Just Foreign Policy News
April 2, 2010
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Urge Congress to Talk About the Human Cost of War
In the next few weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to approve $33 billion more for war and occupation in Afghanistan. Urge your representatives in Congress to use this opportunity to shine a spotlight on the human cost of continuing war and occupation.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/humancost
Call Congress the Week of April 12 Against the War in Afghanistan
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PBS Frontline: The Quake
What can be done now – and who will do it?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/haiti/
IJDH: Aid Groups Can Do Better in Haiti
With video and a petition, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti reaches out to the big aid groups, urging them to do better.
http://www.change.org/
Highlights of the Afghanistan Debate
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/video/housedebate
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) China announced that President Hu Jintao will attend a nuclear security summit this month in Washington, the Washington Post reports. China’s decision to attend could help the Obama administration win China’s support for more sanctions on Iran, and put pressure on the U.S. Treasury Department not to declare China a currency manipulator in a report due April 15. [This comes close to suggesting a quid pro quo in which the U.S. agrees not to declare China a currency manipulator in exchange for Chinese support for Iran sanctions at the UN – a possibility raised by Juan Cole on his blog this morning: "It may be that Obama will let the Chinese revaluation issue slide in order to get better cooperation on increased sanctions. If so, it would be a bad deal. Reviving US industries through more competitive exports is light years more important than ratcheting up sanctions on Iran, especially since the kind of sanctions that can likely get through the Security Council will be powerless to deter Iran’s nuclear enrichment program." http://www.juancole.com/2010/04/obama-phones-hu-over-iran-sanctions.html – JFP]
2) The IMF has made some positive changes in their published work on inflation and capital controls, writes Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian. But for the most part these changes have not translated into changing conditions attached to their lending. The IMF has continued with a long-held double standard: it supports counter-cyclical policies – ie expansionary fiscal and monetary policies during a downturn – for the high-income countries, but not so much for low and middle-income countries. The key problem is that the IMF is still run by "special interests" – the G7 finance ministries, like the US Treasury department, which in turn are run by Wall Street and the European banks.
3) Afghan President Karzai accused the West of wanting "puppet government" in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reports.
4) A new study says soldiers who acknowledged killing somebody in combat were more likely to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, USA Today reports. Of the nearly 2 million veterans, 5% to 20% have some symptoms of post-traumatic stress, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [According to the numbers Veterans for Common Sense obtained from the VA under FOIA, 12.4% (143,530) of the 1.16 million Iraq/Afghanistan vets eligible for VA have been treated at the VA for PTSD – JFP.]
5) The deaths of five GIs assigned to Fort Hood this year have been confirmed as suicides, with another suspected of killing himself, the San Antonio Express-News reports. The Army set a record for suicides last year, with 160 possible cases among active-duty GIs, 140 of which were confirmed.
6) The ACLU says more than 800 families have made claims against the US for damages for civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of which were denied under the "combat exemption" clause to the Foreign Claims Act, AFP reports. The ACLU urged the Obama Administration "to reform the broken civilian compensation program."
7) Member countries of the International Criminal Court are considering extending the jurisdiction of the ICC to cover the crime of aggression, warns Stephen Rademaker in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Rademaker notes that several countries where the U.S. has used force in the last two decades are now members of the ICC. [Rademaker was an assistant secretary of state in the Bush Administration when it invaded Iraq in flagrant violation of the UN Charter – JFP.]
Israel/Palestine
8) Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, asked the international community to intervene to prevent an escalation of hostilities between Israel and Gaza, the Washington Post reports. Israel is now allowing essential foods and humanitarian supplies into Gaza and a few truckloads of Gaza-grown flowers per week have been allowed out for export. The main power plant in Gaza still runs at a little less than half capacity because of limited fuel supplies, leaving rolling blackouts of eight to 12 hours per day throughout the Strip. Israeli military operations around Gaza remain routine, the Post says.
Haiti
9) More than 30 Haitians who boarded U.S.-bound planes without paperwork in evacuations after the earthquake were freed from immigration detention centers after spending about two months behind bars, AP reports. A total of 65 Haitians had been detained in Florida and other states. It’s not immediately clear what will happen to the rest of the detainees, AP says.
