Migration!

Dear readers,
I'm moving this blog to its new home at my author's website, JHarrisonline.com. All further blog posts will be located there.

Thanks for reading, and as always,
Send lawyers, guns and money,
J.

Peace Makes Strange Bedfellows

If politics and war make strange bedfellows, the partnerships forged by their counterpart are just as eccentric. Both human rights NGOs and former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe are speaking out against the Legal Framework for Peace and its approval in the Colombian Senate.  

The constitutional amendment aims to pave the way for a peaceful resolution of the Colombian armed conflict, through demobilization of militant groups, political participation and social reintegration, and amnesty or reduced sentences for combatants and war criminals that confess their crimes and compensate their victims.

The former commander-in-chief and human rights defenders, including Human Rights Watch and the Presbyterian Church USA’s Colombia Accompaniment Program, aren’t parties that share the same soapbox with any frequency.  (Uribe, in fact, has made quite a name for himself denouncing HR defenders as guerrilla sympathizers, going  so far as to call HRW’s Americas director an “accomplice” of the FARC.)

On the surface, the complaints appear the same: The transitional justice legislation is overly lenient on those who commit atrocities and grant impunity to the country’s worst criminals. A closer inspection of motives, though, reveals that the opposition to the Legal Framework for Peace is as ideologically polarized as ever.

The former head of state’s issues with the bill center around granting political legitimacy to the FARC and the political “uncertainty” it would create in the country. While he does address “impunity,” he seems to be far more concerned with showing leniency to guerrilleros than with the concept of impunity on the whole. (It should be noted that Uribe, in 2010, harshly criticized the guilty verdict of retired Col. Alfonzo Plazas Vega for his part in the forced disappearance, torture and murder of several civilians during the retaking of the Palace of Justice in 1985. Uribe called the officer—sentenced to 30 years in prison for whisking away 11 cafeteria employees from the smoldering rubble to the army’s Cavalry School to be tortured and eventually executed—a military man that simply “sought to do his duty”.)

Human Rights Watch’s strenuous objections boil down to the fact that they consider the amendment to essentially constitute complete amnesty for human rights violations and crimes against humanity.

From HRW’s press release on the subject (emphasis mine):

Three fundamental problems persist in the most recently approved version of the bill:

1.      The amendment empowers Congress to suspend the sentence of any guerrilla, paramilitary, or military member convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity, including those deemed “most responsible” for such abuses. Congress would thus have the authority to guarantee that top FARC commanders convicted of atrocities do not spend a single day in prison. If Colombia’s Constitution provides guerrilla leaders with the opportunity to avoid incarceration, it is only to be expected that they will demand it—and nothing less—the day they sit down to negotiate with the government.

2.      The amendment limits the prosecution of atrocities to those individuals found “most responsible,” and empowers Congress, and subsequently justice officials, to exempt from criminal prosecution countless guerrillas and paramilitaries responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

3.      Military personnel responsible for heinous crimes will be eligible to benefit from dropped prosecutions and sentence suspensions. These benefits would even extend to military members responsible for extrajudicial executions known as “false positives,” despite the claim by the bill’s sponsor in the Senate, Roy Barreras, that such individuals should not be eligible since “that was never the intention or the spirit of the legislators.” Irrespective of the asserted intent of the legislators, the most recently approved version of the amendment applies to “state agents, in relation to their participation in [the internal armed conflict],” and on multiple occasions, Colombian justice authorities have found that false positive cases are related to the internal armed conflict. Cases of false positives have repeatedly been prosecuted as “homicides of protected persons,” a strictly conflict-related crime defined by the Colombian penal code as “caus[ing] the death of a protected person due to and in the course of the armed conflict” (Source)

It’s a sad fact that the road to peace is a delicate and volatile balancing act between truth, justice, and reconciliation.  Armed actors have no reason to turn themselves over to civilian justice without an incentive—reduced sentences, social reintegration, political participation, and so on. It’s an entirely valid perspective that reducing sentences betrays the victims and their families, robbing them of the vindication of seeing those who’ve shattered their world answer for their crimes. On the other hand, a full confession is the only way to get closure for the families of the “disappeared”—a staggering number put at over 55,000 in the last thirty years by the United Nations. 

No peace effort or transitional justice process can ever lead to complete satisfaction for all persons involved and affected—those who want an end to the conflict, those that just want to lay down their arms and go home, those that thirst for retributive justice and vengeance, those who’d like complete amnesty. 

No legislation can achieve that end, that perfect blend of peace and justice, of remorse and forgiveness.  But HRW is correct: This constitutional amendment is a far cry from the best of all possible worlds. A peace agreement that leaves smoldering resentment, caused by a feeling of powerlessness and a lack of judicial vindication, is not peace; it’s merely a fleeting cease-fire. A lasting peace, a healing of the society as a whole, cannot be realized without giving due consideration to the victims’ need for justice.

Send lawyers, guns and money,

J. 

Prisoner of War, Victim of Circumstances

For the past three weeks, French journalist Romero Langlois has been held by the FARC. Unsurprisingly, the FARC claim the taking of the journalist is not, in fact, kidnapping. Because kidnapping was formally renounced as a political tool by the subversive group, and if there's one thing the guerrilla front has shown, it's that it's definitely known for keeping its word.

Instead, they're claiming that Langlois is a prisoner of war. The guerrillas maintain that he was "dressed in a military uniform" when he was wounded and taken captive in the middle of a firefight between government troops and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. More than likely, he was wearing a kevlar helmet and vest, as has become standard practice for journalists operating in war zones. However, "dressed in a military uniform," in order to qualify for POW status, would require him to be dressed in a Colombian Army camo suit, with identifying marks.

That, however, is belaboring the point--a point is believed by no one who isn't already firmly in the leftist group's corner. It's pretty hard to mistake a dSLR (maker: Nikon; calibre: 35mm) for the Colombian army's battle rifle (7.62mm, manufactured by Galil).

Like most other positions taken by the FARC, this is to garner them both legitimacy and publicity. They've admitted they have him, and are willing to turn this non-combatant over, under three conditions: 1. The Red Cross facilitates the exchange; 2. Piedad Cordoba (a Colombian legislator involved in most of the past peace & hostage-release talks) takes an active role; and 3., a delegate from French President-Elect Hollande's government attends the release. Ultimately, this lends legitimacy to the group; a major national government sitting down and negotiating with the FARC, rather than with the actual elected government of Colombia gives them political capital to use.

UPDATE: A brief review of International Humanitarian Law, outlined in the Third Geneva Convention, says that war correspondents who accompany (or are "embedded with") armed actors can be considered prisoners of war. See Part I, Article 4.A:

Art 4. A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy: 
...
(4) Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization, from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model. (Source: International Red Cross.) [Emphasis mine.]

UPDATE: Yesterday’s assassination attempt on former Interior Minister Fernando Londoño is likely to put a kink (at best) in any exchange/release scenario. If the bombing was in fact carried out by the FARC, negotiations are very likely to be off the table, nixed by any one of the parties involved: The Santos government, Ms. Cordoba, the Red Cross, or the Hollande administration.