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COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT Juan Manuel Santos has enacted a landmark “Victims’ Law” aimed at redressing the estimated 4 million victims of the country’s long-running internal conflict – marking the country’s first attempt to reckon with the magnitude of the social costs of its more than half-century class-based conflict.
The law, enacted yesterday, creates mechanisms for compensating survivors of the tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, killed since 1985 in Colombia’s dirty war. Stolen land is to be returned to hundreds of thousands of displaced.
Santos signed the law in the presence of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.
“Today is a historic day,” Santos said of the law he has made the centerpiece of his 10-month-old administration, speaking to a crowd of 600 guests including the military brass, the nation’s most senior judges and representatives of Colombia’s more than 2 million internally displaced.
“Our country is not condemned to 100 years of solitude,” Santos added, invoking the title of the novel by Colombia’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which depicts the nation fatalistically as one that can’t seem to escape endless cycles of violence.
Attempts to reclaim land
Authorities say the law will take a decade to implement and cost at least $20 billion. The challenges are immense. The conflict is anything but over, and the CODHES human rights group says 49 people have been killed since 2002 seeking to reclaim stolen land, eight of them this year alone.
In a brief speech, Ban praised the law but said the work has just begun and must produce results.
After all, the number of victims, arrived at by a public registration process, accounts for nearly one in 10 Colombians. And the country remains beset by conflict, though leftist rebels and right-wing bands hold sway over far less territory than they did a decade ago.
Many victims applauded the law but also expressed concern.
“I think that without seriously getting under control ‘parapolitics,’ the ‘para economy’ and those who have cleared out lands, it will be very difficult to produce processes of restitution of land and reparations,” said Rep. Ivan Cepeda, longtime head of Colombia’s organisation of victims of state crimes.
He was referring to Colombia’s so-called paramilitaries, privately funded far-right militias that emerged in the 1980s to counter kidnapping and extortion by leftist rebels.
The paramilitaries devolved into drug-trafficking gangs, however, whom wealthy landowners used to extend their holdings at the expense of poor peasants, indigenous groups and Afro-Colombians.
The paramilitaries continue to exert a powerful, violent and corrupting influence in rural Colombia, where the central government remains relatively weak and local politicians and military officials sometimes aid and abet them.
Jailed paramilitary warlords who surrendered in exchange for promises of relative leniency have admitted to ordering more than 50,000 murders. Human rights activists say the death toll could be triple that amount.
- AP
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the biggest obstacle is religion
The biggest problem is lack of education. I have lived in the AIDS capital of the world and religion was not the barrier there
religion is a barrier to education
Religion has nothing to do with this.
It’s lack of education and knowledge. Full stop.
I agree education is key, education in safe sex and removal of tribal cultures surrounding ‘cures’ for HIV, and especially key is the education of women – as they tend to be more likely to pass onto children, where culture and tradition have not yet become indoctrinated.
However, Africa has a boom in Catholicism: http://www.africamasterweb.com/AdSense/AfricaAndCatholicism.html
And the official Vatican stance and that of catholic relief and aid workers is that condoms are not to be condoned or distributed: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june11/vatican_05-30.html
This is despite condoms and testing being key to the decrease in HIV infections in the Western World.
Have you checked the numbers between countries with many Catholics and those with the highest AIDS rates? They might not match as closely as you believe.
Most of Southern Africa, which is where you will find those countries with the highest rates of AIDS are actually predominantly protestant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Africa#Southern_Africa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_by_country#Africa
Just to point out that I am actually an agnostic and so not a Church supporter but there’s no point blaming them for something that is not entirely their fault
Without getting into lies, damn lies, and statistics I would wonder how much of those protestants in Southern Africa are from an ex-pat background and therefore less likely to be an victim of HIV?
Like I say, I’m not discounting what you’re saying – I’d just like to see relief organisations (of which many are Catholic) move towards teaching and promoting safer sex, rather than unrealistic abstinence.
Most of the Africans in Southern Africa are protestant.
Most African catholics were converted by Catholic Missions who generally stayed around mid-Africa whereas the protestants (English, Dutch, etc.) settled and converted in Southern Africa.
I’ve grown up there. I know the statistics
I would like to say that I too, would like to see a realistic approach to teaching safe sex and use of condoms as opposed to using the ridiculous notions that Africans will follow the idea of abstinence
Siomha,
I remember Bishop Desmond Tutu addressing a WHO conference and declaring that the attitude of Catholic missionary and aid groups to condom use had exasperated the spread of the disease in Africa.
Religion is only a small part of it – need to look at the bigger picture!
I’ve been living with HIV for seven years. If it wasn’t for the antiretroviral drugs I’d be dead. Huge advances in the treatment and decreases in the stigma attached to the virus have been achieved, but there’s still a long way to go. The virus is seen as a manageable disease and therefore not the threat is once was. This is folly. I wish the only impact on my life was the taking of a tablet each evening. Little is known about the long-term effects of these drugs; nor about the very real risk of dementia, cancers, pneumonia, skin conditions and the host of opportunistic infections being infected leaves you prone to. Education is everything.
Why does Concern’s Senior HIV Adviser never mention the use of CONDOMS to fight Aids in developing countries? NOT MENTIONED ONCE.
I find that surprising as well. Condoms are the main way to prevent the spread of AIDS and nearly all anti-AIDS campaigns use those as their main platforms.
Maybe it is more than just the use of condoms that is important?
Si it is more but they are the best way to prevent AIDS spreading. Every campaign should highlight that
Could have sworn I heard the news on the radio say infection in young people here had risen sharply
The article doesn’t break down the infection rates by demographics so you could be right. The overall trend seems to be going the right way.
You did hear that. Young men 24 to 39 at highest risk, I think. Ignorance is on the rise because the heyday of AIDS campaigning was 20 years ago when they were little kids.
Hmmm.. There were people in Swaziland eating faecal matter not so long ago because they couldn’t take their AIDS meds on an empty stomach (talk about skewed priorities – drugs are more important than FOOD now?)
This article also points out that in the place where new infections are rampant nutrition and sanitation leave a lot to be desired..
Wonder how many people in the 3rd world get “diagnosed” with AIDS when malnutrition and poor sanitation is the true reason their immune systems don’t work? Bearing in mind that the “tests” (ELISA and western blot) specifically state that they are unsuitable for determining the presence of HIV, a virus that has not been isolated. Rather these tests measure viral load and antibody response (and can test positive if you have the flu, are pregnant, or have just had a vaccine – hence the two tests taken several weeks apart).. There are people starving, they are obviously not adequately nourished, and instead of making sure that they can eat – drugs take priority (and companies like concern just keep pushing that appalling quality soy based muck and drugs approach rather than building self sustainability and organic farming)
I do not wish to detract from the seriousness of the problem, but something here reeks of fish..
have your say