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Abstract
The provision of social services in protracted conflicts, such as the Colombian conflict, is scarce and sometimes non-existent. Collective reparations are normally composed of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation and guarantees of no repetition. They constitute what normally would encompass development projects and can provide basic social services in contexts of peace and stability with additional symbolic and psychosocial elements. After more than five decades of conflict in Colombia, it seems that significant political will for transitional justice programmes — and in particular, reparations programmes — has emerged with the 2010 election of President Juan Manuel Santos and the ratification of the 2011 Victim's Law. In 2007, a pilot project of collective reparations programmes was initiated with the support of international development agencies. This paper uses data collected from these pilot projects to demonstrate the complexity of introducing development projects as a form of reparations in conflict-affected communities. It also questions whether it is good policy to require communities to have to ‘bleed first’ to receive basic social services under the auspices of collective reparations and explores the possible problems involved in implementing collective reparations programmes without a comprehensive development policy in post-conflict contexts.
Notes
1 All research for this project was approved by the Internal Review Board (Protocol ID: 12-04-330; 30 April 2012) and all translations were made by the author. The research for this paper was supported by a Kellogg Institute Research Grant. The author would like to thank the communities and individuals that participated in this research.
2 The UN Statement of Common Understanding on Human Rights-Based Approaches to Development Cooperation and Programming: http://hrbaportal.org/the-human-rights-based-approach-to-development-cooperation-towards-a-common-understanding-among-un-agencies, 1 accessed 2013.
3 ‘Transitional justice’ refers to judicial and non-judicial measures for dealing with the effects of massive human rights abuses.
4 This article is based on focus group data from four of the eight original pilot cases, individual interviews with leaders in the communities, and 15 interviews with different international NGO and government actors, national NGO and government actors, municipal-level government actors and local NGO actors as well as archival research of government and NGO documents. The communities that were visited were: La Libertad in the state of Sucre, El Salado in the state of Bolivar, the University of Córdoba in the state of Córdoba and the Peasant Workers Association of el Carare (ATCC) in La India, in the state of Santander.
5 For a more extensive discussion on the definition of collective reparations, please see Guillerot and Ruben Carranza (Citation2009).
6 These findings support the recent recommendations by the UN Special Rapporteur on truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, Pablo de Greiff. Please see UN Human Rights Council Citation2013, 21–22.
7 UN General Assembly, 21 March 2006: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/4721cb942.pdf, accessed 1 April 2013.
8http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/ga_60-147/ga_60-147.html, accessed 22 March 2013.
9 UN General Assembly, 4 December 1986: http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r128.htm, accessed 15 March 2013.
10 In fact, in interviews conducted by the author, Colombian government officials explained that this debate has been perceived as purely academic. ‘The distinction between the economic, cultural and social rights and the Right to Reparation is erased in practice in the communities’ (representative of the Unidad de Víctimas, 16 July 2012).
11http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?page = topic&tocid = 459d17822&toid = 459b17a82&docid = 3ae6b39ec&skip = O, accessed 8 August 2013.
12http://www.www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/Maastrichtguidelines_.html, accessed 26 March 2013.
13 Although peace talks are underway with the leftist guerrilla group the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas (FARC), no peace agreement has been reached as of 2013.
14 Unidad de Victimas: http://www.unidadvictimas.gov.co/, accessed 19 March 2013.Communities that have suffered harm to their collective rights or to the individual rights of community members qualify for collective reparations. These must have occurred after 1 January 1985.
15 For a comprehensive discussion in English on the Law of Victims, see Summers (Citation2012).
16 Initially ten projects were chosen by the CNRR as pilots of collective reparations. Eight communities and organisations agreed to be part of the pilot programme and two were eventually dropped for methodological and political reasons. Out of the six pilot projects that went ahead, only five were able to advance because the location of the sixth project, La Gabarra in the state of North Santander, continues to be in a state of elevated levels of insecurity and conflict.
17 Since the demobilisation, a resurgence of criminal gangs associated with the former paramilitaries have begun to appear in the areas where the AUC was the authority. These groups, called the ‘Bacrim’ (which stands for bandas criminales or ‘criminal gangs’), are composed mainly of former members of the AUC who were not incarcerated or demobilised. They do not have political representation or present any particular political agenda; instead they are entirely dedicated to drug-trafficking and criminal activity.
18www.unidadvictimas.gov.co/index.php/reparacion/9-uncategorised/155-reparacion-colectiva, accessed 23 March 2013.
19http://www.confidencialcolombia.com/es/1/105/5348/‘La-ley-es-el-camino-pero-con-las-v%C3%ADctimas‘-V%C3%ADctimas-reparación-Colombia-conflicto-guerra-Farc-guerrilla-paramiklitares-Santos.htm, accessed 1 April 2013.‘Victims’ for the purposes of this project are people who individually or collectively suffered harm in the events that occurred in Colombia from 1 January 1985. See Law 1448 for more details about the exact definition used. A database of registered victims in Colombia registers reportedly around four million Colombians as victims.
20 According to the Unidad de Víctimas, 28 collective reparations projects are currently underway in the departments of Bolívar, Córdoba, Norte de Santander, Putumayo, Santander, Sucre, Valle del Cauca, Chocó, Guajira, Risaralda, Antioquía, Arauca and Magdalena. These include the original seven pilot projects.
21 This was confirmed during visits by the author to four of the pilot projects in 2012.
22 El Salado is located in the department of Bolívar in the Montes de Maria.
23 For more information see: http://www.fundacionsemana.com/seccion/proyectos-especiales/el-salado/13, accessed 8 August 2013.
24 Fundación Semana is a non-profit organisation whose main objective is to work for social inclusion in Colombia. It concentrates its efforts on serving as a link between business, government, international aid agencies and social sector organisations to develop sustainable projects of high impact that will generate employment and welfare for vulnerable populations. It is funded and supported by Revista Semana, a weekly magazine that offers political analysis and commentary.
25 Law 387 of 2005 and Decree 2569 of 2000 established as part of the minimum living standards, the Emergency Humanitarian Assistance, Socio-economic Stabilization and Recovery of Rights (Law 387/05 and Decree 2569/00)
26 After much delay, the Peruvian government suddenly announced in January 2011 that it was working on a plan for economic reparations, designating US$7.2 million for individual reparations (Laplante Citation2012).
27http://www.latercera.com/noticia/mundo/2013/02/678-511364-9-colombia-reparo-en-2012-a-casi-158-mil-victimas-del-conflicto-armado-interno-con.shtml, accessed 1 April 2013.
28 It also leaves open the question of why other communities, which have not suffered significant violence, have little to no social services.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Pamina Firchow
PAMINA FIRCHOW is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. She has published in the Journal of Information Technology for Development and Latin American Perspectives and co-edited a recent Special Section on Reparations and Peacebuilding for Human Rights Review. Currently she is working on a project developing alternative indicators for measuring local perceptions of progress towards peacebuilding, funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
