On 19 November, the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt and her associate Clara Rojas will spend their 1000th day held in captivity by FARC rebels in Colombia.
More than 3000 other hostages, both civilian and military, are also held in inhuman conditions and await their freedom, some of them for more than seven or eight years or even longer.
Ingrid Betancourt was already well known for her work for Human Rights and her unceasing struggle against injustice, corruption and drug trafficking. Since her kidnapping on 23 February 2002 by FARC, she has become the symbol of all those kidnapped in Colombia.
Whether they are kidnapped by rebel groups, paramilitary gangs or other groups on the fringes of the law, these kidnap victims have all been deprived of their freedom which is in breech of their fundamental rights. Just like the 8000 people who have been killed and the 3 million who have been displaced, these people are the victims, directly or indirectly of a war situation that has lasted in Colombia for more than 40 years and that has caused more than half of the population of the country to live in conditions of misery that continue to
worsen.
As we remembered on 23 February last, the vast majority of those kidnapped, like Ingrid Betancourt, are civilians. And since even war has its laws, there is one law we would like to stress here, one that has been brought many times to the attention of numerous organisations and to the UN : all international conventions expressly forbid the involvement of civilians in any military operations.
This is a message that we want once again to send to FARC and those who support them: no matter what justifications are put forward, THE TAKING OF CIVILIAN HOSTAGES IS
UNACCEPTABLE!
By kidnapping openly and on such a large scale, FARC and the other illegal groups
who also do this, are placing themselves on the edge of every universal law. In that way, they give an excuse to those, in Colombia and elsewhere, to treat them as terror organisations and use this excuse to violate, in their turn, the most basic human rights, plunging Colombia into a humanitarian situation that is, according to the United Nations, the third greatest world crisis after the Sudan and the Congo.
Since 23 February2002, not one day has passed without a town or village somewhere in the world expressing its support for our campaign. Today 13 departments in France, and four entire regions in France and Belgium as well as1227 municipalities in the world have chosen to make Ingrid Betancourt an Honorary Citizen in the name of the 3000 kidnapped and to show their support for her struggle to re-establish a state of democracy in Colombia.
Thanks to this campaign - which must continue - we wish to show our governments and those governments in other countries that public opinion demands that pressure be brought to bear on the Colombian government to negotiate and reach a humanitarian agreement with the guerrilla groups, thereby allowing the freedom of all those kidnapped - a first step towards a peaceful and more general solution to the conflict.
Unfortunately, at present, hopes of a peaceful solution seem very remote; on the contrary, far from the media, a huge military operation is under way in the south of Colombia - the Patriot Plan - devised and put into action with the help of the United States, which endangers the life of those hostages whom we know are held in the region where the Colombian army is preparing its attack.
We urge our governments to do everything possible to convince President Alvaro Uribe to consider solutions other than an all out war that appears to be planned and that inevitably will lead to even greater horrors for the Colombian people.
We ask our elected representatives to find ways, through governments and those
who have maintained links with the guerrilla, to convince FARC to stop its practice of kidnapping and to free the civilians that they hold, if they wish, as they claim, to be regarded as fighters and not as a terrorist organisation.
And we ask members of the media to continue to support our actions: in particular we ask the French media to include in their daily reports of the two French hostages held in Iraq, their fellow national Ingrid
Betancourt.
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