Pubdate: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 Source: Wall Street Journal (US) Copyright: 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Contact: http://www.wsj.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487 Author: Mary Anastasia O'grady, Editor Section: The Americas COLOMBIA'S ANTI-TERRORIST EFFORTS DESERVE U.S. HELP In 1996, retired Colombian General Farouk Yanine worked at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C. His boss was two-star U.S. General John Thompson. "One day he walked into my office and requested time off," says General Thompson. "He said he wanted to return to Colombia to answer charges that he had violated human rights." The accusation was for crimes in a region that he had long since left when they supposedly occurred. General Yanine was a decorated soldier, confident of his innocence. Colombians widely recognize that he pacified the Magdalena Medio region, a hotbed of guerrilla activity. When he left his command there in 1985, the population feted him. In 1988, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces -- FARC -- tried to kill him with a car bomb. General Yanine was exonerated in court. But not before Colombia, under U.S. pressure, placed him under house arrest for nine months. Exorbitant legal fees exacted a huge toll. Later, because the U.S. revoked his visa, he was unable to return to his Washington post. In early 1999, three active Colombian generals underwent similar treatment; that was followed by more officers being relieved of their duties in order to satisfy U.S. concerns about accusations. This was done, despite the fact that actors sympathetic to the guerrillas had infiltrated the government's investigative bodies and amid claims that some witnesses had been bribed or intimidated. The U.S. never committed resources to investigate these charges itself. The State Department's Human Rights office in Bogota at the time had a staff of one. Not a few pundits and politicians in the U.S. are warning against "getting involved" in Colombia's war, now that Bogota has called off the peace process and is getting tough. This is nonsense. The U.S. is already neck-deep in Colombia. Its self-righteous and appallingly naive harassment of a military at war is only one example. The U.S. is also the principal market for Colombian cocaine, sales of which keep the FARC in business and threaten to corrupt the legal system. The U.S. "source country" drug war places the burden of prohibition on other nations, Colombia in particular. Although failing to make a dent in U.S. supply, it has alienated peasants and helped convert the countryside into a killing field. Yet when Colombia asks the U.S. to share satellite intelligence about guerrilla activity and to help train its military personnel, a hypocritical Congress wrings its hands about U.S. "involvement." Unless the U.S. comes to understand the dynamics of Colombian terrorism, including its own role in it, things will only get worse. It may end up alienating a whole country. For starters, Congress and the White House had better get hip to the propaganda campaign now gearing up against presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe, who not coincidentally, like the generals, takes a hard line against the insurgents. And they had better come to understand the "human right" of self-defense. For three years Colombia tried to reason with the FARC. It ceded land; it held "peace talks;" it worked for a cease-fire. In return, it got only more violence. Earlier this year, in a stunning turnaround, President Andres Pastrana changed course abruptly and decided to fight. Public opinion was ahead of him. In presidential elections, just eight weeks away, Mr. Uribe looks set to win a resounding victory in the first round. Colombians now recognize that they must confront home-grown terrorism with the kind of civilian-backed military strategy Mr. Uribe promotes. That's bad news for rebels, who have had the country on the run. Not surprisingly, the FARC has made a number of attempts to kill Mr. Uribe. Another way that the guerrillas could destroy the leader of this nascent campaign against them would be to give him the "Yanine treatment," by suggesting collaboration with the paramilitary, spreading the word in Paris cafes and Dutch churches and letting the U.S. skewer him. That effort is well underway. Mr. Uribe's real "crime" appears to be his success against the guerrillas when he was governor of Antioquia. In an interview in 1997 he told me that when he arrived as governor "guerrillas were all over the state. They were kidnapping local people, trafficking in drugs , keeping illegal plantations. Against them were the paramilitary. Wherever guerrillas arrived in one place, sooner or later paramilitary arrived there too, committing many similar crimes." He saw this as a result of the power vacuum left by a weak state. He made security a primary goal by supporting both the military and the notion that rural peasants should be allowed to form communication networks for defense. Some enemies of the rebels, no doubt, became ruthless as well. But the practice of mobilizing the population was critical to Mr. Uribe's successful campaign to suppress the rebels. By the time he left, the place was pacified. One of the best generals in that effort was Rito Alejo del Rio, another victim of the State Department intervention mentioned above. In a monograph published by the U.S. Army War College, Maoist insurgency expert Thomas Marks lays out what Colombia is up against. To start with there's the rebel control of coca cash. "FARC did not become a serious factor due to mobilization of an alienated mass base. Rather it became a serious factor due to the power which came from drugs grown by a marginalized population." Secondly there is the Maoist strategy. To mobilize this power, Mr. Marks says, "FARC utilizes the tripartite approach embodied in Maoist insurgency - -- mass line (development of clandestine infrastructure), united front (use of fellow travelers, both internally and abroad, witting and un-witting, especially human rights organizations), and military action." And third there is the contradiction between the need for civilian defense and the taboo the U.S. assigns it. "By refusing to work with Bogota to find an approach to popular mobilization that will work, Washington has made the situation much, much worse. Indeed, it has demanded that the military spread itself still more thinly by 'going after' yet another foe, the autodefensas [self-defense groups.]" In the wild Colombian countryside, the need to legalize rural population defense is critical. It is a human right. Mr. Marks says that, "By refusing to mobilize the population, Bogota ensures that people's war is waged out of control in every nook and cranny. By encouraging Colombia to adhere to this misguided approach, the U.S. pours oil on the flames. The result in many areas is pathos." That's an involvement that the U.S. might want to reconsider. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom