•  bogotÁ
• Thursday, September 22, 2011
• Inter Press Service

'Another one? Another rape?' was the response Mari got at the Attorney General's Office in Colombia when she went to report what she had been through. 'When they said that, I froze and got up and said 'Thank you, I’ll come back another day',' she told human rights defenders later.

This happened to Mari (not her real name) in December 2010, when she finally mustered the courage to report that she had been gang-raped in 2001 by far-right paramilitaries.

'I am displaced, I am a raped woman under threat, I've lost a son,' Mari, a community leader from the western department or province of Valle, told rights watchdog Amnesty International in February.

Hers was one of the testimonies by victims of sexual violence in Colombia cited by a new report presented in Bogotá Wednesday by Amnesty International, which describes how the justice system has failed the victims, sets forth recommendations, and calls on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to set a date for seeking authorisation to open an investigation into the situation in Colombia.

The report, ''This is what we demand. Justice!' Impunity for sexual violence against women in Colombia’s armed conflict', is part of Amnesty's Campaign for International Justice. 'Despite myriad initiatives, laws, policies, mechanisms, decrees and protocols, the Colombian state is still failing to protect women survivors effectively or to ensure that their right to truth, justice and reparation is fully respected,' the Amnesty report says.

'In large part,' it adds, 'this endemic failure has been due to a lack of political will on the part of successive governments to tackle the numerous causes of impunity for human rights violations, especially sexual violence'.

Colombia's current armed conflict has its roots in a period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s known simply as 'La Violencia'. Since 1964, leftist guerrillas have fought government forces, and ultra-right-wing paramilitary militias reappeared on the scene in 1977. After a demobilisation process in 2003 to 2006, many of the paramilitaries regrouped, and the government now refers to these groups as 'bacrim' (short for 'criminal bands' in Spanish).

According to the United Nations, the paramilitaries are responsible for 75 percent of the human rights crimes committed in this country's decades-old civil war. Guerrillas were apparently the perpetrators in 8.5 percent of the 183 cases of sexual violence against forcibly displaced women that the Constitutional Court ordered the Attorney General's Office to investigate, in a groundbreaking 2008 ruling.

The security forces accounted for 19.4 percent of the cases, the paramilitaries for 45.8 percent, unidentified illegal armed groups for 4.5 percent, common criminals for 4 percent, and a family member for 1.5 percent, while in the remaining 16.3 percent of the cases, the group to which the alleged perpetrator belonged could not be determined.

As of September 2010, the courts in Colombia had handed down guilty verdicts in five of the 183 cases, four of which were not war-related. In the only case related to the conflict, the paramilitary who was charged was acquitted, although the ruling has been appealed. In another 140 cases, the investigations are at a preliminary stage and the perpetrators have not been formally identified.

In territories controlled by the security forces and paramilitary groups, which are the most populous and wealthiest regions, one common element is invariably present in the cases: When a woman reports to the authorities that she was raped, she immediately begins to receive death threats.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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