DRUGS UNDER FIRE

One Side Is Paid For By The US Military, The Other By Addicts.

Welcome To Colombia's Civil War

The United States is currently holding 400,000 prisoners of war in jails
across the country. Most of them have never picked up a weapon or
threatened anyone and many of them know they will die in jail, far from
their families.

They are prisoners who have been taken by the US government in what is
known as the "war on drugs". Now the US government has decided to devote a
further $1.3bn of its citizens' money towards fighting this war on a
foreign field - or in many foreign fields - by supplying military aid to
the Colombian government and by seeking the backing and approval of Europe
in this task.

Essentially, the US is to provide the stick in the form of helicopters and
weaponry to tackle drug producers while Europe provides a carrot - or more
likely a banana crop - in the form of aid for the development of crops that
will replace the coca and the opium poppy on which so much of the Colombian
economy relies.

Earlier this month, 27 nations and international agencies attended a
conference in Madrid to discuss Plan Colombia, the scheme under which the
US has committed itself to the destruction of drugs in Colombia. A total of
more than $800m was pledged by a variety of countries and bodies but
crucially the EU will wait until September and another meeting in Bogota
before deciding exactly what its commitment will be.

Officially, the weapons and helicopters are to be used to attack the coca
and opium poppy fields. Unofficially, the hardware is to be used to destroy
the 17,000-strong, well-armed Marxist guerrilla group the FARC (the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) that receives much of its revenue
as a result of the drugs trade. Europe is being asked, as one European
diplomat has been quoted as saying, "to clean up the mess that the
Americans will make".

Over recent weeks, President Clinton has been talking thoughtfully and
sensitively about the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the part he hopes
that he can play before he leaves office. Every effort is being made to try
to bring the two sides together. As the peace process in Northern Ireland
has been stumbling slowly towards resolution, the United States government
has always been prepared to offer its help it mediating between the two
sides, to send its most distinguished statesmen across the sea in an effort
to broker a lasting peace.

Some weeks ago, ministers and officials from Europe, Japan, Canada and the
United Nations made their way to Los Pozos in the heart of the territory of
Colombia given temporarily to the FARC. There they listened to Colombians
on both sides of the civil war and heard the arguments for and against Plan
Colombia. The US were not repre sented at the meeting because they do not
"recognise" the FARC.

Where is the energy that has categorised US initiatives in the Middle East
and Ireland? Some have suggested that the American commitment of such a
high quantity of military aid will unleash a Latin American Vietnam. Others
have likened it to the proxy war fought by the US against the leftist
guerrillas in El Salvador. All are agreed that this escalation of the
36-year-long civil war will mean a marked increase in deaths. Whatever
one's views of the FARC and what they stand for, they are highly trained,
well armed and many are highly committed to the war. They are not going to
roll over and they will be fighting in territory they know well.

Leading the charge, almost literally, for the Americans is the drugs tsar
General Barry McCaffrey. He recently appeared on BBC television in a
documentary about Colombia and claimed that the "greatest threat" to human
rights in Colombia was the FARC and that it posed "a huge threat not only
for its neighbours but also the the US".

This is nonsense. All the human rights reports, whether from the UN or the
US's own state department, indicate that the "greatest threat" to human
rights is posed by the far-right paramilitaries or "self-defence" groups
which have worked so often with the Colombian military.

As the US Department of State human rights report, dated February of this
year, put it: "Paramilitary forces were responsible for an increasing
number of massacres and other politically motivated killings. . . the army
tolerated and even collaborated with paramilitary groups."

McCaffrey has an old-fashioned military man's attitude to facts. In 1998,
he attacked Holland's liberal drugs policy by claiming that this had led to
a crime wave and that the murder rate in Holland was twice that in the US.
"That's drugs," was the general's conclusion. That was also nonsense. The
US murder rate is in fact four times higher than that in Holland. Now
McCaffrey, having convinced the American government to hurl money from the
skies on to Colombia in battle and in fumigation programmes, hopes that
Europe will politely follow suit.

There are three schools of thought about European involvement in Plan
Colombia: the US government view, that they should cough up the money and
keep their mouths shut; the view that Europe should have not be associated
at all with a plan that seems doomed towards escalating the war at a time
when peace talks - however painfully slow and faltering - are taking place;
and the third view, that Europe should attach itself to the plan if only so
that there is another voice that can try to get itself heard above the
noise of the choppers taking off.

Drugs in the US are a problem for the US, however convenient it may be to
blame Latin Americans. Recently the tiny US Libertarian party launched its
bid for the presidency by saying that its first act if - rather big if -
elected would be the pardoning of every non-violent drug offender. If the
US was really serious about its "war on drugs" those are the steps they
would be looking at to remove the grip of organised international crime
from the drugs trade. With all the money saved, they could help address
Colombia's real problem: poverty. As the signs carried by some of the
hundreds of thousands displaced by the conflict who descended on Bogota
last month said: "With hunger, there is no peace."

Instead, there is the possibility of a grim war fought by Colombians, a
civil war in which one side will be funded by the US tax-payer and the
other side by the US drug-taker - a mad scenario indeed. Europe has a
chance to use its influence here, either by withholding its support from
the plan and then involving itself actively in searching for a peaceful
solution or, if it backs the plan, by using its influence to try stop what
could be the next of this millennium's really bloody civil conflicts.

Colombia should not be used as a military exhibition centre and Europe
should do all in its power to prevent a bloodbath before we find we have
sleepwalked our way into it.