COLOMBIA’S WOMEN: VICTIMS OF A COERCIVE “PEACE”

Colombia’s Women: Victims of a Coercive “Peace”

An intercepted communication from 2008, between FARC terrorist ‘Gentil Duarte’ and then FARC leader ‘Mono Jojoy’ illustrates the brutality the leadership endorses: “In exchange for punishment, four girls were forced to have sex with ‘Canaguaro’, who has syphilis,” he reported. “All the girls are infected.”

By Lia Fowler*

December 2 de 2015

In 2009, FARC narco-terrorists slaughtered 11 members of the Awa indigenous community in southwestern Colombia, cutting off their fingers and slitting their throats, for refusing to deliver food to a FARC camp. But for two victims, that wasn’t punishment enough: Omaira Arias, 20, and Blanca Patricia Guango, 19, were pregnant. The terrorists slit their bellies and threw their live babies to a pack of dogs before killing the women.

In the FARC’s history of terror, its systematic violence against women and their children is both the most atrocious and least acknowledged by the international community. So it is not surprising that this month, even as the UN launched its campaign for the elimination of violence against women, the UN Security Council pledged its support for a peace process between the FARC and the Colombian government that would result in impunity for all these crimes and political power for the FARC.

Physical, sexual and psychological abuse have been standard practice for this terrorist group, which from the top down treats women and children as disposable objects.

The rape of civilian women by FARC, for example, has been commonplace for decades. Because victims live mainly in remote villages, however, most incidents go unreported. The scant statistics, which the Attorney General’s Office began compiling just this year, documented 428 cases of civilian women and 118 girls, between the ages of 4 and 17, raped by FARC terrorists.

One woman who provided testimony – as reported in the weekly Semana – was six months pregnant when four FARC members broke into her home, beat her husband with rifles, and raped her — forcing her husband and 10-year-old son to watch. Then they shot her husband in the face. She hemorrhaged and lost her baby.

Then there are the mothers of the estimated 20,000 children, according to government statistics, that have been taken by force to FARC camps. One survivor recounts that the FARC shot her father, then raped and killed her mother, all because they resisted allowing the FARC to take one of their daughters to the camps.

The girls in the FARC’s camps — whose average age is under 13, according to UNICEF — are subjected to daily horrors. Rescued children describe a life of sexual slavery, forced abortions, and forced removal of children from their mothers — when they are allowed to carry them to term. Rescued children often have sexually transmitted diseases.

The fate of those girls is unknown; but, as of earlier this year, ‘Gentil Duarte’ has been enjoying the lavish

accommodations of the FARC’s negotiation team in Havana. If the agreement goes through, he and his comrades will never serve a day in jail. And though the deal calls for apologies to the victims, the FARC is clearly not sorry. In televised interviews, FARC leader Timochenko stated: “When you ask forgiveness, it’s because you regret what you have done, and I don’t regret having done what I have.” More callously, he asked: “What victims? Tell me, please?”

To avoid jail, the FARC will have to “confess” their crimes. But confession without contrition is called bragging — so it will just be one more aggression the victims will have to endure.

“The danger of amnesties is impunity and the mocking of victims,” said Mark Drumbl, Director of the Transnational Law Institute at Washington and Lee University, and author of “Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law.” He added that the absence of true transitional justice – one that would include imprisonment and actual apologies and reparations — “defines a crime by the status of the perpetrator, rather than by the harm inflicted on the victim.”

So it is in Colombia. The Santos government is preoccupied with the “dignity” of the terrorists, bending over backward to legitimize them legally and politically. Conversely, on the high horse of “forgiveness” it has promoted a rhetoric of “non-vindictiveness” that is coercive to all victims – and especially so for victims of sexual violence. Santos himself has publicly denigrated anyone who opposes impunity – 81 percent of the population per the latest Gallup poll — labeling them “enemies of peace”, and publicly likening them to “dogs.”

Yet the U.S. and the world are all-in on this coercive “peace” that empowers the victimizers and oppresses the victims. U.S. Envoy Bernard Aronson even thought it funny to joke with these notorious victimizers of women about beauty queens, quipping at his first meeting with the FARC, “I know you were hoping for Miss Universe, but you’ll have to settle for me.” Proud of his rapport with the terrorists, he told the Wall Street Journal that they roared with laughter.

Colombia’s women aren’t laughing, Bernie.