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UN: Uribe should veto pro-paramilitary law

AFP
07/15/2005

A United Nations agency that works with families of kidnapping victims called on Colombia's government on Wednesday to break ties with outlawed paramilitary groups that have been involved in the disappearances of hundreds of Colombians.

At the end of a week-long investigation into the Andean country's 897 unsolved disappearances in which there is evidence that the state played a role, the U.N. panel urged Colombia to prosecute security forces and public officials implicated in crimes committed by the right-wing paramilitary militias.

The panel essentially agreed with human rights groups that have long called on Colombia to severe links between its army and the paramilitary forces, and also to condemn the law passed by the Colombian Congress on June 23, that would granted something very closed to amnesty to those who committed crimes such as those the panel was investigating.

The so called Law of Justice and Peace gave political status to right wing paramilitary forces and set a maximum sentence of eight years in jail for the ex combatants accused of atrocities such as masacres, kidnappings, disappearances and displacement.

Investigators said families of the victims are often too scared to testify or even report the disappearances.

A government spokesman declined immediate comment on what the United Nations described as a campaign aimed at union members, human rights workers and others seen as a threat by the paramilitaries and some state security forces.

Colombia's armed forces have often cooperated with the paramilitaries against their common rebel foes although the government says those who aid the paramilitaries are subject to prosecution.

The paramilitaries, guilty of some of the worst massacres of the conflict, were organized as private armies in the 1980s by landowners trying to protect their property from the rebels. Both the paramilitaries and the rebels are involved in Colombia's lucrative cocaine trade, often killing peasants they suspect of cooperating with the other side.