Just Foreign Policy News
December 22, 2010
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The prime minister of Mauritius has accused Britain of pursuing a "policy of deceit" over the Chagos islands, its Indian Ocean colony from where islanders were evicted to make way for a US military base, the Guardian reports. The British government’s decision to establish a marine reserve around Diego Garcia and surrounding islands was exposed this month by WikiLeaks as the latest ruse to prevent the islanders from ever returning to their homeland. A US diplomatic cable dated May 2009 revealed that a Foreign Office official had told the US a decision to set up a "marine protected area" would "effectively end the islanders’ resettlement claims." A US state department official commented: "Establishing a marine reserve might, indeed, as the FCO’s Roberts stated, be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling in the BIOT."
Nearly a year after the cable, the UK foreign secretary described the marine reserve as a "major step forward for protecting the oceans". He added that the reserve "will not change the UK’s commitment to cede the territory to Mauritius when it is no longer needed for defense purposes".
2) A proposal for U.S. Special Operations Forces raids against in Pakistan may be intended to put more pressure on the Pakistani military, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service. But it also reflects a real demand from the U.S.-NATO command in Afghanistan to target insurgent leaders inside Pakistan if the Pakistani military does not. Porter notes that the NATO denial of the New York Times story was a non-denial denial, in that the Times didn’t claim that the US was "planning to conduct ground operations into Pakistan," but that military commanders were pushing for authority to do so.
The U.S. National Intelligence Council warned the George W. Bush White House in August 2008 that SOF raids across the border in Pakistan would threaten the unity of the Pakistani military, Porter notes. A disproportionate percentage of army officers serving in the largely Pashtun tribal areas are Pashtun, the Council observed, and if U.S. commando raids continued beyond a few months, it could provoke large-scale defections from the Pakistani army to the militants.
3) The UN office for torture issues says it is looking into a complaint that Bradley Manning has been mistreated in custody, AP reports. The UN could ask the US to stop any violations it finds, AP says.
4) In the three months since Israel ended its partial settlement construction freeze in the West Bank, a settlement building boom has begun, especially in more remote communities that are least likely to be part of Israel after any two-state peace deal, the New York Times reports. Hagit Ofran, a settlement opponent who monitors their growth for Peace Now, said: "We can say firmly that this is the most active period in many years." Settlement opponents say that the larger the settler population, the more resources – water, roads, security – will be needed for them and the harder it will be to get Israelis to agree to a Palestinian state.
5) Aid and nongovernmental groups say restrictions on building materials are hampering international humanitarian efforts in Gaza while doing little to impede the Hamas-led government, the Washington Post reports. Hamas has ready access to construction materials through smuggling tunnels along the border with Egypt, while Israeli bureaucracy and bottlenecks at border crossings are snarling the delivery of materials to international relief organizations struggling to build much-needed housing, schools and infrastructure projects.
"The United Nations, who have a responsibility to help, we’re the ones that are held up," said John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s Gaza operations. "We’re held up from building schools. We’re held up from our other infrastructure projects, from the housing people need. And, yet, for the other parts of society here – be that either those with ulterior agendas or people who just have money – they can get on with it."
6) The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at Guantanamo, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to challenge the basis for continued incarceration, the Washington Post reports. "Indefinite detention without charge or trial is wrong, whether it comes from Congress or the president’s pen," said Laura Murphy of the ACLU. "Our Constitution requires that we charge and prosecute people who are accused of crimes. You cannot sell an indefinite detention scheme by attaching a few due-process baubles and expect that to restore the rule of law."
Israel/Palestine
7) A group in Seattle is placing ads on buses that say, "Israeli War Crimes – Your tax dollars at work," King 5 News reports. A spokesman for the group denied its message was "anti-Israel": "We would like Israel to stop violating human rights," the spokesman said.
Iran
8) A group of prominent Republicans are demanding that the Obama Administration lift its designation of the MEK as a terrorist group as part of an explicit commitment to a policy of trying to overthrow the Iranian government, the Washington Post reports. The Republicans equated the exile group with the Iranian opposition, but the Post notes that the group lost much of their following in Iran after their armed faction, which was based in Iraq, functioned as a division of the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq war.
Colombia
9) A year before the US and Colombia announced an enhanced military cooperation agreement, the US embassy in Bogotá was working with the Uribe administration to dodge Colombian congressional approval of the deal, Raw Story reports, citing a WikiLeaks cable which discussed renaming the agreement so that it would appear to be a modest extension of existing agreements. [In August of this year, the Colombian constitutional court ruled that the agreement was unconstitutional because it had not been approved by the Colombian Congress. The Colombian government has since indicated that it does not intend to push forward the deal – JFP.]
