Why Is Britain Arming Far-Right Militias?

By Johann Hari
From: johannhari.com

March 24th, 2008

Courtesy Of: UKwatch

On the website of the British Foreign Office, a small photograph recently appeared. It shows Kim Howells, our Foreign Office minister, looking into the camera, smiling, as he is surrounded by gun-yielding men accused of murder. He had not been taken hostage. No: he was there to represent a government that gives these men money and military aid.

By tracing the story of this photograph, we can trace the worst aspects of British foreign policy – and find clues to why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have crashed into their current bloody dead-end.

Howells was in Colombia, a country locked in one of the worst civil wars of the past century. It began over forty years ago, when parts of the hungry, mixed-race majority began to fight against the fact that a tiny white land-owning elite held virtually all the country’s wealth. Since then, it has hardened into a conflict between two gnarled human rights-abusing wings.

To the left, there is a slew of guerrilla groups – most prominently the FARC and the ELN – who fund themselves by kidnapping, extortion, recruiting child soldiers and ‘taxing’ drug-producers.
To the right, there is the Colombian government and the right-wing paramilitary death-squads it has unleashed against any community of civilians suspected of leftish sympathies, or of challenging the elite. That’s why to be a trade unionist in Colombia – organising for better wages and working conditions for your colleagues – is to carry a tombstone on your back: more than 3000 have been assassinated since 1986, more than in the rest of the world combined.

Between them, these violent wings have killed more than 30,000 people and driven three million people from their homes.

And Howells – our representative – was posing with some of the worst abusers. He was huddled with the High Mountain Brigades, who Amnesty International says have been involved in hunting down and murdering trade unionists. Standing next to him was General Mario Montoya, who is so densely linked to paramilitary death-squads that even the US Congress has cut off chunks of his funding.

Here’s what our taxes and support deliver to ordinary Colombians. On January 10th, at 10.30am, Colombian soldiers wearing balaclavas burst into the house of Rosa Maria Zapata house, a 56 year old indigenous woman. When the soldiers pointed their guns at her and barked that they wanted to know where the guerrillas were, she screamed back that she didn’t know; she doesn’t know any guerrillas. They told her she was hiding weapons for the FARC. They told her they knew. She howled and protested. So they started searching – and a moment later she heard gunfire. The police announced they had killed the guerrilla. She went running – and found her severely disabled 22-year old son dead.

The British pro-peace group ‘Justice for Colombia’ believes these soldiers received British training. They have documented 36 other civilians murdered by British-trained forces in a six-month period, and they are asking the Foreign Office to finally outline exactly where our money goes – rather than hiding behind the shroud of National Security.

Worse, we are funding a military that is so densely enmeshed with the union-slaying paramilitaries that they are known as the “sixth brigade” of the Colombian armed forces. The relationship was symbolised in a famous football game in the 1990s. The local community in Cacarica were made to gather at the local football field to watch a match. It sounds touching. But the head of the local left-leaning community leader, Marino Lopez, was used as the ball, after being hacked from his body with a chainsaw. Uribe is now offering a ‘peace deal’ to the right-wing paras like this that allows them to escape proportionate punishment, but offers no such deal to the left.

So how has Howells responded? Easily: he has called his critics supporters of terrorism. Last week, in the House of Commons, he declared, “This has all been created by the organisation ‘Justice for Colombia’, which supports FARC, a band of gangsters and drug smugglers.” He also announced that the FARC is responsible for “most” of the murders in Colombia.

Both were straightforward repetitions of the Colombian far right propaganda line. In reality, ‘Justice For Colombia’ – which is supported by more than half of all Labour MPs – is opposed to all violence within Colombia. And the FARC – while unequivocally disgusting – are responsible for far fewer murders than the government and right-wing death-squads, according to every major study.

So how did this happen? How did a minister in a Labour government end up defending a hard-right Colombian regime?

The British government says they have become the second biggest military donor to Colombia (after the US) because they want to promote human rights there. But if you had a few million pounds to support human rights in that country, the idea you would give it to the High Mountain Brigades is simply surreal. Sure, the government claims to be giving “human rights training” along with their weapons licenses and cash, to “iron out” abuses. But as the historian Mark Curtis explains: “The Colombian military is responsible for its violations not by accident… It is part of a concerted and active policy to nullify the opposition and terrify the general population into further submission.”

No – the explanations for British backing lie elsewhere. The first is a desire to support the United States, because we project our power in the world largely by being a loyal adjunct to American military might. If Britain wasn’t offering these funds, the Bush administration would be alone in the world in backing Uribe, against a Latin America tipping towards the left and urging peace talks with the FARC.

And we are doing it to support the global, unwinnable ‘war on drugs.’ Since Bill Clinton’s Presidency, the US has been spraying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chemical poisons onto the vast tracts of Colombia where the coca leaves essential for cocaine production are grown. All plants and trees die in their wake. Birth defects and cancer rates are rising. Some of the most precious biodiversity on earth is destroyed. And the effect on drug production? It simply moves to another area.

(It is only the drug-producing areas controlled by the FARC that have been fumigated. The areas in the North, controlled by the right, remain untouched.)

Drug production is so profitable and so popular it cannot be fumigated off the face of the real world. Drug prohibition hands great swathes of the Colombian economy to armed criminal gangs, from the FARC to the right. It ensures they will always have enough money to buy enough guns to outshoot the government and preserve their patches of territory.

There is another way. More and more Colombians believe it is only by brining drugs into the legal economy – where they can be controlled and taxed – that the guerrillas and paramilitaries can be stripped of their cash-flow, and the Colombian state slowly unified. The people arguing for this are wildly diverse: from the current Conservative Interior Minister, Carlos Holguin, to the former Attorney General Gustavo de Greiff who busted the notorious Medelin drug cartel, to the coutnry’s most popular singer, Juan Esteban Aristizabal. They all believe an end to drug prohibition is the only long-term solution to the civil war. Yet Britain demands the opposite.

There is one more crucial reason why we are supporting the Colombian military. The British oil firm BP controls half of Columbia’s petrol output. The historian Mark Curtis argues the UK is keen to ensure resources “remain in the correct hands” – that is, “our” hands. In a highly unequal country angry at seeing its resources siphoned off by foreigners, that means supporting an elite who are willing to use violence to keep the majority in their place.

These three factors can help us to understand why the military actions thousands of miles away from the jungles of Colombia – in Afghanistan and Iraq – have gone so wrong. As in Colombia, we got in, in large part, out of loyalty to the US: Tony Blair bragged he had “not disagreed with the US on a major issue” in his whole time in office.

We have misgoverned Afghanistan so badly because we are inflicting on the country the same ‘war on drugs’ we have wished on Colombia. If we turned up in any country on earth and announced we were there to destroy 40 percent of their economy, the people would fight back.

The fact that the 40 percent consists of opium fields makes no difference to dirt-poor farmers. This is why we are losing Southern Afghanistan even to the hated Taliban.

And the US-UK government has misgoverned Iraq so catastrophically because – as in Colombia – it was primarily driven by a desire to ensure that control of the country’s resources went to The Right People. The protection of the Oil Ministry, while Baghdad’s museums and hospitals and universities were looted and burned all around it, is only the most bleak symbol of this.

The image of Kim Howells squatting with a unit who have tortured and butchered trade unionists can be seen as a Rosetta Stone for the dark side of our foreign policy. It is a reminder that, if we want to turn Britain into a force for human rights in the world, we have to campaign long and hard to turn much of it around. If we don’t, it will end with more women like Rosa Maria Zapata, clutching her dead disabled son and asking why.