members from politics until they get a sort of certificate stating that they have complied with their peace accord commitments.
Because of these changes, two prominent Green Party senators who are strong negotiation supporters—Claudia López and Antonio Navarro Wolff—voted against the Senate measure. The bill must now go to reconciliation with the House version, then it becomes law, then the Constitutional Court must review it. Meanwhile, Congress must pass a separate law to establish the new justice system’s operational procedures. The International Criminal Court may also choose to review the law, and if the Senate language on “command responsibility” is still in it, the ICC may decide that Colombia is not complying with its international human rights commitments.
(Sources: Semana magazine, El Espectador editorial, Verdad Abierta)
Human Rights
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) annual report on Colombia (English – Spanish – summarized in an earlier blog post) expressed concerns about legislative efforts to water down transitional justice, attacks on human rights defenders and social leaders, and the slow pace of the government’s peace accord implementation so far.
For the first time, a FARC leader was a panelist at the report’s launch press conference at a Bogotá five-star hotel. Julián Gallo, until recently known as “Carlos Antonio Lozada,” sat two spots from Police General Carlos Mena at the panelists’ table.
Interviewed by the daily El Espectador, Todd Howland, the longtime director of the OHCHR office in Colombia, did not hide his anger at the changes Colombia’s Senate wrought to the transitional justice bill.
At the dialogue table we worked hard to comply with international standards. In the end something was obtained that isn’t perfect, but isn’t bad. That took years of work. It was too big an effort for the Congress not to take it seriously afterward. That effort was based on an interest in victims’ rights, but now the congresspeople acted as though nothing had happened in Cuba.
Tags: Updates
