Community Demands End to Landmines After Farmers' Deaths
BOGOTA, Aug 31 (OneWorld) - A Colombian indigenous community has called for an end to the use of anti-personnel mines in the country after an explosion killed two men.
An indigenous organization that represents over 10,000 ethnic Awas living in Narino called the mines an "inhuman war strategy" and part of "Colombia's absurd conflict." Five other Awas from the area were killed by landmines in July. The victims included three members of the same family: Arcenio Canticus stepped on a mine as he walked to work on his plot of farmland, and his two sons, Andres, 8, and German, 12, died similarly as they attempted to rescue him. The Awa community's defiant stance against landmines demonstrates the peaceful resistance indigenous communities are raising in the face of Colombia's ongoing conflict. The fighting has worsened since the late 1970s, when illegal armed groups began to receive funding from the drugs trade. The Awas' most recent calls come amid increasingly dire circumstances; armed groups have become more active in Narino in recent months and years, carrying out the murder, rape, and forced recruitment of indigenous inhabitants. "One thinks that life is meaningless," says Eger Burgos, the coordinator of CAMAWARI, the indigenous group representing the Awas of Ricaurte municipality in Narino. "People can't move, they can't walk. It's hard, hard, hard to keeping going in this situation." The Awas of Ricaurte are mainly subsistence farmers who cultivate maize, beans, plantains, and sugar. They desire simply to opt out of the conflict, which they say they have no interest in.
In response to the violence, the Awas have demanded their economic and political autonomy, which are already codified as rights under Colombian law. To this end, they petitioned the Colombian Senate and the Constitutional Court, and invited top military leaders to the area to experience the instability. The Awa community has also established direct dialogue with the paramilitaries and guerrillas in the area in an attempt to ensure their community's neutrality in the conflict. They took this step despite the existence of a Colombian law forbidding anyone outside the government from negotiating with illegal armed groups. "Our politics are simply indigenous," says Burgos. "We respect non-indigenous political ideas and forms of organization; we just want our autonomy to be respected. But the results of talking to the armed groups have not been what we'd hoped for. There are deep economic and ideological interests at stake." Both the FARC and ELN guerrillas have rejected the indigenous community's call for neutrality, demanding instead that it join their respective insurgencies. In turn, the right-wing paramilitaries have accused the indigenous population of collaborating with the guerrillas. All three groups rely heavily on drug trafficking for funding. According to Burgos, the Awas "don't make distinctions between the armed actors, even the army and the police. All of them cause victims. We don't know which armed groups plant each mine. What we do know is that, as long as military operations continue, there's the risk of any tactic of war being used." The Awas formed the CAMAWARI association in 1992 to provide unified political leadership and to assert their claims to formal ownership of their ancestral lands. Though the legal recognition of their 11 indigenous reserves was achieved between 1995 and 2002, the Awas have been unable to prevent armed groups from operating in these areas. The conflict now threatens the Awas' continued inhabitance of Ricaurte municipality. Since 2004, CAMAWARI estimates that 4,554 Awas have been forced to leave their homes. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees' representative in Colombia, Robert Meier, has raised the situation as a special area of concern, calling it "unsustainable." One solution, suggested by an advisor to Narino's provincial government, is the relocation of the Awas from their ancestral lands to nearby zones. Such a move would severely affect the Awas' spiritual relationship with their territory. Across Colombia, the number of deaths caused by landmines has risen sharply from less than 150 each year between 1990 and 2000 to 627 in 2002 and 1107 in 2006. A recent Human Rights Watch report stated that the armed group most responsible for laying mines is the FARC, who have claimed that landmines are the "weapon of the poor" because of their low cost. Indigenous communities, who often inhabit remote areas with little state presence, are particularly vulnerable to the activities of armed groups and the impact of anti-personnel mines. ....................................................................................
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