CRISIS FACING COLOMBIANS IS CALLED WORST IN HEMISPHERE

UNITED NATIONS, May 10 - Colombia's drug wars have created the largest
crisis for civilians in the Americas, driving two million people from
their homes and threatening Indian tribes with extinction, a United
nations official said on Monday.

The official, Jan Egeland, the United Nations humanitarian
coordinator, said the country was mired in debt and reluctant to
divert military funds to an army of uprooted people escaping the
fighting or forced off their land by cocaine traffickers.

"Colombia is therefore by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of
the Western Hemisphere," he said at a news conference.

"It has the biggest number of killings in the Western Hemisphere. It's
the biggest humanitarian problem, human rights problem, the biggest
conflict in the Western hemisphere."

He said that only Sudan and Congo had more displaced
people.

In 10 isolated areas of Colombia, which aid groups cannot reach,
Indians are trapped in forests and on farms, many of them forced to
flee by drug lords or rightist paramilitary gangs, Mr. Egeland said.
Others have been killed.

He said he had spent a month in the area when he was 19 but now "all
my Indian friends have been dispersed or massacred."

In 2002, forced internal displacement reached an all-time high of
320,000 people uprooted. The accumulative numbers since then have
reached 2 million out of a country of 36 million people, threatening
forecasts that Colombia's $77 billion economy will expand some 4
percent this year, he said.

Many of the displaced are flooding into cities, including many young
people with "no hope, no education," making them ripe for recruitment
into guerrilla, paramilitary or drug gangs, Mr. Egeland said.

The uprooted people go to cities in large numbers, where they live in
shantytowns, like the one outside Cartagena, which has 10,000 people
"floating in a sea of sewage and garbage."

Mr. Egeland said he had discussed with President Álvaro Uribe a new
plan to coordinate foreign aid in the country. The United Nations last
appealed for $80 million in funds in 2002 but received only $33.6 million.