UN warns Colombia mired in 'grave crisis'

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UN warns Colombia mired in 'grave crisis' 

Jeremy Lennard http://www.guardian.co.uk/colombia/story/0,11502,1214340,00.html
Tuesday May 11, 2004 

Colombia's drug wars have created the gravest humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere, driving two million people from their homes and threatening indigenous groups with extinction, according to a senior UN official. 
Jan Egeland, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said the debt-ridden nation was reluctant to divert funds to the ever-growing numbers of displaced people fleeing the conflict between left-wing guerillas and right-wing paramilitaries, or forced off their land by the cocaine cartels. 

"[Colombia] has the biggest number of killings in the western hemisphere," Mr Egeland told a press conference at UN headquarters yesterday. "It's the biggest humanitarian problem, human rights problem, the biggest conflict in the western hemisphere." 

Only Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo suffered greater problems with displacement, he said. 

Mr Egeland, who was Kofi Annan's special advisor on Colombia from 1999-2002 and has a long association with the country, added that he had spent a month in isolated indigenous areas when he was 19. But as a result of armed incursions onto their ancestral lands, "all my Indian friends have been dispersed or massacred". 

Forced internal displacement reached a peak in 2002, when 320,000 people - about 800 per day - were driven from their homes. The majority, like Mercedes Perez, were victims of the illegal paramilitary group, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). 

Ms Perez now lives in a Bogotá shanty town, where she shares a one-room dwelling constructed out of corrugated iron and wooden palettes with her four children. 

"The paramilitaries took my husband, tortured him and beheaded him," she said. "It took us two days to find his body. They took everything we had, including 30 cows. As they left the village they fired indiscriminately into houses and burned others down before walking away under the noses of the military." 

Collaboration between the paramilitaries and the Colombian armed forces, which has received military aid from Washington worth $2.5bn (£1.4bn) over the past four years, has been widely documented and is said to be rife. 

Though forced displacement has eased somewhat since 2002, the torture and massacre of the rural poor continues as armed groups vie for their land. The current total number of internal refugees has now reached two million, in a total population of 36 million. 

Most of the displaced flood into cities, including many youngsters with "no hope, and no education", making them ripe for recruitment into guerrilla, paramilitary or drug gangs, Mr Egeland said. 

All Colombia's major cities have shanty developments, with Cartagena de las Indias, colonial port and principal tourist attraction on the country's Caribbean coast, housing 10,000 people in what Mr Egeland described as "a sea of sewage and garbage". 

In a country where 80% of the wealth is controlled by less than 20% of the population, the growing slum population has long-term implications, he noted, and he urged wealthy Colombians to do more to help the poor while berating the armed antagonists for their tactics.

"It is not only criminal and illegal, but also cowardly to target unarmed civilians. Colombia can't have hundreds of thousands of displaced children who grow up with no hope in a country that has cities like in Europe and whose ruling class lives like Europeans," he said during a recent visit to the country.