Reports of illegal Colombian army killings up - UN

By Hugh Bronstein
BOGOTA
March 15

Colombia's army is increasingly being accused of killing civilians and passing the bodies off as dead leftist rebels to cover it up, according to an annual U.N. human rights report released on Thursday.

U.N. investigators heard more allegations last year than they did in 2005 of extrajudicial executions attributed to soldiers who reported such incidents as deaths of guerrillas or members of other armed groups in combat, the report said.

"In many cases, three common elements were identified," it said. "The presentation of civilian victims as dead in combat, the alteration of the scene of the crime by its authors, and investigation of the facts by the military criminal justice system."

Human rights groups say such crimes would be better investigated by the independent civil justice system.

"This very serious violation is not limited to a single military unit," said the report, which included no figures or statistics. "It affects various units throughout the national territory."

The government responded to the report with a statement saying the army was increasing human rights safeguards. It said extrajudicial killings by soldiers are rigorously prosecuted.

Guerrillas have been fighting the Colombian state since the 1960s. In the 1980s landowners formed right-wing paramilitary militias to protect their property.

Since the late 1990s both armed groups have been locked in a war over lucrative cocaine-producing land in which thousands of civilians are killed or displaced every year. Colombia is the world's top exporter of the drug.

More than 31,000 paramilitaries have turned in their guns under a deal reached with President Alvaro Uribe offering them benefits including reduced prison terms for crimes such as torture and massacre.

The report said that paramilitaries have not turned over children who fought in their ranks, keeping them from being rehabilitated, and that many mid-level paramilitary commanders have formed new crime gangs.

"The structures of paramilitarism appear less visible and more fragmented, which makes it more difficult to combat them," it said.

Uribe remains popular despite a scandal in which eight of his congressional allies and his former intelligence chief have been arrested for colluding with the paramilitaries.