Unfortunately, this intricate mesh of international law rules and mechanisms has been utterly insufficient to curb the escalating humanitarian crisis growing out of the armed conflict in Colombia. In its Annual Report, submitted to the OAS General Assembly on April 16, 2001, the Inter-American Commission found that "there was chronic disregard for the obligation to ensure respect for the civilian population’s fundamental human rights, such as the right to life, the right to humane treatment, the right to freedom of movement and residence, and the right to effective judicial protection." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was much less diplomatic. In her latest report, she not only decried the "grave, massive and systematic" violations of human rights, she condemned the widespread breaches of international humanitarian law, claiming that IHL violations "were again recurrent, massive and systematic, many of them forming part of a general assault on the civilian population."

III. International Law and the War in Colombia

What the High Commissioner meant was that the parties to the conflict in Colombia are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The great majority of their victims are not other combatants but unarmed civilians singled out for retribution, sometimes with extreme cruelty. In the course of this savage war, civilians are persistently murdered and massacred, tortured, raped, disappeared, taken hostage, terrorized, and driven from their homes by the thousands. It does not matter whether the perpetrators are army officials, paramilitary chieftains or rebel commanders. So long as their actions or those of their subordinates are part of a widespread or systematic attack against the civilian population, or are in violation of universal principles of the laws and customs of war, they may be held criminally responsible under international law.

What follows is an accounting of those actions attributable to the warring parties in Colombia that qualify as international crimes. I will conclude with a short reflection on the role of international law in light of the country’s dire human rights and humanitarian law crisis.

Paramilitary groups and the Colombian Armed Forces

The paramilitary groups, aided and abetted by sectors of the Colombian armed forces, are clearly the worst perpetrators of international crimes. Together, they account for approximately 80% of the murders and forced disappearances of civilian non-combatants occurring in the course of the conflict, which totaled over 4,000 victims in 2000. Many of these killings take place during the numerous massacres systematically carried out by paramilitaries. (Massacres are commonly defined as the collective execution of four or more persons.)

Paramilitary groups have long utilized massacres as a widespread strategy to combat the insurgency by targeting civilians presumed to comprise the rebels’ social base. During a one-year period between October 1996 and September 1997, for instance, they were responsible for 86 massacres and a total of over 500 victims, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists. In recent years, these groups have stepped up significantly the rate at which they conduct their systematic attacks against the civilian population. In one rampage, carried out over the first 18 days of 2001, paramilitary groups acting in concert committed 26 massacres in 11 departments of the country, butchering a total of 170 people.