Colombia
10) A court in Bogota sentenced a former paramilitary commander to 30 years in prison for the 2001 murders of two trade unionists, EFE reports. Colombia remains the world’s most dangerous country for members of organized labor, the CUT labor federation said last month. More than 40 labor activists were killed in Colombia in 2009 and 2,700 have been slain since 1986, according to the CUT. The vast majority of those killings have gone unpunished.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) President Hu Jintao of China to attend nuclear summit in Washington
Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, Friday, April 2, 2010; A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/01/AR2010040100073.html
Beijing – China announced Thursday that President Hu Jintao will attend a nuclear security summit this month in Washington, in what analysts described as a sign that the government is trying to put relations with the United States back on track after months of tension.
The Beijing government had been conspicuously quiet about its intentions regarding the April 12-13 summit. Many speculated that China would dispatch a lower-level delegation to show its displeasure with Washington over a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan and President Obama’s recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.
But China’s decision to attend, announced by the Foreign Ministry, could help alleviate at least some tensions. That, in turn, could help the Obama administration win China’s support for more sanctions on Iran, which Beijing has long resisted.
The decision also would appear to put pressure on the U.S. Treasury Department not to declare China a currency manipulator in a report due April 15.
For Hu to visit, Chinese officials would probably have wanted assurances that he would not be embarrassed by the report on the heels of his visit, China experts said.
[…]
2) Can the IMF Reform When It’s Run By the Banks?
Mark Weisbrot, Guardian, Thursday 1 April 2010 23.00 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/01/imf-wall-street-banks
Over the past year or two the IMF has made some positive changes in policy and in their published work, some of which challenges the conventional wisdom among central banks and even the past practice of the IMF itself. The fund, which prior to the current decade was one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world, has presided over a number of economic disasters and was widely seen – at least in the low-and middle-income countries to which it has lent for the past four decades – as generally doing more harm than good. Now there is debate over how much it has changed, and what these changes mean for the IMF itself and its role in the global economy going forward.
First, the good news: last year the IMF created some $283bn of its reserve currency, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), available for borrowing by its 186 member countries. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be done in a world economic downturn. It is similar to the "quantitative easing" – ie creating money – that the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have done during the recession. Although the IMF is not a world central bank, in this case it was acting as one, in a positive way. And the SDRs were made available to member countries without any conditions attached – something the IMF has never done before. Unfortunately, the SDRs were allocated according to each country’s IMF quota, which meant that the high-income countries got the bulk of the money. And of course most of the low-income countries can’t afford to take on more debt. Nonetheless, this was a positive step for the IMF toward developing countries.
The IMF has also recently published some interesting papers which indicate a re-consideration of their views on some important policy issues. The first, entitled Rethinking Macroeconomics (pdf), was co-authored by the IMF’s chief economist Olivier Blanchard and released on 12 February. In this paper the authors question a number of orthodoxies: is the 2% inflation target that is common among central banks too low? Should central banks in some countries target the exchange rate? This kind of re-thinking could lead to governments having more room to pursue policies that lead to higher employment.
The second paper, Capital Inflows: The Role of Controls, is even more important. In this paper the authors suggest that government controls on capital inflows may help countries be less vulnerable to economic crises. Recall that in the 1990s the IMF, together with the US Treasury department, pressured Asian countries such as Indonesia and Thailand to remove restrictions on capital inflows. This was a major contributor to the Asian financial and economic crisis of the late 1990s, which was brought on by a sharp reversal of the large capital inflows that came in after this de-regulation. The IMF has generally favoured removing restrictions on capital flows, despite the fact that there has never been much empirical evidence in favor of such de-regulation.
These papers indicate perhaps an unprecedented level of rethinking at an institution that has represented a conservative orthodoxy for decades. The question is, how much can we expect it to lead to a change in the IMF’s policies – most importantly, the conditions it attaches to lending?
This is where the bad news comes in. In the last few years, the IMF has continued with a long-held double standard: it supports counter-cyclical policies – ie expansionary fiscal and monetary policies during a downturn – for the high-income countries, but not so much for low and middle-income countries. In a study of 41 countries that had current agreements with the IMF in 2009, we found that 31 of these agreements had involved tightening either fiscal or monetary policy, or both, during a downturn. This contrasts sharply with what the IMF recommends for the rich countries like the US, which is running very large budget deficits and the Fed is holding policy interest rates at near-zero, and has created hundreds of billions of dollars in order to counter-act the recession (although our own stimulus has still been much too small relative to the fall-off in private demand; hence the loss of 8.5 million jobs and the bleak employment picture for years to come.)
