DAVID BARNWELL,
A chara, - The European Union recently vetoed a move to designate the Colombian FARC as a terrorist organisation. Perhaps details of FARC's activities have yet to reach Brussels, but as a regular visitor to Colombia I believe I can tell the EU a little about it. FARC is an organisation of mass murderers; witness its attack on a church in Bojaya just a few days ago - as many as 100 killed. The UN has dubbed this a war crime. There is no shortage of war crimes on a smaller scale - examples come every week. The most recent was the May 2nd murder of a 14 year-old boy. FARC then booby-trapped this poor boy's body in order to kill police or military who might come to investigate.
If mass murder does not convince the EU, how about kidnapping? Should I take it that the European Union has never heard of the recent kidnapping of Green Party presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, or last month's abduction by FARC of Governor Gaviria of Antioquia province, kidnapped as he led a peace march near FARC territory? How about former Culture Minister Consuelo Araujo, kidnapped by FARC and shot in the head when she became too exhausted to trek through the jungle with her captors?
But if the EU is not too worried about attacks on democratic elected officials, maybe it can at least think of the suffering poor of Colombia. What about the nine peasants taken out and shot by FARC a couple of weeks ago because their trade union had endorsed FARC's enemy, Alvaro Uribe, in the presidential election? Or has Brussels never heard of Jimmy Guauna, leader of one of the "peace islands", or neutral villages, that the rural poor have tried to establish? When FARC came to attack the police barracks in Guauna's village he walked towards them waving a white flag and shouting that his village wanted to take no side in the war. The FARC's response was a bullet in Guauna's throat.
Colombia is not Pinochet's Chile. The government of Colombia, with all its imperfections, is democratically elected - indeed the country will shortly again go to the polls. Most of the Colombian left rejects FARC as gangsters for whom drugs and conflict have become a business. Colombian leftists often point out that revolutionaries who claim to fight for human dignity and social progress have obligations not to betray these values through their own actions.
The pseudo-leftist FARC death squads have reneged on this duty in countless cases. Unique among guerrilla armies, FARC does not have to nurture popular support - it can continue its war indefinitely because the drug business, rather than the populace, is the sea in which it swims. The drugs provide the weapons, the FARC and its kindred provide the bodies. Unfortunately, the European Union's posture provides nothing but more despair for the suffering people of Colombia. - Is mise,
DAVID BARNWELL,
Serpentine Avenue,
Dublin 4.