-Caveat Lector-
Friday, 27 August 1999
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* COMMENTARY *
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Danger: U.S. could go to war on the wrong side
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by Jonathan Power
MADRID, Spain -- After Kosovo, why not Colombia, land of the drug barons
and 40 years of near-continuous civil war?
The world may drop its jaw at the idea of a NATO-like international
military intervention to pacify leftist guerrilla groups, army-backed and
fascist-inclined paramilitaries and the world's most ruthless drug
cartels. But some in Bogota are touting it as a necessary solution.
And if not an international force, then the U.S. military.
Don't drop your jaw. None other than the U.S. commander in chief, Bill
Clinton, said last month that vital American interests are at stake in
Colombia and that it is ``very much in our national security interests to
do what we can.''
When the U.S. President uses these code words, it essentially means that
the backbone of the U.S. military, intelligence and national-security
bodies has decided that the United States is prepared to go to any lengths
-- even war -- to deal with the problem.
Clinton's statement may have been sparked by the relatively trivial loss
of a U.S. military reconnaissance plane flying over Colombia. But it comes
after a long period of slow-burning, mounting frustration at the inability
of successive Colombian governments to get to grips with the armed gangs
that threaten to destabilize the government and with the narcotic
traffickers who supply hard drugs to the American market.
If U.S. intervention were likely to be evenhanded, perhaps there could be
an argument for it. After all, Colombia often is exhibit No. 1 for those
who say: Look what happens when the outside world doesn't intervene --
local fires just burn brighter and fiercer.
But evenhanded doesn't appear in the current lexicon of Pentagon thinking
on Colombia.
Almost perversely, the Clinton administration seems to be ignoring what
the New York-based Human Rights Watch describes as ``the root of these
abuses . . . the Colombian army's consistent and pervasive failure to
ensure human-rights standards and distinguish civilians from combatants.''
Terrible violence is being inflicted both upon each other and on civilian
innocents by the three sides in the armed struggle. But by no stretch of
the independent reporting available can it be said that the left-wing
guerrillas are the most vicious or the most responsible. The consensus is
that the army is in league with the right-wing paramilitaries who, in turn,
are in league with the drug mafia. It is they who set the pace of
assassinations, organize death squads, inflict torture and practice
widespread intimidation.
The army not only has failed to move against the rightist paramilitaries
in any significant way; it has tolerated their activity, even providing
some of them with intelligence and logistical support.
In a 1998 report the Bogota office of the United Nations High Commission
for Human Rights observed that ``witnesses frequently state that massacres
were perpetrated by members of the armed forces passing themselves off as
paramilitaries.''
It is true that both the governments of Ernesto Samper and Andres Pastrana
have suspended or closed down particular units, such as the army's
notorious 20th Brigade. Yet officers are rarely, if ever, prosecuted, and
some even have been promoted. Occasionally there is a dismissal.
``Defending human rights in Colombia is a dangerous profession,'' says
Susan Osnos of Human Rights Watch. Yet it continues to attract unusually
dedicated people. Last year when assassins gunned down the president of a
human-rights committee in Medellin, the drug traffickers' hometown, he was
the fourth president to be killed since 1987. Even so, someone else has
taken his place.
The Clinton administration's attempts to be evenhanded have been derisory:
On one hand, it allows the State Department to issue human-rights reports
critical of the Colombian establishment. Last year's report accused the
government of ``tacit acquiescence'' of abuses, and in May 1998 the United
States revoked the visa of one particularly corrupt and cruel general.
On the other hand, its main direction has been to increase aid to the
Colombian military and reduce the strings attached as to how the aid is
used. It also has deployed CIA and Pentagon operatives to work with
Colombian security-force units that cannot be given a clean bill of health
on human-rights abuses. Last year Gen. Charles Wilhelm, head of U.S.
Southern Command, told a committee of Congress that criticism of military
abuses was ``unfair.''
Now, with the pace being set by Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the administration's
top anti-narcotics official, Washington is giving more and more aid to the
Colombian military, supposedly for combating the drug menace, but in
practice aimed disproportionately at the left-wing guerrillas. After Israel
and Egypt, Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid.
Washington's sense of frustration is understandable. The left-wing
guerrillas have not responded well to the significant steps that Pastrana
has taken. But then nobody expected that the betrayals, bad memories and
fears of 40 years of war would be set aside by handshakes and face-to-face
meetings. But it would be counterproductive for the United States to allow
itself to be drawn in.
It would give substance to all the Marxist twaddle of Latin America's
left-wing intellectuals and guerrillas about who really pulls the strings.
And it would embolden the Colombian army and its paramilitary allies to
even-worse excesses.
The path to peace in Colombia lies where it has long been: in honest and
humane government within the country and serious moves by the world's
largest drug-consuming nation to pull the rug from under the drug barons by
amending its outdated and outmoded laws on prohibition.
Jonathan Power, a London-based columnist,
specializes in world affairs.
Copyright 1999 Miami Herald
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