Some of the IMF-sponsored macroeconomic policies that have provoked so much ire in the past continue today. The fund is currently squeezing Ukraine, for example, to reduce its spending, and suspended its disbursement of funds to the government in order to force budget tightening. This despite the fact that Ukraine’s economy shrank by about 15% last year, and its public debt was only 10.6% of GDP. A country in this situation should be able to borrow as needed to stimulate the economy, and reduce its deficit after it has accomplished a robust recovery. In nearby Latvia, the IMF and European Commission are lending with conditions that have already resulted in the worst cyclical downturn on record, and it is not clear when or how fast the economy will eventually recover.
It also remains to be seen whether the IMF will follow through and change its actual policy on capital controls. If it were serious, it could actually help countries design and implement such policies successfully. But the fund’s agreement last year with Ukraine, a country that seems to have successfully used capital controls during the downturn, called for these to be phased out.
Most bad policies result from either the power of special interests or ideologically driven mistakes. The fund appears to be gradually rethinking some of its ideologically driven mistakes, which is a good thing for the institution – and because it is influential, for the world. But the problem is that it is still run by "special interests". First, it is controlled by the finance ministries of the high-income countries – principally the US Treasury department. The borrowing countries have practically no say in decision-making; the 2006 changes in voting shares lowered the rich countries’ majority from 52.7% to 52.3%, and proposed changes will take it to 50.9%. No significant change there since 1944.
But there is another obstacle to policy change at the fund that is equally important: within the G7 governments that run the IMF, their finance ministries are also dominated by special interests. This is certainly true of the US treasury department, which has had a disproportionate number of personnel that were previously employed by Goldman-Sachs. To see how influential these corporations are in the US government, we need only look at the "nothing-burger" legislation that Congress is considering for financial reform, despite massive public anger and the financial sector’s well-publicised excesses in the bubble years leading up to the recession. How much change can we expect from the IMF on such key issues of capital controls while Wall Street and European banks still hold sway over the fund’s directors?
3) Karzai rails against foreign presence, accuses West of engineering voter fraud
Joshua Partlow and Scott Wilson, Washington Post, Friday, April 2, 2010; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/01/AR2010040101681.html
Kabul – President Hamid Karzai on Thursday delivered one of his most stinging criticisms to date of the foreign presence in Afghanistan, accusing the West and the United Nations of wanting a "puppet government" and of orchestrating fraud in last year’s election.
Karzai’s comments come just five days after President Obama, in his first visit to Afghanistan as commander in chief, pushed the Afghan president hard in a tense exchange to crack down on his government’s pervasive corruption, ensure independently monitored elections and draw up a clear plan for how to reintegrate defecting Taliban foot soldiers into Afghan society.
Karzai’s criticism provides a new indication of the depth of suspicion and mistrust between the Afghan president and his Western partners, at a time when 30,000 new U.S. troops are flooding into Afghanistan to join the 100,000 foreign troops already there, and the Obama administration is depending on Karzai to help fend off the growing Taliban insurgency. U.S. officials have long been skeptical about his ability to be a reliable partner, and the first four months of his second term have provided little reason for encouragement.
[…]
4) Weight Falls On Soldiers Who’ve Taken Life
Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today, April 1, 2010
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-04-01-Speakes_N.htm
Washington – Army Capt. Grant Speakes had lived through the worst the Iraq war has unleashed: He had heard the screams of a soldier burned to death in a roadside bomb strike, stanched the bleeding of a soldier cut down by a sniper and killed an insurgent himself. He returned home haunted by the memories. While riding in cars, he jumped when other vehicles pulled next to his. He drank too much. One night at his parents’ home, his father, retired lieutenant general Stephen Speakes, found his son sitting awake at 2 a.m., rocking back and forth alone in a chair.
One night he finally crumbled. "My dad had been calling, leaving messages asking why I didn’t return his phone calls," Grant Speakes said. "I just broke down and told him all the stuff I was dealing with. I was crying outside Hooters on the phone in Killeen, Texas. That was a low point for me."
Soldiers such as Grant Speakes, who say they killed enemy troops in combat, are at greater risk of suffering combat stress and having emotional problems, a new study shows.
