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Palestine and Colombia: Two conflicts, one solution
Zoltan Dujisin/IPS-TerraViva
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The conflicts of Palestine and Colombia seem eternal and without a solution. In both, the victims are mostly civilian. And in both, the geo-political and other interests of Western powers play a fundamental role. The prospect of peace might be realistic, but depends a lot on the international community.
The audience attending the session, A War-Free World is Possible, seemed to believe in the theme. Promoted by the Social Sciences Latin-American Council (CLACSO), the session was a success as the audience filled up the hall, some people on their feet and others sitting on the floor. Some even taped the speeches to show them later to those who could not get in.
“Each conflict has a pacifist, political and negotiated solution, but how can one consider the USA a peace carrier when it behaves like a war agent and is the biggest Israel supporter?” Emir Sader, from CLACSO, said at the opening of the discussion that did not deviate much from this line of thought.
In the discussions on the Colombian and the Palestinian conflict, the latter one was clearly more interesting to the public because of its current relevance, and media attention. The civil war in Colombia, with one of the highest records of human-rights violations rarely fancies the interest of media, which prefer to focus on picturesque coverage of comments by presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia or Venezuela´s Hugo Chávez.
“Peace will be possible only when the West tells Israel that it must stop the war, but Europe and the US block resolutions that stipulate that Israel has to obey international law,” said Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Palestinian movement Stop the Wall. Tel-Aviv “does not even recognize the 4th Geneva Convention” related to civilian protection in times of war, he said.
The Palestinian activist attacked Western governments for showing themselves in front of the cameras “greeting Israeli politicians who had their hands stained with blood, almost demonstrating their approval of the massacre,” Juma said. He added that this was not the first indirect encouragement by the West and had happened earlier during the Lebanon war in 2006. “This war encouraged Israel to perpetrate more and more massacres, as the country knew it had NATO’s support. At that time also, it used phosphorus bombs and, as always, nobody was indicted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court,” Juma added.
Colombians too live their everyday lives with a history of “political and non-political” violence. “We are talking about a low-intensity democracy in the Latin-American country that has had the fewest military governments,” observed Alejo Vargas, from the National University of Colombia. Besides the absence of an ethnic dimension to the conflict, the academic noticed another important difference in comparison to Israel: “In the 1980s, drug trafficking became a central element in the conflict, penetrating politics, the economy and society, becoming an important source of funds for the conflict."
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has also Washington´s ideological neoconservative shifts to justify his own war, in a country with “traditionally pro-American political elites,” Vargas said. Taking maximum advantage of the Bush administration’s ideology, Uribe “presented the Colombian conflict as another element of the global war against terrorism, and by extension against drug traffic. It is still to be known whether we can fight the drug trade by killing coca planters or arresting cocaine consumers in Manhattan,” he added.
As in Israel, Uribe’s political survival depends a lot on ‘security’ politics that creates tensions with neighbouring countries. Succesful strikes against leftist guerrillas in 2008 won him popular support, but Uribe’s methods enraged Ecuador and Venezuela, where kidnaps and murders related to the Colombian conflict were documented. “The growing militarization of borders in the region turns their political integration difficult and sparks an arms race, already stimulated by the US-sponsored Colombia Plan," Vargas said.
The Colombian conflict has created about three million domestic refugees and 300,000 in neighbouring countries and has become the second-biggest humanitarian crisis in the world after Sudan’s. But Juma does not see any parallel: “You cannot speak of a conflict when the Palestinians confront the world’s fourth biggest army,” while Colombian guerrillas have managed to achieve some strategic equilibrium.
Vargas and Juma both express moderation to the optimic wave unleashed by the current “Obama-mania.” “Without being naïve, we may expect that the new US government can contribute in finding out exits, but the conflict will always demand a political solution, regional participation and organised action from the Colombian society,” which, according to Vargas, favour negotiations.
People in both Colombia and Palestine await encouraging signals from the world: “Peace is possible and even easy to achieve, but if the international political situation maintains its current state, peace will be impossible,” Juma concluded.
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 Historical challenge
The capitalist crisis and five presidents gathering in Belem, attest to the big challenge before this Forum: become an effective global force for change, says TerraViva editor Alejandro Kirk. |
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 Story of An Indian Lost in Brazil
Journalist Rahul Kumar travelled all the way from India to find out that he looks local in the Amazonian region, where heat and mangoes resemble home. |
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