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) WikiLeaks cables: Mauritius sues UK for control of Chagos islands
Leaked document shows Foreign Office official told US that marine reserve would end evicted islanders’ claims
Richard Norton-Taylor and Rob Evans, Guardian, Tuesday 21 December 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/21/mauritius-uk-chagos-islands
The prime minister of Mauritius has accused Britain of pursuing a "policy of deceit" over the Chagos islands, its Indian Ocean colony from where islanders were evicted to make way for a US military base. He spoke to the Guardian as his government launched the first step in a process that could end UK control over the territory.
Navinchandra Ramgoolam spoke out after the Labour government’s decision to establish a marine reserve around Diego Garcia and surrounding islands was exposed earlier this month as the latest ruse to prevent the islanders from ever returning to their homeland.
A US diplomatic cable dated May 2009, disclosed by WikiLeaks, revealed that a Foreign Office official had told the Americans that a decision to set up a "marine protected area" would "effectively end the islanders’ resettlement claims". The official, identified as Colin Roberts, is quoted as saying that "according to the HMG’s [Her Majesty’s government’s] current thinking on the reserve, there would be ‘no human footprints’ or ‘Man Fridays’" on the British Indian Ocean Territory uninhabited islands."
A US state department official commented: "Establishing a marine reserve might, indeed, as the FCO’s Roberts stated, be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling in the BIOT."
Nearly a year later, in April this year, David Miliband, then foreign secretary, described the marine reserve as a "major step forward for protecting the oceans". He added that the reserve "will not change the UK’s commitment to cede the territory to Mauritius when it is no longer needed for defence purposes".
"I feel strongly about a policy of deceit," Ramgoolam said , adding that he had already suspected Britain had a "hidden agenda".
Asked if he believed Miliband had acted in good faith, he said: "Certainly not. Nick Clegg said before the general election that Britain had a "moral responsibility to allow these people to at last return home". William Hague, now foreign secretary, said that if elected he would "work to ensure a fair settlement of this long-standing dispute".
Ramgoolam said he believed the government was adopting the same attitude as its predecessor. Mauritius has lodged a document with an international tribunal accusing Britain of breaching the UN convention on the law of the sea. It says Britain has no right to establish the marine zone since it was not a "coastal state" in the region, adding that Mauritius has the sole right to declare an "exclusive zone" around the British colony.
A legal document seen by the Guardian and submitted to an international tribunal says that in 1965 Britain "dismembered Mauritius by purporting to establish a so-called ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’". Eight years later, it "forcibly removed the entire indigenous population of the Chagos archipelago, comprising a community of approximately 2,000 persons calling themselves Ilois or Chagossians", the document says.
[…]
2) U.S. Plan for High-Risk Raids into Pakistan Is More Than Psywar
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service, Dec 22
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53940
Washington – This week’s leak to the New York Times of a proposal for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids against Afghan insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan may be intended to put more pressure on the Pakistani military to take action against those sanctuaries.
But the proposal for such cross-border raids also reflects a real demand from the U.S.-NATO command in Afghanistan to target insurgent leaders inside Pakistan if the Pakistani military does not respond to the threat, according to a U.S. source familiar with discussions at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul.
And the position of the Barack Obama administration on the necessity of attacking insurgent safe havens in Pakistan appears to be in line with the proposal for cross-border raids.
Carrying out such raids would probably provoke a new level of anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan, with dangerous political consequences in that country, according to experts on Pakistan, but the behaviour of the national security organs of the United States in the recent past suggests that such dangers are being rationalised.
The New York Times reported Monday that "senior American military commanders" – meaning Gen. David Petraeus and his subordinates at ISAF – are pushing for raids into Pakistan aimed at capturing Taliban commanders and taking them back to Afghanistan for interrogation.
Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the primary spokesman for ISAF, issued a statement saying, "There is absolutely no truth to reporting in The New York Times that U.S. forces are planning to conduct ground operations into Pakistan."
That did not amount to a real denial of the Times story, however. The story did not say that U.S. forces were "planning to conduct" such raids. In fact, it made clear that Obama had not yet made any decision on the proposal.
Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center and a leading authority on the Pakistani military, sees the leak of the proposal for more cross-border raids as a form of "psychological warfare" aimed at getting the Pakistani military leadership to take action against the Haqqani network sanctuaries in Northern Waziristan.
Nawaz told IPS, however, that the timing for such an impact is off, because the Pakistani military could not launch any new offensive there until next February in any case, because of the weather. Furthermore, it still lacks the helicopters necessary for such operations, he said.
