Amnesty International on Tuesday urged the US and other nations on Tuesday to halt military aid to Colombia until security forces reduce killings of civilians and the country heeds UN recommendations for ending its civil conflict.
In a 94-page report, the international human rights group questioned Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s claims that Colombia “is experiencing an irreversible renaissance of relative peace” and “rapidly falling levels of violence.”
Amnesty acknowledges that kidnappings and conflict-related killings of civilians have decreased since Uribe first took office in 2002, and some major cities are safer. But the report says that’s only part of the picture.
“Colombia remains a country where millions of civilians, especially outside the big cities and in the countryside, continue to bear the brunt of this violent and protracted conflict,” the report says, adding that “impunity remains the norm in most cases of human rights abuses.”
The Colombian vice president’s office, which oversees human rights matters, had no immediate comment on the Amnesty report.
However, on Monday evening, Uribe called on the military to “completely eradicate whatever perverse notion might remain in any member of the armed forces who is not committed to absolutely respect human rights.”
He made the comments as the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay of South Africa arrived for a weeklong visit.
On Friday, three colonels were fired over the mysterious disappearance of 11 noncombatants from a Bogota suburb. The bodies were later found hundreds of kilometers away in common graves in a war zone.
Amnesty’s director for the Americas Renata Rendon said many disturbing indicators were now trending upward in Colombia.
“Conflict-related killings, extrajudicial executions, killings of civilians by paramilitaries [and] by guerrillas, enforced disappearances, abductions by guerrillas, forced displacement, killings of women, enforced disappearance of women and killings of trade unionists have all gone up from 2006 to 2007,” she said in a telephone interview from Washington.
Those indicators should not be ignored, she said, as the administration of US President George W. Bush continues to push US lawmakers to ratify a free-trade agreement with Colombia.
The Democratic leadership in Congress has resisted, citing continued killings of Colombian labor organizers.
The US Department of State thinks Colombia has made “notable progress” in the past decade in improving human rights but “more needs to be done,” spokeswoman Heide Bronke said.
She said the State Department is concerned about reports of extrajudicial killings by Colombia’s security forces and supports programs that seek to effectively investigate and prosecute rights abuses.
Colombia is Washington’s staunchest ally in Latin America and has received more than US$4 billion in mostly military aid from the US during Uribe’s tenure.
The Amnesty report also said that despite Uribe’s claim that demobilization put an end to far-right militias blamed for thousands of killings, evidence is strong that the paramilitaries remain active and continue to commit rights violations.
It further said that the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia has over the past year been creating “strategic alliances” with paramilitaries in several regions as both groups seek “to better manage” their chief funding source: cocaine trafficking.
Amnesty says a major impediment to ending rights abuses is Uribe’s refusal to recognize that Colombia has an armed conflict, insisting instead that all combatants other than state security forces are terrorists.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS