GENEVA (Reuters) – Colombia should investigate a sharp rise in killings by gangs largely composed of former paramilitaries who have turned to crime after being demobilised, a UN human rights envoy said yesterday.
The Andean nation, which holds a presidential election on Sunday, has demobilised tens of thousands of former paramilitaries in recent years, but they still enjoy an “alarming level of impunity”, said Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions.
“Today, the failure in accountability is clear from the dramatic rise in killings by illegal armed groups composed largely of former paramilitaries,” he said in a report issued on Thursday on his investigation in Colombia in June 2009.
The new illegal armed groups “engage in and are financially sustained by drug trafficking; many also engage in extortion from local businesses and landowners, kidnapping, money-laundering and other criminal behaviour,” he said. “When local populations resist corruption or participation in illegal conduct, they are threatened with death and, all too often, killed,” he said, noting that human rights activists and indigenous communities are often targeted.
Alston, an Australian who teaches at New York University law school, quoted an unnamed senior Colombian judicial official as saying prosecutions would be difficult as the groups are “very economically powerful and they have infiltrated the military and political establishment who help them by providing cover”.
Colombia’s government should also prosecute soldiers who committed a significant number of premeditated civilian murders from 2004 to late 2008, presenting them to look like enemy guerrilla casualties, he said.
“Soldiers simply knew that they could get away with murder,” Alston declared.
In the army, under increasing pressure to crush a 45-year-old leftist insurgency, success was often equated with enemy “kill counts” — the number of FARC rebels and others killed in combat, he said.
Alston and his team interviewed more than 100 witnesses, victims and survivors during the 10-day visit, which included talks with President Alvaro Uribe and senior ministers.
Senior officials had told him that any unlawful killings by soldiers were isolated, but Alston disputed this view.
“There have been too many killings of a similar nature to characterise them as isolated incidents carried out by individual rogue soldiers or units, or ‘bad apples’,” he said, citing hundreds of alleged unlawful killings by security forces.
Colombia has taken steps to reduce the killings, including dismissing some senior military officers, especially since slayings by troops in 2008 in the impoverished Bogota suburb of Soacha, but most still enjoy impunity, according to Alston.
“Service members suspected of involvement in killings should be suspended for the duration of the investigation and prosecution,” Alston said, adding that killings by police should also be investigated as a priority.
