Naming The Real
Killers
By John Pilger
18 March, 2005
The New Statesman
While
apologists for Bush and Blair's murderous adventure in Iraq see a "silver
lining" in pseudo-events in the Middle East, real events in Colombia
illuminate the universal nature of their "mission". The latest
tells a horrific story that, had it qualified as news, probably would
have been reported as a tragedy in which the "price of cocaine
[was] paid with blood". That was how the Observer on 13 February
represented the suffering of Colombia. It exemplified the standard,
sanitised version, with the Metropolitan Police commissioner and a Foreign
Office minister assuring us that Colombia's woes could all be blamed
on drugs, and that the "Oxford-educated" president of Colombia,
alvaro Uribe, was "trying to rein in rogue elements of the army".
Moreover, the British government was helping him in his noble cause.
As for America's colossal military involvement in Colombia, known as
"Plan Colombia" - whose expenditure rates just behind the
billions spent in Iraq and Israel - this was merely "controversial"
and "aimed at eradicating the [drugs] trade". And as for Bill
Rammell, the Foreign Office junior minister for most of the planet,
the Observer reported that he had identified a moral issue in Colombia.
For the English caring classes, said Busy Bill, snorting cocaine "should
be as socially taboo as was drinking a bottle of South African wine
during apartheid".
Busy Bill was in
Pyongyang not long ago, telling the North Koreans it was just not right
for them to have nuclear weapons. That his own government was armed
to the teeth with nuclear weapons was, of course, irrelevant. Prior
to that, Busy Bill was telling me, in an interview at the Foreign Office,
that the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, who had been
brutally and illegally expelled from their homeland by British governments,
could not possibly return because they would be at mortal risk from
the "rising sea". When the tsunami struck on Boxing Day, it
spared the Chagos - as the Americans knew it would. That is why they
colluded with the British to kick the inhabitants out and build a vast
military base in what the US navy calls "the superb, secure and
outstanding environmental conditions" on Diego Garcia, the principal
island.
Let's leave Busy
Bill for a moment and return to Colombia. On 21 February, according
to witnesses, soldiers of the 17th Brigade of the Colombian army entered
the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, in the north-west of the
country. The community has no political alliance and is internationally
renowned and "protected" by the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights. According to witness statements, the soldiers abducted and murdered
eight civilians, including three young children and a teenage girl,
all of whom were hacked to death with machetes. Among them were Luis
Eduardo Guerra, the community leader, his partner Bellanyra and son
Deiner. Guerra was admired as a remarkable humanitarian and conciliator.
Since 1997, his people have suffered more than 130 murders; there have
been no convictions.
The United Nations
has called for an investigation; the United States has called for an
investigation; and so has the Foreign Office. If the past is a guide,
the latter two will be confident that this latest horror will blow over
and Colombia's facade can be erected again. For just as Bush and Blair
are soaked with blood in Iraq, so they are in Colombia.
The Colombian military
and police have the worst human rights record in the western hemisphere.
That the government of "Oxford-educated" Uribe is any better
than his predecessors' and that drugs alone are the cause of more than
20,000 murders every year is a fiction promoted in Washington and London.
No one doubts that Farc, a peasant-based guerrilla group, has trafficked
in cocaine, but the drugs trade and violence in Colombia are overwhelmingly
the responsibility of the state, its military and paramilitaries, funded
and trained, directly and indirectly, by the American and British governments.
Moreover, the issue of cocaine is a distraction: the fuel of the conflict,
not the cause. The victims are the likes of Guerra and his family, and
trade union activists, teachers, land-reformers and indigenous and peasant
leaders who work to promote social and economic justice and human rights.
In his study of
British foreign policy, Unpeople, the historian Mark Curtis wrote:
The war in Colombia
is essentially over the control of resources in a deeply unequal society:
the elite, especially the large landowners, control most of the wealth
while the majority of the population lives in poverty. The basic role
of the state is to marginalise the popular forces and ensure that Colombia's
resources - notably oil - remain in the correct hands. [US andUK] strategy
is to support this . . . The "war on drugs" is a cover.
Death squads linked
to Colombian governments have been so successful in driving people off
their farms that 76 per cent of the land is now controlled by an elite
of less than 3 per cent of the population. Given the close links between
the military and the paramilitaries, says Douglas Stokes of the department
of international politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, "US
military aid is going directly to the major terrorist networks throughout
Colombia, who traffic cocaine into US markets to fund their activities."
The Blair government
refuses to say exactly where most of British taxpayers' millions of
pounds of "drugs-related assistance" to Colombia ends up.
"We do not give details of all the support," says Bill Rammell,
"nor of specific units to whom we provide assistance, as to do
so could reduce its effectiveness and potentially endanger the UK personnel
involved." We get his drift. His predecessor Keith Vaz was less
shy. "We should give as much support as possible to the government
of President Pastrana," he said in January 2000. Read Amnesty's
reports on the murderous connections of the Pastrana regime and you
certainly get his drift. As for Uribe, the Blair government's propaganda
is that he has an "impressive" record of "containing
crime and violence". They mean he has allowed the Colombian police,
military and paramilitaries to "pacify" the cities and make
sections of the middle class feel safer. No one sees what they do outside
the suburbs. In Uribe's first year as president, there were nearly 7,000
political killings and "disappearances", worse than the average
during the four years of Pastrana.
Busy Bill has been
promoting the Uribe regime in these pages (Observations, 21 February).
His omissions are many, such as the fact that the chemicals used in
turning coca into cocaine all come from the US and Europe, and that
significant British oil investments and human rights violations are
two sides of the same coin - with BP protected by the Colombian military,
and the pipeline company, in which it is a major shareholder, investigated
for its reported links with a notorious army brigade. Such is the state-sponsored
menace in Colombia that British non-governmental organisations, together
with their Colombian counterparts, are at constant risk. "We regularly
urge the Colombian government," says Busy Bill, "to support
and protect their work." The murderers of Luis Eduardo Guerra and
the seven others must be quaking.
This article first
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