Lives that matter
Another April 9, and what about the victims?
9 de abril del 2019
"To be a victim is to be jobless, to be rejected for leaving one town and trying to move on in another place, is to be told that you don't have the right to this or that.” Mary* remembers the exact date she had to leave her village. She had not been able to pay for the vaccine that the guerrillas had been asking her for months and one day when she returned to her farm there was nothing left. Her house had been burned down and the cattle she used to bargain with had been taken away. Fortunately, her children were gone and her youngest daughter was with her; she took the few things she found still useful and drove 15 hours on a motorcycle to meet a sister she didn't know to start from scratch.
In spite of the time it hurts Maria to remember, perhaps because in order to have her own farm she had to leave a violent relationship, she had to get up at four every morning in order to study and take care of her children, she had to fight in a world of men to be able to enter the business, such as cattle farming, she had endured all kinds of sexual violence and suddenly everything vanished. Listening to her history means repeating once again that those who were victims of the war in Colombia not only deserve the solidarity and recognition of those of us who were not, but also the guarantee of their rights so that everything that Mary and the almost 9 million victims of which we have record so far, lived will not be repeated.
Today, April 9, the International Day of Remembrance and Solidarity with the Victims of the Armed Conflict, the state of implementation of Law 1448 of 2018, which gave rise to this commemoration, is critical. As reported in August 2018 by the newspaper El Espectador, the State has a great debt to the victims: only 300,000 hectares have been handed over and nearly 500 are waiting to be processed. Furthermore, 90% of the victims have not received financial compensation, nearly 100 million COP are missing to carry out a real psycho-social rehabilitation plan to rebuild the social fabric of communities, and a budget is needed for the functioning of the 1055 Victims Participation Tables created throughout the country, whose last election will be held this year. Not to mention that there are still obstacles for women victims of sexual violence during the conflict to access justice, obtain protection and receive comprehensive health care.
The lack of budget for the functioning of the Participation Tables adds to the lack of commitment of many institutions to guarantee the implementation of the integral public policy of victims in the territories. Limpal Colombia, with the support of GIZ, has accompanied four Participation Tables of the municipality of Meta and the feeling is the same: Law 1448 is very good on paper, however, in real life the institutions evade their responsibility to the victim population for lack of capacity, ignorance of the Law, or worse, little political will to manage the claims of victims.
This lack of political will is likely to worsen under the current government. The victims went from being a central group in the Final Peace Agreement to becoming another group, without differential recognition in President Ivan Duque's National Development Plan (NDP). Colombia’s current NDP in its chapter “Pact for the Construction of Peace: Culture of Legality, Coexistence, Stabilization and Victims" allocates $1.21.6 million, which is part of the $37.1 billion Pluriannual Investment Plan for Peace, for the reparation of victims. Law 1448, in force until 2021, requires many more resources to meet the objectives it set. This, added to the constant growth of victims due to an armed conflict that still persists, the permanent obstacles to the payment of compensation and the lack of resources of the territorial entities to guarantee effective action plans that respond to the needs of the victims, make the illusion of re-establishing the rights of this population increasingly distant.
Today, the women who have had to endure the ravages of the armed conflict on their bodies, who took charge of their homes alone and who work collectively to rebuild the social fabric demand that the Government works to remove barriers to access the guarantee of victims' rights, to protect the social leaders who lead processes of victims' claims and restitution of land in their territories, and to commit to the implementation of the Final Peace Agreement, whose central axis are the victims. Only in this way will Mary and the millions of victims be given a real guarantee of non-repetition. Let's not leave the victims alone, they are the face of peace and of a new country: "We are going to continue there, even if there are difficulties and they humiliate us, we are going to continue there, why? because we cannot remain calm when the enemy is once again on top of us, when our rights are being violated "*.
*Maria is a fictious name, her real identity is protected for security reasons.
*Testimony of a representative of the victim participation tables that the Liga Internacional de Mujeres para la Paz y la Libertad (LIMPAL Colombia), together with GIZ, accompanied in the department of Meta.
