Forced displacement in Colombia is primarily a way to seize agricultural land from peasants and small farmers, and only to a lesser degree the unintended consequence of fighting between warring parties.

Much of the violence is deliberately aimed at civilians to dislodge them from their homes and lands. It is a struggle that has been going on for centuries, but now involves national and international commercial interests, part of an internal war pitting the government and paramilitary forces against two guerrilla groups and a related war on drugs.

More than 3.5 million out of the country's 40 million people have been displaced during the last two decades, according to CODHES, an authoritative non-governmental source. The authorities' figure is only 1.8 million, mainly because they only started systematic registration of internally displaced people (IDPs) in 2000 and do not recognise the CODHES figures from 1985 to 2000.

Almost one million people have been displaced since the government of President Ãlvaro Uribe took office in 2002, according to both sources, although their figures have started diverging over the past two years; the government figures show around 160,000 people newly displaced in 2005, whereas CODHES recorded more than 300,000 new IDPs. Both figures are in any case indicative of a significant escalation of the conflict since 2002, tremendous suffering, imbedded violence, and social, political and economic exclusion in a deeply fragmented country.

Massacres, attacks and intimidation of civilian population by the armed groups, particularly in rural areas continue to be reported. None of the IDPs in Colombia live in camps but there are areas where the majority of the inhabitants are IDPs. Typically, they flee from rural areas to shantytowns around larger towns and struggle to make a living. However, increasing control by paramilitary groups and crime-related violence often force the IDPs to flee again within the urban areas.

IDPs generally have less access to health care, education, nutrition, water and sanitation facilities than the rest of the population, including the poor resident population in the shantytowns.

Paradoxically, Colombia has both one of the highest IDP populations in the world and probably the most advanced legislation to protect them.

Since it took office in 2002, the Uribe government has pursued a policy of "democratic security", which aims at cracking down on guerrilla groups by, among other things, involving civilians in counter-insurgency activities, arming peasant soldiers and setting up networks of informants. These "security" measures have implicated civilians in the armed conflict and contributed to the stigmatisation of people, particularly human rights defenders and community leaders who have been forced to flee the conflict-ridden areas. Partly as a result many IDPs do not claim status as such, seeking instead anonymity in the areas of displacement.

President Uribe's comfortable victory in the presidential elections on 28 May 2006 is largely attributed to improved security in urban areas were homicide and kidnappings rates have dropped significantly during his first tenure. However, around 55 per cent of the electorate refrained from voting, reflecting little faith in the democratic institutions.

In January 2004, the Constitutional Court's declared the government's IDP response unconstitutional. In direct response, the government committed the equivalent of more than $2 billion for the protection and assistance of IDPs for the period 2005-2010 in October 2005.

The government had as of May 2006, with the hesitant support of the international community, demobilised more than 30,000 paramilitaries within a controversial legal framework. The Justice and Peace Law endorsed by the Congress in June 2005 and declared partly unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in May 2006, has been an important element of this framework.

Critics of the Justice and Peace Law have claimed that it leaves crimes against humanity and violations of international humanitarian law unpunished, that it does not seek to establish the historical truth nor aim at identifying and holding the sponsors of paramilitarism accountable for their crimes, and that it violates the victims' right to justice and reparation.

The armed groups, notably paramilitary groups in alliance with drug-traffickers, control millions of hectares of land, much of it grabbed from people they displaced by committing massive human rights violations. While the Constitutional Court's verdict was a serious legal blow to the demobilisation process, the practical consequences are less clear. The process had nearly come to an end by the time of the verdict in May 2006 and the government has reassured paramilitary leaders that it will not have retroactive effect.

The demobilisation process is part of the government's legitimate efforts to restore law and order in the country, but the Constitutional Court's verdict gives credit to concerns that the Justice and Peace Law may leave the political, economic and social structures controlled by the paramilitaries intact, effectively preventing IDPs from returning home in the foreseeable future.