SEEKING THE TRUTH ABOUT A MASSACRE IN A COLOMBIAN HAMLET

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe told me in New York last week that
he will seek ways to help Colombian military personnel pay their
lawyers when they are accused of human rights violations.

"I will figure out how to help them," Mr. Uribe said, stressing that
"every day in Colombia we receive fewer and fewer accusations against
the army and the police" because of reforms to professionalize the forces.

Mr. Uribe's pledge to provide legal assistance to accused soldiers --
as is the practice in the U.S. -- is only fair. But it is just part
of what needs to be done to counteract one of the most effective
tools used by the Colombian terrorists: judicial warfare.

For years, the country's Marxist guerrillas (known by the Spanish
acronym FARC) have been undermining military morale and effectiveness
through expensive legal action in the courts.

The strategy has been adopted because of Washington's policy that
says that any officer "credibly" accused of a human rights violation
must be relieved of duty; failure to do so risks the interruption of
U.S. funding to the war effort. So for the guerrillas, pressing false
charges is a win-win; it means either the removal of the accused or a
cutoff in aid. Absolution after years of investigation isn't much
consolation for an officer whose career has been ruined.

Granting the accused military personnel defense counsel will help.
But it would also help if accusers -- including grandstanding U.S.
politicians and money-grubbing "human rights" groups who want to
collect "damages" -- were held more accountable. As it is now, there
are no ramifications when efforts to frame the military are proved fraudulent.

An example of the problem is next month's trial of three Colombian
air force personnel accused of bombing the hamlet of Santo Domingo in
the eastern province of Arauca in December 1998. The case illustrates
how the rebels use local populations as human shields, as accomplices
in their drug trafficking businesses and as accusers in judicial warfare.

"Santo Domingo" is useful too, in dramatizing how the U.S. imposition
of the "war on drugs" intensifies civil conflicts around the region.
The cocaine business makes terrorists rich, peasants dependent on
them and soldiers vulnerable to human rights dilemmas.

The case begins in late 1998, when Colombian intelligence intercepted
FARC communications detailing cocaine-trafficking plans near Santo
Domingo. When a small private plane landed on the only paved road in
the area on Dec. 12, the military was waiting.

So was a group of locals, including women and children, who went to
unload the aircraft.

The military had to alter its plan of attack because of the civilians
involved in handling the plane's cargo.

The cocaine disappeared into the countryside. Nevertheless, the army
was able to deploy troops and a week of fighting ensued.

It was the death of 17 individuals, at least three of them children,
which resulted in charges against the air force that it had bombed the town.

In the first half of 1999, a military court looked at the evidence
and ruled that the crew was not at fault.

But the matter was later reopened by the air force, under pressure
from the U.S. State Department and sent to Colombia's civilian judicial system.

One branch of the judiciary ruled in favor of disciplinary action
even though it did not review all of the evidence. The attorney
general's office is now taking up the matter, with the aircraft's
crew accused of negligence.

One reason why the truth about the incident has been slow to emerge
is that the most critical evidence -- a videotape which recorded
events on the ground during the week in question -- came from the
civilian contractor Air Scan. Court documents say that Air Scan was
hired by Occidental Petroleum to provide surveillance to the area's
oil pipeline, Cano Limon. It may be that the involvement of civilian
aircraft in a military operation was something the military was in no
hurry to disclose.

Nevertheless the tape, which displays GMT time as it runs, is now
public and offers strong evidence that the charges against the air
force were trumped up.

Both sides agree that an air force "cluster bomb" was dropped at
three seconds after 10 a.m. on Dec. 13. But while the accusers say it
was dropped on the town, the air force says it was dropped in a
wooded area some 800-1000 meters outside the town where the battle was raging.

The videotape corroborates the air force version by showing there was
no damage in the town hours after the alleged bombing.

An old red truck parked in the center of town and a gasoline station
at the corner, which the accusers say the bomb destroyed, are
completely intact on the same afternoon.

It seems also likely that the "crime scene" was tampered with by the
guerrillas. Two FARC defectors present during the week-long battle
told the Colombian media and a non-government organization called
Verdad Colombia (True Colombia) that the guerrillas had adopted a
strategy to blame the Air Force for FARC-induced civilian casualties.

The defectors say that the guerrillas had booby-trapped the red truck
to explode when the army came into the town. "They put a mortar round
in that truck.

They also put in ANFO [an Ammonium Nitrate-Fuel Oil explosive
mixture], a detonating cord and shrapnel," one of the ex-FARC
fighters told Caracol television news. When the truck exploded by
accident ahead of schedule, he says that an order was given: "People
have to be told that the air force dropped a bomb."

The other defector told Caracol that after the truck exploded, "The
movement of wounded and dead was started; some were brought in from
the bush, that is, deaths that did not occur at the moment of the
explosion." If bodies were moved from the wooded battlefield, it
would explain why an FBI report concluded that the wounds of the dead
suggested a cluster bomb.

These two FARC defectors are scheduled to join a U.S. witness
protection program because they have given important information
about cocaine trafficking to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Word
is that their departure from Colombia will come before they can
appear at a pre-trial hearing in October, in which case their
testimony may be lost. That would be a crime.

Washington and Bogota are asking brave young Colombian men to fight
the war on drugs.

Is it too much to ask in return that the truth about "judicial
warfare" be sought?