UN publishes report on Colombia military killings

[Judi Lynn]

May 27, 11:33 AM EDT
UN publishes report on Colombia military killings

GENEVA (AP) -- Colombian security forces committed "a significant number" of murders over the past decade, often for personal profit, and few of the perpetrators have been punished, according to a report published Thursday by an independent U.N. human rights expert.

Philip Alston, the U.N.'s investigator on extrajudicial executions, said in his 36-page report that the number of so-called "false positive" killings by military members surged in 2004.

The term refers to killings in which civilians were lured to remote locations before being shot by soldiers who then dressed their victims in combat garb, or placed a gun in their hand, to make them appear like guerrillas killed in gunfights.

Alston, who made a fact-finding mission to Colombia last year, said the killings didn't appear to be part of government policy but rejected official claims they were isolated incidents.

"There have been too many killings of a similar nature to characterize them as isolated incidents carried out by individual rogue soldiers or units," he said.

More:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_UN_COLOMBIA_MILITARY_KILLINGS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-05-27-11-33-25

[Judi Lynn]

1. Army Killings Rear Head in Presidential Campaign

Army Killings Rear Head in Presidential Campaign
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, May 27, 2010 (IPS) - Colombian presidential candidate Antanas Mockus said he "shares the horror" over the so-called "false positives" -- young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the military's counterinsurgency campaign.

The phenomenon is "an extreme manifestation of the short-cut culture, the anything goes culture," the former Bogotá mayor, who has a real shot at winning the presidency in Sunday's elections or -- more likely -- in a June runoff, told foreign journalists Wednesday.

Members of more than 30 army battalions recruited young men with false job offers and took them to faraway locations, where they were shot and dressed up as left-wing rebels (or less frequently as far-right paramilitaries) and passed off as combat casualties.

This "body count" system used incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to reward soldiers and officers for "results" in the country's nearly five-decade civil war.

The phenomenon really took off after right-wing President Álvaro Uribe first took office in 2002, and reached a peak when Mockus's main rival, Juan Manuel Santos, was defence minister from July 2006 to May 2009.

~snip~
"I do not believe they are legally responsible, but I do see a moral, or perhaps political, responsibility," he said.

Santos insists that when he was defence minister, he and President Uribe "denounced the problem and reached the decision that had to be taken, with transparency in front of the whole country." He says a total of 15 measures, "which were effective," were adopted to counter the phenomenon.

In November 2007, Santos issued a new directive that provided rewards for captured and "demobilised" combatants, rather than offering incentives for officers who showed the fewest army casualties and the largest number of enemy casualties.

"Reports of false positives were drastically reduced after November 2008; they fell by a factor of over 100," Santos recently stated, repeating what he has said on every occasion that the issue has been raised in the campaign.

But it was not until October 2008 that the government dismissed 27 army officers during an unexpected visit to Colombia by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

"Were the dismissals a response when they realised what was going on? Or when they realised that the world had realised what was going on?" Mockus asked.

~snip~
The Mothers of Soacha are indignant that Santos is a presidential candidate. "Not because he pulled the trigger," said one, "but because he was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and has to assume responsibility."

The United Nations' special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, released a 36-report page Thursday that says the Colombian security forces committed "a significant number" of "false positive" killings over the past decade, and that the number of murders began to climb after 2004. (END)

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51613