February 2007 e-newsletter
Inter Pares' E-Newsletter
Entrusted with Stories: A Window on Colombia
In this e-newsletter:
- Letter of Introduction
- Excerpts from:
- Entrusted with Stories: A Window on Colombia
- Blood money: Doing business in Colombia
- Displaced Communities - Learning to exercise their rights
- Publication: Quaker Initiative to End Torture
- Public Forum: Green Revolution - Whose Revolution?
Links
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Dear friends,
Stories help us understand the lives of others. They help us understand people's struggles against injustice, as well as their hopes and their plans for building a better future for generations to come. They foster connections across borders of all kinds.
Stories are a way for people to communicate parts of themselves - they are also a way for others to see their own reflections in the lives of others.
Last fall, Inter Pares, the Native Women's Association of Canada, and the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia met to support one another in their search for social justice. Hundreds of women gathered to share stories of the violence they face, along with those of survival, healing and justice. They are forging long-term bonds that will strengthen their movements.
I have enclosed our latest Bulletin, entitled Entrusted with Stories: A Window on Colombia, which describes the experience of these women coming together as well as the wider struggle of Colombians for social justice in a country devastated by over four decades of war. These are stories of people on the move. Some are disturbing, recounting the actions of mining companies, paramilitaries and guerrillas. Others are hopeful, narrating women's organizing against violence, and calling for lasting peace, justice, and reparations.
Your political and financial support to Inter Pares and our counterparts expresses your belief in the possibility of working across languages, cultures and geographical locations towards a common goal of dignity and justice for all.
We invite you to draw closer...and listen.
In solidarity,
Rachel Gouin
Entrusted with Stories: A Window on Colombia
Over the past four decades, Colombia has been caught in a horrific conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and forced millions of people to flee their homes and seek the relative safety of metropolitan slums. For over twelve years, with our colleagues from Project Counselling Service (PCS), Inter Pares has supported displaced people to organize themselves, inform themselves of their rights, and strengthen their capacity to negotiate with the government for durable solutions to their situation. In Colombia, indigenous people are nearly eight times more likely to be forcibly displaced or to suffer human rights abuses, and it is not coincidental that the land they are being chased from is rich with natural resources.
To draw national and international attention to ongoing human rights violations, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) organized the International Verification Mission. ...
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What they say: The conflict in Colombia is a war about drugs.
What we see: The present conflict in Colombia began long before there was any large-scale production and marketing of cocaine. While the reasons people take up arms are complex, the conflict was clearly rooted in the tremendous inequity in the distribution of wealth and resources, and the complete impunity for those who abused people's human rights in order to maintain this system. Since that time, guerrilla forces have adopted tactics that violate the human rights they once defended. The wealthy elite in turn created paramilitary forces to protect their power. The paramilitary forces have come to dominate the drug trade, and the guerrillas have increasingly used money from the drug trade to finance their activities. Drug money has exacerbated the war, but drugs were not the cause. Extreme social inequity and impunity for human rights violations still exist, and must be addressed if Colombia is to achieve durable peace.
Blood money: Doing business in Colombia
Colombia is a wealthy country, with a large number of very poor people. As in so many places around the world, the wealth of Colombia has been extracted from the poor.
Colombia has huge tracts of fertile agricultural land, as well as petroleum, natural gas, coal, timber, emeralds, and various precious metals, including one of the largest gold deposits in the world. If you take a map of Colombia and mark the location of minerals, petroleum and the best agricultural land, you will find precisely where the worst of the violence has occurred, and from where the greatest proportion of the population has been forced to flee for their lives.
This is not a coincidence. ...
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What they say: Colombia is more peaceful now since 30,000 paramilitaries have laid down arms under federal demobilization programs.
What we see: According to Amnesty International, the paramilitaries continue to exercise complete social, economic, and political control over many parts of the country, including the health and education system, public works, private security firms, shipping and ports, as well as criminal activities such as prostitution, extortion and gambling. Only one gun was turned in for every three paramilitary fighters who went through the demobilization process to return to civilian life, and the political and economic structures of the paramilitaries have not been dismantled. In the past six months, five of Inter Pares' Colombian counterparts have received death threats from groups that describe themselves as the "new paramilitaries."
Displaced Communities - Learning to exercise their rights
Bucaramanga is a city of two million people in the northeast of Colombia. Over the course of the conflict, tens of thousands of uprooted families have arrived here seeking safety. The majority are women and children, forced to flee the violence in the surrounding countryside, where the guerrilla, the paramilitaries and the army are fighting for control. They live hand to mouth in shacks on abandoned land, with little sanitation or water, and are often refused health care or education for their children.
Four years ago, most displaced Colombians were unaware that under national and international law, the government is obliged to provide them with food, shelter and education. ...
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What they say: Fewer people are being displaced now so things must be getting better.
What we see: Since 1985, more than 3.7 million people have been displaced from their homes; they continue to live in miserable conditions, while the government refuses to provide access to housing, education, health care or employment. During the first six months of 2006, over 112,000 people joined the displaced population due to ongoing violence of paramilitary, guerrilla and army forces. Ongoing displacement by "demobilized" paramilitaries is no longer counted in official government figures.
Publication
Quaker Initiative to End Torture, by Anne-Marie Zilliacus, December 2006
This article describes the torture industrial complex in our society and the work that is needed to end it. It was originally published in The Canadian Friend and describes the founding of the Quaker Initiative to End Torture, a movement that aims to translate the outrage people feel about torture into the political pressure that will abolish it. Please click here to view this document.
Public Forum: Green Revolution - Whose Revolution?
Monday, March 26th
7:30-9:30 pm
Ottawa Congress Centre (Capital Hall)
Free admission - Donations welcome
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have joined forces with the Rockefellers to launch a new Green Revolution in Africa. The $US150 million initiative intends to spur agricultural development in Africa by introducing new "improved seed." What does this mean for Africa's farmers, food security, and biodiversity? Who will benefit and who will lose with this new agricultural revolution? Are GMOs and industrial agriculture the solution to hunger and poverty in Africa or is there a better way? Come hear what African and Canadian farm leaders and scientists think. For more information, please contact info@interpares.ca.
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Inter Pares
221 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6P1
Phone (1-613) 563-4801 or (1-866) 563-4801 (toll free) Fax (1-613) 594-4704
With the support of thousands of Canadians, Inter Pares works in Canada and around the world with social change organizations who share the analysis that poverty and injustice are caused by inequities within and among nations, and who are working to promote peace, and social and economic justice in their communities and societies. Charitable registration number (BN) 11897 1100 RR000 1.
Please re-distribute this e-newsletter to anyone you think would enjoy it, in its complete and original form only. Copyright 2007 Inter Pares. All rights reserved.
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