Human Rights: Colombia

Claire Hanna Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I thank the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) for securing this debate, which comes at a time between the fairly muted five-year anniversary of the peace agreement and next month’s elections. Those elections will set the direction for the implementation of that peace agreement.

I visited Colombia earlier this month, along with the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara), at the invitation of ABColombia, which, as Members will know, is a coalition of key Irish and British international non-governmental organisations, including Trócaire, Oxfam and Christian Aid who accompanied our visit. When we were there we met representatives of both the agencies, elected representatives, the United Nations, those processing peace, former combatants and, crucially, local communities that are already engaged in doing so much about the shocking and perilous situation on the ground for those who stand up for the protection of human rights.

As Members have outlined, Colombia’s conflicts spanned five decades, with a death toll of around a quarter of a million, including 45,000 children. As others have said, that includes 25,000 disappearances, where people did not even have the dignity of a body to bury. Clearly, many millions more were displaced due to a conflict that is, at its core, about land; that is the substantial and core unimplemented part of the peace agreement.

The issues are exacerbated by a residual level of violence in the country, carried out with impunity. From my point of view as a fairly casual observer, it appears that the state is at best absent and at worse complicit in many of those violent human rights abuses. That should concern us morally, but it should also concern us because the situation is exacerbated by extractive industries that are exploiting Colombia’s natural resources in a way that means a very small number of people accrue large profits; those of here accrue benefits in material goods, but the process leaves only negative environmental and social impacts for local communities.

Our visit focused on the effects of mining in the La Guajira region to the north-east, near the Venezuelan border, and on the Cerrejón mining company, which is owned exclusively by the giant corporation Glencore and clearly treats indigenous communities as an inconvenience. We looked at the failure of national and transnational governance structures that seem unwilling or unable to deliver justice, rights and fair play for those communities.

We met communities in the Sierra Nevada who had been displaced with woeful resettlement packages, or who were threatened by displacement due to the massive mine, which is literally hundreds of kilometres of open-cast. It is the biggest mine in Latin America, and is a shocking and violent vista. Wherever one looks there is a massive crater in the environment that looms over and oppresses people, both visually and environmentally. They have had the air around them, the soil under their feet and the water that they depend on polluted by mining practices. There has been a sharp increase in disease. Some people have already had their water supply diverted—or risk having it diverted—to satisfy the mine’s insatiable need for water.

We visited the Arroyo Bruno—the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree has better Spanish than mine—around which communities have lived and grown sustainably for many hundreds of years. Those communities now face an existential risk to their existence and human rights, and those who are attempting to stand up for those rights are particularly at risk. It is worth saying that those developments have almost no spill-over economic benefit to the communities. Workers and the materials that supply the mine are trucked in, and coal is noisily and dustily trucked out. We drove past a train that was so long that we were driving past it for literally 10 minutes. At all hours of the day and night, it spills out coal dust.

The basic human right of these communities to somewhere to live—as they have lived for years—is not being protected. They have not had the opportunity to feel the benefits of peace and security at the end of the conflict. The water is sold back to them in plastic containers, and there is no benefit whatever to the communities. We are rightly confronting the human rights implications of our dependence on Russian hydrocarbons, and it is appropriate that we also focus on impacts in other areas.

Coal is over. Everybody knows that that mine and many others will close in the coming years, but it is important that we use our influence to ensure a just transition for those communities and other communities whose rights have been abused. We must ensure that these issues are not lost in the implementation of the peace deal. I have tried not to do that Northern Irish thing of overlaying and viewing every single international issue through the prism of where we grew up, but I must say that it is encouraging and courageous that Colombia is dealing upfront with the issues of truth and justice as a pre-requisite for reconciliation. It is courageous that those issues are being confronted head-on, and I say that as someone who lives somewhere where for 25 years we just tried to keeping closing the door on the truth, allowing the perpetrators on various sides to move on with their lives, and the victims not to have clarity and the release of justice.

We understand that the truth commission will publish its report, on which it has engaged heavily, a couple of weeks after the presidential election—come what may. What is clear to me, and what I hope hon. Members will be able to use their influence to ensure, is that the crucial issues of land reform, land abuse and theft, and the accruing of resources, are not lost as we implement the peace deal. It is clear that accompaniment and scrutiny is important in Colombia. The country is rightly interested in what the world thinks about it and has an interest in transitioning to clean sources of energy, but it is vital that as its Government implement this deal, they bring forward a new approach to managing, serving and dealing with indigenous communities.