Colombia's drug wars have created the largest humanitarian crisis in the Americas, driving 2 million people from their homes and threatening Indian tribes with extinction, a UN official said on Monday.
Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian coordinator, said the country was mired in debt and reluctant to divert military funds to an army of uprooted people escaping the fighting or forced off their land by the cocaine mafia.
"Colombia is therefore by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western Hemisphere," Egeland, who just returned from the country, told a news conference.
"It has the biggest number of killings in the Western Hemisphere," Egeland said.
"It's the biggest humanitarian problem, human rights problem, the biggest conflict in the Western hemisphere," he added.
He said only Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, two war-torn African nations, had more displaced people.
In 10 isolated areas of Colombia, which humanitarian groups cannot reach, Indians were trap-ped in forests and on farms, many of them forced to flee by drug lords or rightist paramilitary gangs. Others were killed.
Egeland said he had spent a month in the area when he was 19 years old but now "all my Indian friends have been dispersed or massacred."
In 2002, forced internal displacement reached what was an all-time high of 320,000 people uprooted. The accumulative num-bers since then have reached 2 million out of a country of 36 million people, threatening forecasts that Colombia's US$77 billion economy will expand some 4 percent this year, he said.
Many of the displaced are flooding into cities, including many youngsters with "no hope, no education," making them ripe for recruitment into guerrilla, paramilitary or drug gangs, Egeland said.
The uprooted people go to cities in large numbers, where they live in shantytowns, like the one outside Cartagena, which has 10,000 people "floating in a sea of sewage and garbage."
"The people are still displaced because they are attacked by armed groups in what is a very dirty war," he said.
Paramilitary forces and guerrillas systematically attack pea-sants they believe support the other side, he said.
Egeland said he discussed with President Alvaro Uribe a new humanitarian plan to coordinate foreign aid in the country. The UN last appealed for US$80 million in funds in 2002 but received only US$33.6 million.
The US has sent troops to help the government combat the drug lords, rightist paramilitary forces and rebel insurgents in a 40-year conflict.
The Bush administration in March asked Congress to raise US personnel in Colombia to 800 military personnel and 600 civilian contractors from the current 400 limit on each.
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