RIGHTS GROUPS ASSAIL U.S. AID TO COLOMBIA

Violations Alleged In Fighting Rebels

BOGOTA, Colombia -- On the eve of a visit by President Clinton, three top
human rights groups Monday issued a scathingly detailed report charging
that Colombia does not deserve a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package.

Clinton released the money last week, acknowledging that the government of
President Andres Pastrana had not met five of the six human rights
conditions slapped on the package by Congress, but signing a waiver in the
U.S. "national interests."

The report prepared by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the
Washington Office on Latin America represents one of the most comprehensive
criticisms of U.S. policy in that Andean country. It contains a scorching
litany of allegations that the government has done little to halt gross
abuses by security forces fighting an estimated 20,000 rebels.

"We deplore this decision," the report said of Clinton's waiver, citing
scores of cases in which military personnel went unpunished despite
credible evidence against them.

While the U.S. aid package requires the military to promptly suspend
personnel "credibly" accused of gross abuses, the report said "dozens . . .
not only remain on active duty but are in command of troops or carrying out
intelligence work, and are regularly promoted."

Some officers have even been allowed to remain on active duty after
civilian prosecutors filed serious human rights charges against them, the
30-page report noted.

Military commanders, required by the U.S. package to crack down on
violators, instead often seek to shield them from civilian courts and send
them before military tribunals that "have a virtually unbroken record of
covering up crimes, failing to gather or consider evidence and acquitting
implicated officers in the face of overwhelming evidence," the report said.

The document was surprisingly tough on Pastrana, a young moderate credited
with helping to persuade the U.S. Congress to approve the aid for
Colombia's battle against drug traffickers and leftist guerrillas. Congress
put strings on the package because of the Colombian armed forces'
reputation for massive abuses such as murder, disappearances, torture and
assisting paramilitary units accused of the worst massacres.

Clinton is scheduled to visit the port of Cartagena for six hours Wednesday
to show his support for Pastrana's counter-narcotics and democracy-building
Plan Colombia, and figuratively hand over the check, but the human rights
report could cast a pall on the visit.

The report claims that while the armed forces are required by the U.S. aid
to cooperate with civilian authorities investigating human rights
violations, even government prosecutors regularly receive threats when
handling cases of military abuses.

It noted that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Nestor Ramirez had complained in
December about the "subversives who have infiltrated the prosecutor's,
attorney general's and Human Rights Ombudsman's offices."

A Defense Ministry website made similar allegations earlier this year
against the American diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota in charge of
monitoring human rights abuses, the report noted.

KEY CRITERION

Perhaps most damaging to Pastrana, the report complained that he had not
even met the one requirement that Clinton certified he had: ordering the
armed forces to stop pushing for military trials for suspected human rights
violators and leave their cases up to civilian courts.

Clinton reported last week that Pastrana met that condition with an Aug. 17
presidential directive that military personnel accused of "genocide,
torture and forced disappearances" be tried in civilian courts.

That left out murder and other violations such as cooperating with the
paramilitaries, the report noted, adding: "Partial compliance . . . is not
adequate. Full means complete -- not partial, not mostly -- but total."

Pastrana in fact unsuccessfully objected to a section of a bill approved by
the Colombian Congress earlier this year that strengthened civilian justice
control over some military cases, the report added.

RECENT BOAST

And while Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez recently boasted that the
military had transferred 533 cases of alleged human rights abuses from
military to civilian courts, the report said it found only 103 since 1997.

Many involved common crimes, it added, and "only 39 related in some way to
crimes that could be construed as human rights violations, like murder.
Most of these cases involved low-ranking sergeants and lieutenants."

FEW TRANSFERS

"In other words," the report added, "fewer than 10 cases per year are
transferred from military to civilian jurisdiction, and these rarely
involve senior officials who may have ordered or orchestrated gross
violations."

U.S. aid to the Colombian military was cut off from 1996 to 1998 because of
its dark human rights record.

That record has improved in the past year, but critics say that is only
because officers are allowing the growing paramilitary units to carry out
the "dirty" part of the war on leftist rebels.