The proposed U.S. cross-border operations are "a perfect recipe for ruining even this bad relationship", said Nawaz. They would "disrupt the whole enterprise in Pakistan, including the civilian government". Political opponents of the existing government would be "screaming for blood", he added, and the military would feel that it had to act against the government.
The U.S. National Intelligence Council warned the George W. Bush White House in August 2008 that SOF raids across the border in Pakistan would threaten the unity of the Pakistani military. A disproportionate percentage of army officers serving in the largely Pashtun tribal areas are Pashtun, the Council observed, and if U.S. commando raids continued beyond a few months, it could provoke large-scale defections from the Pakistani army to the militants.
The intelligence warning came only after Bush had approved a request from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for more latitude in carrying out raids against al Qaeda and Afghan insurgent targets in Pakistan’s tribal area.
The first raid in early September 2008 killed six children, two women and at least 10 innocent villagers who came out of their houses to see what was happening. When the Pakistani government and military responded angrily and threatened to disrupt cooperation with Washington, the raids were terminated.
[…]
3) UN looking into WikiLeaks suspect’s treatment
Associated Press, Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 1:09 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/22/AR2010122203042.html
Hagerstown, Md. – The United Nations says it is looking into a complaint that the Army private suspected of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks has been mistreated in custody.
The UN office for torture issues in Geneva said Wednesday it received a complaint from one of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s supporters alleging that conditions in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., amount to torture. Visitors say he spends at least 23 hours a day alone in a cell.
The Pentagon has denied mistreating Manning. A Marine Corps spokesman says the military is keeping Manning safe, secure and ready for trial.
Manning has not commented publicly on whether he is the source of the leaks.
The UN could ask the United States to stop any violations it finds.
4) After Freeze, Settlement Building Booms in Israel
Ethan Bronner, New York Times, December 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/world/middleeast/23settle.html
Jerusalem – In the three months since Israel ended its settlement construction freeze in the West Bank, causing the Palestinians to withdraw from peace talks, a settlement building boom has begun, especially in more remote communities that are least likely to be part of Israel after any two-state peace deal.
This means that if negotiations ever get back on track, there will be thousands more Israeli settlers who will have to relocate into Israel, posing new dilemmas on how to accommodate them while creating a Palestinian state on the land where many of them are living now.
In addition to West Bank settlement-building, construction for predominantly Jewish housing in East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to make their future capital, has been growing rapidly after a break of half a year, with hundreds of units approved and thousands more planned.
On a tour of West Bank construction sites, Dror Etkes, an anti-settlement advocate who has spent the last nine years chronicling their growth, said he doubted whether there had been such a burst in settlement construction in at least a decade.
Hagit Ofran, a settlement opponent who monitors their growth for Peace Now, said the same: "We can say firmly that this is the most active period in many years." She said there were 2,000 housing units being built now, and a total of 13,000 in the pipeline that do not require additional permits. In each of the last three years, about 3,000 units have been built.
[…] The Palestinians are also planning to submit to the United Nations Security Council a resolution condemning settlement construction.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that since the 10-month building moratorium ended in September, the government has been sticking to building in existing settlements only, and has not expropriated more land for settlements. The construction going on now, he said, "will not in any way change the final map of peace."
Settlement opponents disagree, saying that the larger the settler population, the more resources – water, roads, security – will be needed for them and the harder it will be to get Israelis to agree to a Palestinian state. Moreover, much of the new building is deep in the West Bank.
Ir Amim, an Israeli advocacy group devoted to sharing Jerusalem, has been watching the growth of Israeli building in East Jerusalem with alarm.
"These areas are the only ones for Palestinians to build, but instead there are Jewish projects planned," said Yudith Oppenheimer, executive director of the group, on a tour of East Jerusalem areas where Jewish housing is due to expand, leaving little room for any border. "The Israeli government says it is not creating anything new or changing the status quo. But by filling in these gaps and stretching the edges of Jewish neighborhoods, Israel is surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods and making any future border impossible."
[…]
5) Aid groups say they, not Hamas, are thwarted by Israeli restrictions on Gaza
Janine Zacharia, Washington Post, Monday, December 20, 2010; 10:42 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/20/AR2010122004661.html
Gaza City – Despite recent moves by Israel to ease construction in the Gaza Strip, restrictions on building materials are hampering international humanitarian efforts while doing little to impede the Hamas-led government they are designed to weaken, aid and nongovernmental groups say.
Israel says the limits on cement and other imports are intended to prevent misuse by Hamas. But the Islamist militant group has ready access to construction materials through smuggling tunnels along the border with Egypt.
