Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

Rushing To Judgement

Jim Monaghan is a sound man, a former republican prisoner, who I met in the 1980s after his release from prison and who sat on the ard comhairle of Sinn Fein for a time. He and two others were arrested in Colombia last week with false passports, which in itself is a fairly minor offence. However, the Colombian military authorities claimed that the three men had been training FARC (the 16,000-strong, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in "terrorist acts, the handling and manipulation of explosives and the fabrication of non-conventional weapons." A spokesperson claimed that traces of cocaine and numerous types of sophisticated explosives had been found on their clothing.

The British media jumped on the claims and unionist representatives heralded the arrests as evidence of republican deceit with regards to the peace process. By the next morning the BBC was reporting that the authorities had satellite photos of the three men training FARC in the making of barrack busters. Sinn Fein was called to account for their presence in South America. The media reported that the investigation could take up to eighteen months and that the men were facing possibly twenty years in prison.

By the next morning there were, eh, no pictures and a lot less talk of traces of explosives or cocaine on the men's clothes. Now, I haven't a clue what Jim and his company were doing in Colombia. I do know, however, to be sceptical and suspicious of news agencies, especially given our own experience of the chasm between the presentation of Irish republicans in the British media and the actual truth.

Jim Monaghan is well read and is very much into revolutionary politics. But he's not the sort of guy to be interfering in the internal affairs of another country in the way of Tony Blair, for example. Blair supports 'Plan Colombia', a $1.3 billion programme organised by the USA, aimed at defeating FARC; a programme that has caused immense suffering to the peasantry.

Blair and former US President Bill Clinton, not that long ago, also authorised a bombing campaign in Kosovo and Serbia, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. Of course, they killed some of 'the enemy' as well and brought Serbia to heel, so that must make it okay. Ulster Unionist MPs supported this bombing campaign whilst simultaneously questioning the commitment of republicans to the use of exclusively peaceful means for achieving their objectives.

So what about FARC. Founded in 1964 it has its roots in decades of peasant revolts against repressive, oligarchic governments in a country where 1.5% of the people own and control 80% of the land that is fit for agricultural development. Hundreds of thousands have died over fifty years in an intermittent civil war that continues to this day. Displaced peasants who were driven from their farms by large landholders sought out inhospitable areas such as the foothills region of the various Amazonic departments where they established agricultural production. It is in these areas that FARC enjoys most support and from where it launched its guerrilla war.

In the 1980s FARC supported the Patriotic Union (UP), a coalition of left-wing forces that attempted to establish a popular political party. In its first electoral intervention, UP elected 14 Congress members to the Senate and House, eighteen deputies to departmental assemblies and 335 counsellors. In reaction to this the Bogotá government unleashed a 'dirty war'. By 1988, 30% of UP's candidates were assassinated. Trade union leaders were also murdered, popular protest criminalized and the media continues to be controlled by big business. The extermination of the UP threw FARC back into armed struggle.

The peasants, particularly in the wake of agricultural recession, found coca to be the only product that was both profitable and easy to market. Today, 300,000 people are directly dependant on the coca economy. FARC derives its income from imposing a revolutionary tax on rich businessmen. But it, undoubtedly, also derives significant taxes from medium- and large-scale coca producers, which is where I must part company.

FARC is thus in conflict with the US government, millions of whose citizens' lives are being devastated by illegal drugs, mostly trafficked from Colombia. However, FARC claims the main reason it is opposed by the USA is because it is a revolutionary, socialist organisation resisting US imperialism. Washington claims that the guerrillas are major drug traffickers (a claim repudiated by even the US Drug Enforcement Agency in a 1997 report) and that counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations are one and the same. (Incidentally, this is a separate war from that against the likes of the late drug baron Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel with its corrupt links to government, judiciary and armed forces.)

FARC argues that the way to eradicate the drugs trade is for peasant farmers to be given aid to develop and plant alternative crops, but the government has shown no interest in this offer and instead murders farmers, attacks villages and, advised by US experts, destroys the peasant crops through aerial fumigation of coca and poppy fields which has damaged the health of children and poisoned water supplies, as well as driving an army of unemployed youth into FARC.

Several years ago, as a result of a peace process Colombia's President Andres Pastrana conceded almost 40% of Colombia to FARC. The area is known as the 'demilitarised zone'. Last month FARC released 300 captured soldiers in an exchange of prisoners but just this week Pastrana signed a controversial new law giving the military sweeping powers of detention and the right to set up martial law in specific places, despite international opposition, the army's abysmal human rights' record and its proven links to right-wing death squads.

In the demilitarised zone FARC has built 250km of new highways, twenty bridges, paved streets in the towns so that people can walk free of mud and mire, built water mains and carried out a massive vaccination programme.

In the June edition of their magazine, 'Resistencia', FARC mentions the volume of international visitors to its demilitarised zone, ranging from "government envoys, ambassadors, parliamentarians, journalists and personalities, etc." In its 'capital', San Vincente, it has held festivals of theatre, dance and music in the central square to which it invites those in solidarity and foreign tourists.

Foreign tourists like Jim Monaghan and his two friends.

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