Editorial:
Those
Helicopters
9/17/99
David Borden, Executive Director, [email protected] The Amnesty International report on the Barrancabermeja massacre, detailing explicit cooperation between Colombia's army and its paramilitary death squad forces, raises troubling moral issues surrounding U.S. involvement in the Andean drug war, an involvement whose scope and military dimensions may soon dramatically increase. The military-paramilitary connection is not a new discovery. In 1989, for example, Human Rights Watch wrote that "although we could not prove that Colombia's military high command directly ordered paramilitaries to commit atrocities, it should be obvious that their response to these atrocities 'to close ranks and avoid and frequently to obstruct any serious investigation' compromised their obligation to uphold the rule of law" and that "the failure to investigate and prosecute military officers who have joined with paramilitaries to commit murders and mass murder indicated, at the very least, that their superiors had chosen to tolerate these crimes." By 1996, Human Rights Watch had obtained evidence that the military had directly enlisted paramilitary forces in surveillance, intimidation and extra-judicial executions of members of legal political opposition groups. HRW called on the United States to immediately suspend all military aid, training and arms sales -- including $169 million worth of Black Hawk helicopters -- saying it is "clear that aid has supplied units implicated in gross human rights violations." The same year, Congress passed legislation, introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, intended to limit the flow of U.S. arms and dollars to human rights abusers. The Leahy Amendment prohibits funds from being provided to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country, if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that the unit has committed gross violations of human rights. Many, perhaps a majority of units of the Colombian military, have been deemed ineligible. But while human rights advocates have complimented Colombia's efforts to comply with the Leahy requirements, they also note the law has not led to individuals responsible for human rights abuses being brought to justice, nor catalyzed the hoped-for reduction in political violence. The problem of direct and indirect complicity by the Colombian military in politically-motivated tortures and mass murder, therefore, has been well known for some time. When the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources held hearings on Colombia last month, then -- discussing drug czar Barry McCaffrey's request for a dramatic increase in military aid to Colombia to the tune of several hundred million dollars -- one would have thought that the issue would have come up. Somehow, though, Republican drug war ringleaders, like Dan Burton of Indiana and Bob Barr of Georgia, managed to get through the entire hearing, speeches and all, without using the word "paramilitary" even once. Only McCaffrey mentioned the paramilitaries, and only in passing, as another set of guerrillas with which the Colombian government has to contend, not as organizations with ties to that government's armed forces. And while the motivation for McCaffrey's proposal was the growing threat to the Colombian government from the FARC guerrillas, allegedly financed by drug trafficking, the profits that the paramilitaries are thought to reap from drug trafficking also went unmentioned. A few reasoned members of the Committee spoke against increased U.S. involvement in Colombia's civil conflict. Edolphus Towns of Brooklyn warned we could "exacerbate the situation" and derail Colombia's struggling peace process. Janice Schakowsky of Illinois pointed out that there has been no reduction in drug flows from Colombia despite well over half a billion dollars invested in just the last few years, and asked "Why should we believe that investing more in this plan will achieve a different result?" This line of discussion, however, was quickly terminated -- rudely, by Barr, who called Towns' remarks "preposterous" -- or politely, but equally effectively, by Asa Hutchison, who called Schakowsky's questions "fair," but then provided neither answers nor follow-up. The drug warriors had as little interest in examining their policy's effectiveness as they had in its human rights implications. So if the committee didn't discuss the military's connection to the murderous paramilitaries, and they didn't talk about Colombia's peace process, and they didn't discuss the overall ineffectiveness of source country anti-drug strategies -- what did they talk about? Those helicopters. Republican committee members were beside themselves over the administration's slowness in delivering the Black Hawk helicopters they'd appropriated in 1996. A heated exchange took place between the Republicans and McCaffrey, who disagreed on the number that had been delivered -- they said two and he said twenty -- and on the length of time needed to build the helicopters and train Colombian personnel in their use. Doug Ose of California seemed at the point of tears: "Kids are dying in my district [from drugs], and you can't even deliver some helicopters!" Dan Burton actually did touch indirectly on the human rights issue. Burton, who chairs the Committee on Government Reform, of which this subcommittee is a part, scoffed at "Senator Leahy's red tape" that slows down the delivery of military aid. Burton didn't, however, mention the purpose of the "red tape" -- that it is a human rights law, enacted to prevent U.S. taxpayer dollars from being spent on torture and murder. If Dan Burton opposes human rights conditions on aid to foreign militaries, then he has the right to argue that case, but he should argue it as such. To crudely dismiss the Leahy law as "red tape," without so much as mentioning its purpose, is dishonest. And for the lot of them to hold hearings on military aid to Colombia, without discussing the human rights implications -- without uttering the word "paramilitary" a single time -- is a grave disservice to the issue and to the peoples of the United States, Colombia and Colombia's neighbors. Burton, Barr and other committee members were among the President's fiercest critics for his having lied under oath about a private affair, behavior that in and of itself directly affects only a handful of people. And such behavior on the part of a President certainly merits criticism. But how much more serious, then, to deceive the public on a policy matter of extraordinary importance, having global impact and the deepest moral implications? While it is understandable that advocates of providing helicopters and anti-drug money to Colombia's military would be reluctant to bring up that institution's support of paramilitary groups engaging in torture, mass murder and drug trafficking, failing to even acknowledge the existence of the problem in a public hearing is inexcusable. It may soon become more difficult for the drug warriors to maintain this deception of silence, however. About a week after the hearings, the Dallas Morning News reported that Colombia's military had proclaimed one of their greatest victories in the long-running civil war against the FARC guerrillas, following a three-day pitched battle in the town of Puerto Lleras. Residents of Puerto Lleras, however, said that military aircraft -- supplied by the U.S. -- had bombed dozens of buildings, including homes, a hospital, a church and a convent, and had killed three residents and wounded several others. Yes, slowly but surely, the violence and immorality of Colombia's human rights abuses will come to light -- and so will the violence and immorality of the war on drugs.
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