Those soldiers often pay a profound psychological and emotional toll, according to Shira Maguen, lead author of the study on soldiers and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of nearly 2,800 soldiers surveyed, 40% reported killing or being responsible for somebody’s death in Iraq.
"Those who acknowledged killing somebody in combat were more likely to have PTSD symptoms, anger, relationship problems," said Maguen, a staff psychologist at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Grant Speakes is among tens of thousands of U.S. troops who say they have had some type of combat stress from their service in Iraq or Afghanistan. Of the nearly 2 million veterans, 5% to 20% have some symptoms of post-traumatic stress, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[…]
5) Fort Hood Suicides Are Rising
Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express-News, 04/02/2010 12:00 CDT http://www.mysanantonio.com/military/Fort_Hood_suicides_are_rising.html
Fort Hood has had at least nine questionable deaths among young soldiers in the first three months of 2010, more than half of them confirmed suicides, despite Army efforts to reverse a trend linked to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The San Antonio Express-News found five Fort Hood soldiers died under unknown circumstances in March. Two were confirmed as suicides.
The deaths of five GIs assigned to the post this year have been confirmed as suicides, with another suspected of killing himself.
That’s about half the number for all of 2009, when 11 GIs committed suicide.
Four other deaths this year are unresolved.
Fort Hood, the biggest post in the Army as the year began with 46,500 troops, had a suicide rate of 26 per 100,000 people from 2006 to 2008, far above the civilian rate of 14.06 per 100,000.
[…] The Army set a record for suicides last year, with 160 possible cases among active-duty GIs, 140 of which were confirmed. Eighty-two cases were logged for reservists, with 74 confirmed suicides, as the Army did the bulk of the fighting overseas.
The Army wouldn’t provide an official tally through the end of March. An Army spokesman, George Wright, said a new suicide report with updated figures will be released next Thursday.
Just this week, the Army said it has 263,300 GIs posted in nearly 80 countries, and noted that those numbers have been higher in past years. An Army chart shows 623,326 soldiers have deployed once since 9-11. Another 278,138 have gone twice and 94,516 have pulled three tours.
Pentagon officials, most notably Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, think the high pace of Army operations is driving the suicide spike.
Some soldiers have spent three to four of the past eight years at war, serving up to 15 months. Suicides among active-duty GIs have increased each year since the invasion of Iraq, from 79 in 2003 to 140 in 2008.
[…]
6) 800 Cases Filed on Civilians Killed in US Wars: ACLU
AFP, Thu Apr 1, 10:56 pm ET http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100402/wl_afp/usiraqafghanistanunrestlawsuit_20100402030027
Washington – More than 800 complaints have been filed by families of civilians killed in US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a civil rights watchdog said citing documents made public Thursday.
The 13,000 pages of documents made public by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) include "more than 800 claims for damages by the family members of those killed, including many that were denied," the group said in a statement. The group obtained the documents following a September 2007 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
It said many of the claims were denied under the "combat exemption" clause to the Foreign Claims Act (FCA), "which provides that harm inflicted on residents of foreign countries by US soldiers during combat cannot be compensated under the FCA, even if the victims had no involvement whatsoever in the combat."
Due to the claim denials, "many innocent civilians were not compensated for their harm or were referred to the Commander’s Emergency Response Program for a discretionary condolence payment that is subject to an automatic 2,500-dollar limit per death," the ACLU said. The records "illustrate that innocent civilian victims and their families are still not being appropriately compensated for their losses," said Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney working with the ACLU on the case.
She urged President Barack Obama’s administration "to reform the broken civilian compensation program."
[…]
7) International Criminal Court doesn’t need power over ‘aggression’
Stephen G. Rademaker, Friday, April 2, 2010; A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/01/AR2010040102802.html
[Rademaker, senior counsel at the lobbying firm BGR Government Affairs, was an assistant secretary of state in the Bush Administration from 2002 to 2006.]
The International Criminal Court’s member countries will gather in May in Kampala, Uganda, where they will spend most of their conference considering whether to expand the court’s jurisdiction to include the "crime of aggression." This is a bad idea on many levels.
The ICC was established to be a standing international mechanism to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Eight trials are underway at the court, all arising out of civil wars in Africa. The court has yet to convict a defendant of any of these offenses.