Instead, aid groups say, Israeli bureaucracy and bottlenecks at border crossings are snarling the delivery of materials to international relief organizations struggling to build much-needed housing, schools and infrastructure projects.
"The United Nations, who have a responsibility to help, we’re the ones that are held up," John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s Gaza operations, said in an interview. "We’re held up from building schools. We’re held up from our other infrastructure projects, from the housing people need. And, yet, for the other parts of society here – be that either those with ulterior agendas or people who just have money – they can get on with it."
[…] Thousands of homes damaged in a punishing three-week war with Israel in 2008-2009 are yet to be rebuilt. Millions of liters of raw sewage are spilling into the Mediterranean Sea because treatment plants remain in disrepair. And experts say Gaza’s rapidly growing population of 1.5 million could run out of fresh drinking water by 2015 if the infrastructure is not overhauled.
The number of internationally funded aid projects authorized by Israel increased from 14 before the May naval raid to 78 by June. But Ging says that’s only a fraction of what Gaza’s heavily aid-dependent population needs. The 27 U.N. projects that have been approved make up just 7 percent of the relief agency’s construction plans. Many of the projects that have been approved cannot be completed on time because of the problems getting materials, he added.
[…] Securing Israeli approval of projects requires weeks or even months of negotiations and the sign-off of up to six Israeli agencies, according to Gisha, an Israeli nongovernmental group that tracks movement and access problems between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
"Hundreds of hours of staff time and millions of dollars are spent on documenting each nut and bolt – as if we were supervising the transfer of highly specialized weapons, and despite the fact that steel, concrete and gravel enter Gaza quite freely via the tunnels," said Sari Bashi, Gisha’s executive director.
[…] Over the past two months, about half of the 925 trucks of supplies scheduled to enter Gaza for U.N. projects actually did, according to the U.N. relief agency, Gaza’s largest outside donor.
Since Israel’s move in June to facilitate more international construction, the agency has completed two projects – a sewage pumping station and 151 housing units – a fraction of the 10,000 units it seeks to build.
But Ging says his main concern is schools. Israel has approved six out of 100 the agency says it needs to build to accommodate 40,000 eligible children. "Overcrowded classrooms, tens of thousands of children failing academically, all of these things, they have long-term detrimental consequences," he said. "We don’t have the luxury to deal with that after the peace process."
[…]
6) Indefinite Detention Possible for Suspects at Guantanamo Bay
Peter Finn and Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post, December 22, 2010; A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122105523_pf.html
The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to challenge the basis for continued incarceration, U.S. officials said.
The administration has long signaled that the use of what the administration calls prolonged detention, preferably at a facility in the United States, was one element of its plan to close Guantanamo. An interagency task force found that 48 of the 174 detainees remaining at the facility would have to be held in such conditions.
"We have a plan to close Guantanamo, and this detainee review process is one element," said an administration official who discussed the order on the condition of anonymity because it has yet to reach the president.
However, almost every part of the administration’s plan to close Guantanamo is on hold, and it could be crippled this week if Congress bans the transfer of detainees to the United States for trial and sets up steep hurdles to the repatriation or resettlement in third countries of others.
[…] Some civil liberties groups oppose any form of indefinite detention, even with a built-in mechanism to challenge incarceration.
"Indefinite detention without charge or trial is wrong, whether it comes from Congress or the president’s pen," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office. "Our Constitution requires that we charge and prosecute people who are accused of crimes. You cannot sell an indefinite detention scheme by attaching a few due-process baubles and expect that to restore the rule of law."
[…]
Israel/Palestine
7) ‘Israeli War Crimes’ signs to go on Metro buses
Allen Schauffler, King 5 News, December 21, 2010
http://www.king5.com/news/local/Israeli-War-Crimes-signs-to-go-on-Metro-buses-112108154.html
Seattle – "Israeli War Crimes," the enormous advertisement reads. "Your tax dollars at work."
To the right of the image is a group of children – one little boy stares out at the viewer, the others gawk at a demolished building, all rebar and crumbled concrete.
It’s an ad you’ll be seeing soon on a handful of Metro buses in downtown Seattle.
A group calling itself the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has paid King County $1,794 so that 12 buses will carry that message around town, starting two days after Christmas. That’s December 27: the two-year anniversary of Israeli attacks on Gaza, aimed at stopping rocket attacks and weapons smuggling.
Ed Mast, a Seattle man who is a spokesperson for the group, says it’s not meant to be an anti-Israel message, but a message designed to generate discussion and awareness.
"I wouldn’t say it’s an anti-Israel message any more than any complaint about a country is anti-that country. We would like Israel to stop violating human rights. We would like Israel to give equal rights to its Palestinian citizens and its Palestinian subjects who live under occupation," said Mast.
