HOW THE WEST HAS WRECKED COLOMBIA

As my helicopter clattered into the jungle-covered mountains of
Colombia, I could see below me four Blackhawk helicopters with rotors
turning.

Beside them lines of troops were waiting to embark - each soldier
clutching a rifle and rucksack.

A group of 360 heavily armed guerrillas had just been spotted moving
west through the mountains towards Barrancabermeja on the Magdalena
River, where the main oil refinery in Colombia is located. At the
other end of the strip, another helicopter lay immobilised by ground
fire having ventured too close to the guerrillas. The hydraulics had
been hit and the pilot had only just made it back. Suddenly I was back
in the middle of a war. But this time it was not a war belonging to
someone else, as the war had been in Bosnia when I was commanding UN
troops there in 1994. For the terrible war that is ravaging this
remote and beautiful country is an evil that is being visited on
Colombia by countries like my own.

Originally fought by old-fashioned Communist guerrillas seeking to
take control of the means of production from the capitalists, the war
in Colombia today is a modern war that is about stamping out the
production of illegal drugs.

Although almost all of the $1.3 billion that fuels the war comes from
the sale of cocaine and heroin to the Western world, the debate in
both America and in Europe regarding these drugs seems concerned only
with the medical and social consequences of ingestion.

We conveniently forget that it is our social habit of taking drugs
that has wrecked a country, destroyed large areas of the Amazon
rainforest, killed 24,000 people in 1999 alone, and blighted the lives
of millions of Colombian people.

Nor should we underestimate their suffering.

The narco-guerrillas and their competitors, the paramilitaries,
maintain control of the drug-growing areas by extreme violence and
intimidation. Their soldiers, often in their teens, are deliberately
brutalised by their commanders, who force them to carry out acts of
great savagery.

One favourite tactic is to string people up in the village square and
cut them to pieces with chainsaws, or pour acid on their faces until
they die. This is the true human cost of the indulgence of those who
think it necessary or fun to take heroin or cocaine. Curiously, it is
often these same people who complain about the damage done to the
rainforest by the Colombian Government's programme of aerial spraying
of illegal drug crops.

In war, as I so often discovered in Bosnia, the truth is often
manipulated by those propagandists whose wish is to continue the armed
struggle.

The facts about aerial spraying are simple.

Only the non-persistent glyphosate, Round Up, is used in the spraying
programme, which, of course, is the same glyphosate used by farmers
and gardeners in this country.

The quantity of Round Up sprayed against illegal drugs crops is only
15 per cent of the total agricultural use in Colombia. What is not
stated by the propagandists is that the real damage to the ecology of
Colombia is being caused by the burning of the forest to provide space
for the cultivation of the coca and poppy plants, and even more
importantly, by the millions of gallons of petrol and cement, used in
the production of drugs, that is poured into the rivers of the Amazon
Basin. Even the Amerindian people living deep in the rainforests have
now joined the battle against the narco-guerrillas.

The people of Colombia do not deserve their terrible fate, and there
is a growing belief that we all have a moral obligation to help them
to resolve a problem that is not of their making.

However, the international community is proceeding with undue caution
- - mainly because of the past human rights record of the Colombian
security forces.

I had gone to Colombia to discuss human rights issues and, although
five days does not seem sufficient time to get a clear view of events
when the situation is so complex and the country as large as Colombia,
I was able to gain a clear impression of the determination of the
Colombian security forces to defeat the narco-guerrillas and to do so
without indulging in human rights abuses.

There was a clear recognition that it is not possible to win a
counter-insurgency campaign without the total support of the people,
and this cannot be achieved if human rights abuses continue to be
committed. Since 1994 a military criminal justice code has been
introduced and an educational programme concerning the international
law on human rights mandated throughout the security forces.

The measures taken by the Colombians to guarantee human rights are now
more rigorous than those adopted by the British in Northern Ireland.
The results speak for themselves. Only 3 per cent of the population
today support the narco-guerrillas, and complaints against the
security forces are well down. It is evident that most of the human
rights abuses against the Colombian people are being carried out by
the narco-guerrillas and paramilitaries.

In the light of these improvements, the US is now increasing its aid
to Colombia. The EU is also giving support, though the $100 million
offered seems niggardly compared with the high level of drugs money
flowing into Colombia from Europe. When Churchill sent General Templar
to fight a counterinsurgency war in Malaya, a country similar in its
beauty to Colombia, the only instruction he gave him was to "let the
flowers bloom in Kuala Lumpur".

Colombia is a paradise where it is commercially possible to grow
flowers for export rather than drugs.

We all have a duty to help the flowers to bloom in
Colombia.

The danger of playing Quartermaster's Chairs

ON returning to England, as I stepped off the aircraft and read of the
latest proposals relating to the European Rapid Reaction Force, I had
a gloomy feeling of deja vu, for I know only too well the trick that
is being played on us. It is called the "Quartermaster's Chairs", and
it goes like this. Having carelessly mislaid most of the chairs in the
battalion classrooms, whenever the commanding officer decides to carry
out an inspection the quartermaster merely moves his remaining chairs
around the rooms ahead of him - thus giving the impression of a full
complement of chairs.

Trouble strikes only when all the classrooms need furniture.

If this unhappy event occurs, he is forced to call on the
quartermaster of the neighbouring battalion for help, a move that
explains the occasional sight of army lorries filled with chairs
travelling the lanes of England.

Today the Armed Forces of Nato and Europe can manifestly muster the
equivalent of only one set of chairs between them. My concern is what
will happen when the blast of war blows in our ears? A clue may be
given by looking at the responses of the international community to
the war in the Balkans in 1993. Both the political entities of the EU
and Nato at that time were keen to be seen to be "doing something".
Both decided to impose an independent naval blockade in the
Mediterranean to prevent the flow of arms into the Balkans. However,
there were insufficient ships to complement both fleets and the ships
of the Royal Navy were forced to dash frenetically between the Western
European Union and the Nato fleets - changing commands and insignia
every 24 hours as they went. Not a good way to go on a peacekeeping
mission, and an even worse way to go to war.