Nor has the ICC ever prosecuted a case arising out of a conflict between states. But this would change quickly if it is granted jurisdiction over aggression, which the United Nations has defined as occurring when one state uses armed force against another in a manner inconsistent with the U.N. Charter.
Proponents say that previous efforts to prevent war, such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the U.N. Charter of 1945, failed because they were toothless. Empower this court to prosecute national leaders who order acts of aggression, they contend, and aggression finally will be deterred.
But the effect would go beyond the court’s 110 members consenting to prosecution of their own leaders for alleged acts of aggression. The ICC would be empowered to prosecute the leaders of any country that commits aggression on the territory of a member. In the future, then, although Russia is not a member, its leaders could be prosecuted for acts of aggression against a member, such as Georgia. Likewise, the leaders of Israel (another non-member) could be prosecuted for future operations on the territory of members such as Jordan.
For the United States, a non-member, there would be implications any time the use of force was contemplated on the territory of a member. To put this in perspective, consider some of the countries where we have used force in the past two decades: Panama, Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan. All are ICC members today.
Washington is confident that it did not commit aggression in those countries. But Washington has always been the sole judge of whether a particular use of force was justified under international law. If the ICC acquires jurisdiction to prosecute aggression, the court would be responsible for deciding whether it agrees, say, that a Manuel Noriega or Slobodan Milosevic provoked U.S. action against him.
Should it disagree with the U.S. judgment, the court would be empowered to prosecute the "perpetrators." Certainly these would include the president, the secretary of defense and other top officials such as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Members of Congress who voted to authorize or fund the operation also would be potential defendants.
The Obama administration took office eager to ease U.S. hostility toward the ICC. But the potential effects of this proposal have prompted the administration to argue against it. At a minimum, U.S. officials have said, a U.N. Security Council finding that aggression occurred should be required before the ICC could act.
With such pleas apparently falling on deaf ears, the administration reportedly is debating whether to seek some sort of compromise in Kampala.
[…]
Israel/Palestine
8) Cease-fire at risk as hostilities rise along Israeli border with Gaza Strip
Janine Zacharia, Washington Post, Friday, April 2, 2010; 1:01 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/02/AR2010040201724.html
Jerusalem – Tensions along the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip have escalated in the past week, threatening a cease-fire with the ruling Hamas movement that has held since Israeli forces waged war in Gaza last year to try to end rocket attacks into Israel.
The Israeli air force early Friday struck at what the military said were a weapons manufacturing site and two arms storage facilities in retaliation for recent Palestinian rocket fire. Last month, nearly 20 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing one person. And last week, two Israeli soldiers were killed in a skirmish along the border with Palestinians who were planting explosives.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, on Friday asked the international community to intervene to prevent an escalation of hostilities. He urged Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip to "coordinate their activities," suggesting that different factions should not unilaterally provoke Israel with rocket attacks.
"If rockets are a response to Israeli aggression, then they are a legal right. But in some cases, if we know we are going to pay a high price for it, for sure this tool should be reconsidered," Ayman Taha, a Hamas spokesman, said in an interview in his office in Gaza on Wednesday.
[…] Egyptian-led efforts to create a national unity government between the Islamist Hamas group and the secular Fatah party have floundered in recent months, weakening Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s ability to negotiate peace as the Obama administration seeks to resume talks to end the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hamas officials have expressed impatience with the inability to reach an accord with Fatah. "We wish to have reconciliation now, not tomorrow," Hamas’s economy minister, Ziad Zaza, said in an interview.
Hamas leaders accused Egypt of failing to represent their point of view in a draft agreement that was meant to bring Hamas and Fatah together after the three-year split. Disputes over whether to abandon violent resistance to Israeli occupation and how to share power continue to divide the factions. A member of Fatah’s Central Committee, Sakhr Bsaiso, secretly visited Gaza last week to try to resolve sticking points. Still, politicians and analysts in Gaza and Ramallah, the seat of Fatah’s power in the West Bank, predicted no quick end to the division.
[…] Israel is now allowing essential foods and humanitarian supplies into Gaza and a few truckloads of Gaza-grown flowers per week have been allowed out for export.
The main power plant in Gaza still runs at a little less than half capacity because of limited fuel supplies, leaving rolling blackouts of eight to 12 hours per day throughout the Strip.
