COLOMBIA WAR'S FIRST VICTIM: ACTIVISTS

Both Sides Target Rights Workers

BOGOTA, Colombia---Senator Piedad Cordoba was sitting in the waiting room of
a Medellin clinic, leafing through her appointment book when more than a
dozen masked and heavily armed assailants burst through the door.

Mrs. Cordoba, president of the Senate's Human Rights Commission, was
blindfolded and whisked into a waiting car. Then she was flown by helicopter
to a mountain hideout where she met the country's most powerful rightist
paramilitary leader, Carlos Castano, whose forces she had accused of
committing atrocities as part of their long conflict with Marxist rebels.

In a room dimly lit by a candle, Mr. Castano "accused me of being an ally
and a spokesperson for the guerrillas," the senator recalled in an
interview. "He showed me printed transcripts of my telephone conversations
and insisted that I was collaborating" with one of the rebel groups.

Mrs. Cordoba was released two weeks after her May 21 kidnapping, but not
before Mr. Castano had used the high-profile abduction to reaffirm publicly
his intolerance for human rights advocates, whom he has accused of working
''at the service of guerrilla diplomacy."

As Colombia's 36-year-old civil war has entered a heightened phase of attack
and counterattack over the last two years, human rights defenders have been
the victims of a campaign of terror, largely at the hands of illegal
rightist militia groups, many of which have ties to local units of the
country's armed forces.

Since 1997, at least 27 human rights advocates have been slain in Colombia,
five of them this year. The dead include workers at nongovernmental
organizations, professors, lawyers, union members and municipal employees in
charge of receiving complaints about human rights abuses. The vast majority
of the killings have occurred in the northeastern state of Antioquia, where
paramilitary groups have a strong presence.

Human rights organizations have been closing their offices in the interior
of the country, some moving their operations to the capital, and so far this
year more than 20 activists have sought political asylum in other countries.

Recently, the head of the human rights unit of the attorney general's office
was transferred after he received threats on his life.

"Unfortunately, it is true that those who work for peace and human rights in
Colombia are targeted by certain sides making war and literally have to run
for their lives " said Daniel GarciaPena director of the office of the High
Commissioner for Peace from 1995 to 1998 under former President Ernesto
Samper.

Mr. Garcia-Pena, who said he relocated to the Washington area in October
after receiving two threatening letters from Mr. Castano, added: "The
terrible truth is that human rights workers have been forgotten in Colornbia
and are only remembered when they are killed."

The crisis confronting human rights activists has impeded their work at a
time when Colombia's rural population is being subjected to an increasing
number of atrocities and other warrelated hardships. In the first half of
this year, 860 people were killed in 186 separate attacks, while tens of
thousands were displaced as a result of the conflict.

"The human rights movement in Colombia has been weakened, and the future
does not look very good," said Anders Kompass, director of the Colombian
office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. "We are finding
ourselves more and more alone. A lot of the human rights leaders have left
the country, and those who are here are scared."

But rightist paramilitary groups, whose estimated 5,000 combatants are
largely financed by wealthy landowners, are not the only ones targeting
human rights workers. Investigators say the military has collaborated with
rightist death squads in a number of attacks.

Despite a lack of cooperation by the armed forces, sources said federal
investigators are probing whether a top army official worked with Mr.
Castano to arrange the May 1997 killings of two human right workers who were
shot while sleeping in their Bogota apartment.

On the other side of Colombia s conflict, the Marxist rebels have likewise
been tied to violence against rights workers. In March, the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, the largest rebel force, seized and killed three
Americans working for indigenous rights in circumstances that remain
unclear.

The country is so polarized as a result of this nightmarish internal
conflict, and the issue of human rights is so politicized, that there is a
tendency to overlook atrocities committed by the forces one may sympathize
with, said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division
of Human Rights Watch.

Said Manuel Granado, a Bogota-based member of Peace Brigades International,
whose unarmed volunteers accompany activists as a deterrent to violence: It
is too easy to kill a human rights worker in Colombia. There is little
political cost. This is a situation we are trying to change.

Activists have complained that despite allocating more than $4 million to
fund a protection program for social activist groups, the administration of
President Andres Pastrana, like previous governments, has fallen short on
its promises to provide such necessities as armed guards, security cameras
and bulletproof vests. Others say that the program itself is insufficient.

Vice President Gustavo Bell, whose office has assumed the responsibilities
of the defunct Colombian post of high commissioner for human rights, was
unavailable for comment. But Mr. Pastrana, who has made peace the top
priority of his presidency, says the government is doing its best to protect
human rights advocates while facing an escalating civil conflict and an
economic cnsls.

No matter what, said one human rights worker who changed residences here
because of threats, you feel very helpless when you pick up the phone and
hear machine-gun fire on the other end.

Other activists have received fliers announcing their own funerals.

Indeed, trying to improve the human rights situation here has long been a
perilous undertaking. The attorney general's office has about 80 open
cases---some dating back a decade---that involve the killings or
disappearances of a broad range of human rights proponents.

In some areas of the country, it is suicidal to work on human rights,
particularly in those areas full of paramilitaries, Mr. Vivanco of Human
Rights Watch.

Mr. Castano, for instance, has declared Colombia's human rights community a
military target.

Observers said the large number of unsolved cases underscores the difficulty
of apprehending the militia leaders behind the killings.