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Plan Colombia: A Plan for Peace, or a Plan for War? |
STATEMENT MADE BY THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS, NON GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS, THE HUMAN RIGHTS AND PEACE FOR COLOMBIA MOVMENTS.
We declare our decision to support the need for international aid to contribute to resolving the armed conflict by way of political negotiation, to democratise Colombian society and the economy, to develop real and integral solutions to drug-trafficking, to design a new and agreed model of development, to strengthen new democratic institutions and to rebuild the nation.We reject Plan Colombia because it is uses an authoritarian concept of national security exclusively based on a strategy against narcotics. It will lead to the escalation of the social and armed conflict. It fails to provide real solutions to drug-trafficking. It endangers the peace process. It attacks the indigenous populations by destroying their culture and their way of life, and it will seriously affect the Amazon eco-system. It will worsen the humanitarian and human rights crisis, increase forced displacement and aggravate the social and political crisis.
We demand that the Colombian government and request that the international community rethink the underlying concept of national security in Plan Colombia, conceiving national security as that which enhances human rights - civil, political, economic, social and cultural - and provides a sense of belonging to citizens. These are the foundations of national sovereignty.
P>We request the international community to consider its support to Colombia using universal humanitarian principles: the right to life, human rights, social development and the protection of the environment. These have all been eroded by the Colombian conflict.We propose a real process of consensus-building between the various social actors in Colombian society and the international community, in which civil society is a significant interlocutor, and which enables us to find solutions to our conflicts and to build a stable and lasting peace.
As social organizations and as members of Colombian society we are willing to initiate a process of dialogue in order to discuss the analysis, design strategies, define methods of implementation and monitoring of a plan with these objectives.
Sincerely,
The undersigned organizations: