WHAT IN COLOMBIA |
Forced displacement is a consequence of Colombia’s 5 decades of armed conflict. : According to various reports anywhere from 2.2 to 4 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes and villages as a result of internal conflict, creating a humanitarian crisis that is second in the world only to Sudan's. Very often, forced displacement is a response to fear generated by indiscriminate attacks by all parties to the conflict, but in many cases also to massacres, selective killings, torture, and specific threats. Kamel Morhane, the Assistant U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees stated in 2004." Internal Displacement in Colombia is the worst humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere". The internally displaced people (IDP's) remain a vulnerable segment of the population, lacking in security, adequate nutrition, shelter, education, and work. They are exposed to continuing violence, often caught in war zones, victimized and frequently recruited forcibly into the armed conflict by warring factions. |
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The Armed Conflict
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| For over 50 years , Colombia’s guerrilla insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and later the National Liberation Army (ELN), have been responsible for the killing and abduction of civilians, hostage-taking, disappearances, the use of child soldiers, cruel and inhuman treatment of captured combatants, and the forced displacement of millions of civilians. |
These guerrilla forces have continued to use prohibited weapons, including land mines and gas cylinder bombs that terrorize communities and cause gruesome fatalities and injuries, and to attack medical workers and facilities in flagrant disregard of international legal norms. |
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Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups, in turn, originated as small “self-defense groups” formed by local landowners and businessmen to defend themselves and their property against guerrilla violence, and to death squads created by drug cartels in the 1970s and 1980's. Sometimes operating with the tolerance of Colombian military units, paramilitary groups have a long history of abuses against civilians, including massacres, assassinations, torture, forced displacement, forced disappearances, kidnappings, and land expropriation. These longstanding conflicts between warring factions have resulted in the present humanitarian crisis, represented by the forced displacement of three to four million people in Colombia, the largest number of internally displaced people in the Western hemisphere.
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