Mark Tyson
Member
A Colombian paramilitary fighter of the Cacique Nutibara right-wing rebel block places lays down some weapons in Medellin. (Reuters)
Colombian Militiamen Turn In Weapons
Amnesty Provision Of Demobilization Draws Criticism
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 26, 2003; Page A16
MEDELLIN, Colombia, Nov. 25 -- More than 800 members of Colombia's private paramilitary force surrendered their weapons Tuesday in a ceremony that highlighted the promise and challenges facing the government as it works to disarm a group that has served at its side for years.
he event marked a first step in President Alvaro Uribe's plan to remove the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia from a crowded battlefield. The 18,000-member confederation of paramilitary groups, known as the AUC, has fought alongside Colombia's army against two Marxist guerrilla groups engaged in a decades-long war against the state.
Uribe's plan, which includes an amnesty provision, has been criticized by activists and others as offering impunity to those who have committed human rights violations.
In a heavily guarded, cavernous assembly hall, a long line of crew-cut young men piled ammunition vests, assault rifles and pistols on a long white slab, shaking hands with government officials as they passed. Despite the pageantry, officials and paramilitary leaders warned that daunting problems lie ahead for a process that commits most of Colombia's paramilitary forces to disarm by the end of 2005.
"This effort will not be in vain," Luis Carlos Restrepo, Uribe's peace commissioner, told the camouflage-clad ranks stretching to the back of the hall. "The road ahead is not easy. Many times you will find it harder to build relationships in a civil society than it has been to live inside an armed group."
The AUC's main fighting force agreed in July to demobilize 11,000 troops by the end of 2005, beginning a process that Uribe said he hoped would serve as a template for future negotiations with guerrilla groups to end a 39-year civil war. Several other paramilitary factions have started talks with the government to begin formal independent negotiations.
The ceremony began Colombia's seventh demobilization of an armed group since the late 1980s, although whether it will end successfully is uncertain. The 855 paramilitary troops who put down their rifles are the first to do so from a group that considers the government an ally rather than enemy.
By pushing back the guerrillas in a number of regions, the AUC has achieved political support from much of the war-weary population, despite its use of brutal counterinsurgency tactics that fall hardest on civilians. Many within Colombia's military, which has received nearly $2 billion from the United States since 2000, have also looked on the group as the enemy of their enemy and rarely moved against its leaders.
Uribe, highly popular after 15 months in office, has argued that disarming the AUC would simplify the conflict and make guerrilla peace talks more likely. To that end he has proposed legislation that would allow AUC leaders to avoid jail time -- even for grave human rights violations -- by paying restitution to victims. The plan has raised objections from human rights groups and some members of Congress in Washington who said it would allow combatants to avoid punishment for their crimes. Lower-ranking paramilitary troops already receive amnesty unless they are implicated in larger crimes.
"Any man who is leaving this war you must support, whether from the left or the right," said Luis Fernando Quijano, director of Corpades, a human rights group, after the ceremony. "My concern is that we have made very little progress toward actual reconciliation."
The men who gave up their weapons Tuesday also gave up a way of life that brought them money, friendship and a measure of power. All of them operated in Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city and a violent crossroads for guns and drugs in the rugged northwest. Now they are entering civic life with little education and scant resources.
The government has turned to U.S. polling techniques to obtain information about members of the paramilitary forces. A survey of 674 foot soldiers paid for in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development sought to determine what demobilized paramilitary troops will need to make a new life within the law. The survey found that a typical soldier is a man, 18 or 19 years old, with less than a year in the organization. Most respondents said they had some work experience, but more than half had not finished high school. A majority of them have children who depend on them financially.
In questions regarding what they intend to do, more than a third said they hoped to start a small business with financial help. Following Tuesday's event, buses shuttled the men to a recreational club in La Ceja, a town 35 miles east of Medellin, where they will begin several weeks of education under armed guard.
Luis Perez, Medellin's mayor, said the city plans to spend roughly $550 a month to support each demobilized soldier in the program, including 48 minors who turned themselves in last week. After three weeks in La Ceja, those who have firm plans to work or continue their education will move into private homes in Medellin.
"The science of peace is patience," Perez told the troops.
The demobilization on Tuesday removed some, but not all, of the paramilitary forces from this city 150 miles northwest of the capital, Bogota. Some powerful commanders within the AUC are skeptical of demobilization, partly out of fear that the army is not prepared to defend the territory that the paramilitary forces have won from the guerrillas in recent years.
"The AUC is not demobilizing to give up space to the insurgency, but to the legitimate forces of the state," paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño, who is wanted in the United States on drug trafficking charges, said in a videotaped message shown during the ceremony.
High in Medellin's eastern hills, a 25-year-old paramilitary soldier who calls himself Edison continues patrolling the warren of concrete houses and steep staircases in the neighborhood of Santa Lucia.
His enemies remain nearby, Edison said, gesturing toward a green valley running toward guerrilla territory to the east. He said about a dozen paramilitary troops from the neighborhood turned in their weapons, leaving 50 others to keep the guerrillas out of a place they ran as recently as two years ago.
"These were people who were tired and want to live another way," said Edison, who joined the paramilitary force four years ago after serving in the army. "My life is to fight. I'm not putting anything down. I'm standing watch."