[…] Despite a ban on building materials, there is limited construction with cement blocks made locally from a combination of material brought in from Egypt and recycled gravel and other products scavengers try to collect largely from Jewish settlements that were evacuated in 2005. The hunt can be dangerous – Israeli forces prohibit Palestinian access to these areas and in late March there were two reports of Israeli troops firing toward Palestinians collecting rubble.
While Israel withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005, military operations around the Gaza Strip remain routine. On Thursday, the Israeli navy fired toward Palestinian fishing boats opposite the beachfront Sudaniya neighborhood. Snipers fired toward Palestinian territory near Beit Lahiya, the northern Gaza town close to the border with Israel.
[…]
Haiti
9) 30 Haitians who came to Fla. without visas freed
Jennifer Kay, Associated Press, Thursday, April 1, 2010; 6:39 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/01/AR2010040101507.html
Miami – More than 30 Haitians who boarded U.S.-bound planes without paperwork in frenzied evacuations after the earthquake were freed from immigration detention centers Thursday after spending about two months behind bars, attorneys for the Haitians said.
Some of the Haitians said they boarded U.S. military planes because they were hungry or simply desperate to escape the epic humanitarian crisis. U.S. immigration officials warned Haitians they might be detained if they entered the country illegally, yet the country also suspended deportations after the Jan. 12 quake.
"We knew these Haitians were not about to be deported because of our government’s policy. They didn’t have criminal histories. They had suffered terribly. We just couldn’t figure out why they weren’t being released," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, which worked for the Haitians’ release.
A total of 65 Haitians had been detained in Florida and other states, said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. It’s not immediately clear what will happen to the rest of the detainees.
A story about the detainees was first reported in The New York Times.
[…]
Colombia
10) Colombian Militia Chief Sentenced in Killings of Unionists
EFE, March 31, 2010.
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=354613&CategoryId=12393
Bogota – A court in the Colombian capital sentenced a former paramilitary commander to 30 years in prison for the 2001 murders of two unionists, the Attorney General’s Office said Wednesday.
The AG office said Oscar Jose Ospino was found guilty of first-degree murder, adding that Rodrigo Tovar, alias "Jorge 40," a former top militia chief extradited to the United States, was also implicated in the same slayings.
The office said in a statement that the sentence was handed down for the killings of Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita Amaya, president and vice president, respectively, of the union at U.S.-owned Drummond’s open-cast La Loma coal mine in northern Colombia.
The unionists were killed on March 12, 2001, in a rural area of Cesar province, which borders Venezuela.
The crime was committed by members of the North Bloc of the now-defunct AUC paramilitary federation, which disbanded in 2006 as part of a peace process with the government.
On March 12, 2001, union president Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita Amaya were riding in a Drummond bus carrying some 50 workers when it was intercepted by a group of armed men near the northern Colombian town of Bosconia.
The paramilitaries removed Locarno and Orcasita from the vehicle by force, shot the former to death and took his companion with them to torture and kill later. The man who succeeded Locarno as president of the union, Gustavo Soler, was murdered seven months later.
Also implicated in the murders of Locarno and Orcasita was "Jorge 40," former head of the AUC’s North Bloc who turned himself in in March 2006 to avail himself of the benefits of the Justice and Peace Law, the controversial legislation detailing the process of re-integrating Colombia’s militiamen.
He was subsequently extradited to the United States on drug charges after allegedly refusing to comply with the terms of the Justice and Peace law.
Ospino, a top lieutenant of Tovar’s, had plead guilty to the killings in the pre-trial stage.
Ospino, who went missing after giving up the armed conflict in 2006, was arrested in December 2008 in Venezuela and subsequently deported to Colombia in February 2009.
In July 2007, a U.S. jury acquitted Alabama-based Drummond, which had been accused of giving financial and other support to the right-wing militias that perpetrated the crimes, of liability for the murders of the three union leaders.
Some 31,000 members of the AUC – which was formed to fight leftist guerrillas but turned into a drug-running crime mob that routinely killed mayors, city council members, university professors, labor leaders and journalists that it deemed leftist – demobilized between the end of 2003 and mid-2006 as part of a peace process with President Alvaro Uribe’s government.
Colombia remains the world’s most dangerous country for members of organized labor, the CUT labor federation said early last month in the northwestern city of Medellin.
More than 40 labor activists were killed in Colombia in 2009 and 2,700 have been slain since 1986, according to the CUT. The vast majority of those killings have gone unpunished.
–
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
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