[…]
Iran
8) GOP figures criticize Obama’s Iran policy in rally for controversial exile group
Edward Cody, Washington Post, Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 3:37 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/22/AR2010122203666.html
Paris – A group of prominent U.S. Republicans associated with homeland security told a forum of cheering Iranian exiles here Wednesday that President Obama’s policy toward Iran amounts to futile appeasement that will never persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear projects.
The Americans – former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge, former White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend and former attorney general Michael Mukasey – demanded that Obama instead take the controversial Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK) opposition group off the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations and incorporate it into efforts to overturn the mullah-led government in Tehran.
"Appeasement of dictators leads to war, destruction and the loss of human lives," Giuliani declared. "For your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just really a disgrace."
The four GOP figures appeared at a rally organized by the French Committee for a Democratic Iran, a pressure group formed to support MEK.
Their crowd-pleasing appeals, they said, reflected growing bipartisan sentiment in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere that the 13-year-old terrorist designation of the Paris-based dissident group should be ended because it is unfounded and has not made the Iranian government easier to deal with or halt its nuclear program. In addition, they noted, a Washington federal appeals court in July ordered Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to review the listing and cast doubt on some of the information brought forward to support it.
The group, the largest and most active Iranian exile organization, was added to the list in 1997 as part of a Clinton administration effort to reach out to Tehran. It has been maintained since then apparently to avoid antagonizing the Iranian leadership while the United States fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The accusations against Obama, while consonant with other conservative statements on the matter, seemed particularly starkly worded. "If the United States truly wants to put pressure on the Iranian regime, it takes more than talk and it takes more than sanctions," Townsend declared, without saying what should be done.
[…] All four speakers equated the exile group with the Iranian opposition, saying it must be supported to help get rid of the government headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and overseen by a committee of senior Shiite Muslim scholars. Only then, they said, can the world be certain that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons and threaten the Middle East.
[…] Reports from Iran have noted, however, that the outpouring of opposition after last year’s contested election revolved around unsuccessful presidential candidates who live in Iran and not the Paris-based MEK. The exiles lost much of their following in the country after their armed faction, which was based in Iraq, functioned as a division of the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Colombia
9) US helped subvert Colombia’s congress on military ‘escalation’ deal, cable shows
Stephen C. Webster, Raw Story, Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/cablegate-helped-colombia-avoid-congressional-approval-military-installation/
A year before the United States and Colombia announced an enhanced military cooperation agreement, the US embassy in Bogotá was working with the administration of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez to dodge congressional approval of the deal, which saw US troops stationed in the nation and inflamed regional tensions.
The revelation was made in a confidential US diplomatic cable composed in Nov. 2008, given to secrets outlet WikiLeaks and republished on Dec. 18. It was forwarded with priority to US embassies in Brasilia, Caracas, Lima, Panama, Quito and to officials in Washington, DC and the US Southern Command.
The document specified that by renaming the multilateral agreement, "a major escalation in US engagement" would become "simply an extension of our existing cooperation."
The deal to station US troops in Colombia was announced in the summer of 2009 and finalized in October. Then-President Álvaro Uribe Vélez has since been succeeded by Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s former secretary of defense, who took office in August.
Amid negotiations with US officials, the Colombian administration issued a counter-proposal which the US embassy in Bogotá analyzed to make recommendations for Washington strategists. The document it produced noted that the administration wanted to avoid "use of the word’ base’" in describing US installations. They also insisted upon finding a way to "place the agreement under the umbrella of existing bilateral and multilateral accords to avoid the need for Colombian congressional approval."
In order to do that, Colombian officials engaged in wordplay, renaming a US proposal for a "Defense Cooperation Agreement" to the much-less descriptive "Supplemental Agreement for Cooperation and Technical Assistance." The rephrasing shows that both US and Colombian officials knew their deal would not fall within the boundaries of standing agreements without significant alterations to its framing.
The US embassy at Bogotá concurred with the suggested changes, noting that a less descriptive title would shift the troop deal from "a major escalation in US engagement" to "simply an extension of our existing cooperation."
"[Tying] the agreement to existing bilateral and multilateral agreements does not impact U.S. interests and is important to the GOC’s capacity to conclude an accord. If we can get the access and authorities we need by changing the title, we recommend changing the title."
Sure enough, it worked: Colombia’s defense minister said in July, 2009 that no congressional approval was needed for the administration to allow foreign troops.
[…] [In August of this year, the Colombian constitutional court ruled that the agreement was unconstitutional because it had not been approved by the Colombian Congress. The Colombian government has since indicated that it does not intend to push forward the deal – JFP.]
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