COLOMBIA'S ANTI-TERRORIST EFFORTS DESERVE U.S. HELP

In 1996, retired Colombian General Farouk Yanine worked at the
Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C. His boss was two-star
U.S. General John Thompson. "One day he walked into my office and requested
time off," says General Thompson. "He said he wanted to return to Colombia
to answer charges that he had violated human rights." The accusation was
for crimes in a region that he had long since left when they supposedly
occurred.

General Yanine was a decorated soldier, confident of his innocence.
Colombians widely recognize that he pacified the Magdalena Medio region, a
hotbed of guerrilla activity. When he left his command there in 1985, the
population feted him. In 1988, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces --
FARC -- tried to kill him with a car bomb.

General Yanine was exonerated in court. But not before Colombia, under U.S.
pressure, placed him under house arrest for nine months. Exorbitant legal
fees exacted a huge toll. Later, because the U.S. revoked his visa, he was
unable to return to his Washington post. In early 1999, three active
Colombian generals underwent similar treatment; that was followed by more
officers being relieved of their duties in order to satisfy U.S. concerns
about accusations. This was done, despite the fact that actors sympathetic
to the guerrillas had infiltrated the government's investigative bodies and
amid claims that some witnesses had been bribed or intimidated. The U.S.
never committed resources to investigate these charges itself. The State
Department's Human Rights office in Bogota at the time had a staff of one.

Not a few pundits and politicians in the U.S. are warning against "getting
involved" in Colombia's war, now that Bogota has called off the peace
process and is getting tough. This is nonsense. The U.S. is already
neck-deep in Colombia. Its self-righteous and appallingly naive harassment
of a military at war is only one example. The U.S. is also the principal
market for Colombian cocaine, sales of which keep the FARC in business and
threaten to corrupt the legal system. The U.S. "source country" drug war
places the burden of prohibition on other nations, Colombia in particular.
Although failing to make a dent in U.S. supply, it has alienated peasants
and helped convert the countryside into a killing field.

Yet when Colombia asks the U.S. to share satellite intelligence about
guerrilla activity and to help train its military personnel, a hypocritical
Congress wrings its hands about U.S. "involvement." Unless the U.S. comes
to understand the dynamics of Colombian terrorism, including its own role
in it, things will only get worse. It may end up alienating a whole
country. For starters, Congress and the White House had better get hip to
the propaganda campaign now gearing up against presidential candidate
Alvaro Uribe, who not coincidentally, like the generals, takes a hard line
against the insurgents. And they had better come to understand the "human
right" of self-defense.

For three years Colombia tried to reason with the FARC. It ceded land; it
held "peace talks;" it worked for a cease-fire. In return, it got only more
violence. Earlier this year, in a stunning turnaround, President Andres
Pastrana changed course abruptly and decided to fight. Public opinion was
ahead of him. In presidential elections, just eight weeks away, Mr. Uribe
looks set to win a resounding victory in the first round.

Colombians now recognize that they must confront home-grown terrorism with
the kind of civilian-backed military strategy Mr. Uribe promotes. That's
bad news for rebels, who have had the country on the run. Not surprisingly,
the FARC has made a number of attempts to kill Mr. Uribe.

Another way that the guerrillas could destroy the leader of this nascent
campaign against them would be to give him the "Yanine treatment," by
suggesting collaboration with the paramilitary, spreading the word in Paris
cafes and Dutch churches and letting the U.S. skewer him. That effort is
well underway.

Mr. Uribe's real "crime" appears to be his success against the guerrillas
when he was governor of Antioquia. In an interview in 1997 he told me that
when he arrived as governor "guerrillas were all over the state. They were
kidnapping local people, trafficking in drugs , keeping illegal
plantations. Against them were the paramilitary. Wherever guerrillas
arrived in one place, sooner or later paramilitary arrived there too,
committing many similar crimes."

He saw this as a result of the power vacuum left by a weak state. He made
security a primary goal by supporting both the military and the notion that
rural peasants should be allowed to form communication networks for
defense. Some enemies of the rebels, no doubt, became ruthless as well. But
the practice of mobilizing the population was critical to Mr. Uribe's
successful campaign to suppress the rebels. By the time he left, the place
was pacified. One of the best generals in that effort was Rito Alejo del
Rio, another victim of the State Department intervention mentioned above.

In a monograph published by the U.S. Army War College, Maoist insurgency
expert Thomas Marks lays out what Colombia is up against. To start with
there's the rebel control of coca cash. "FARC did not become a serious
factor due to mobilization of an alienated mass base. Rather it became a
serious factor due to the power which came from drugs grown by a
marginalized population."

Secondly there is the Maoist strategy. To mobilize this power, Mr. Marks
says, "FARC utilizes the tripartite approach embodied in Maoist insurgency
- -- mass line (development of clandestine infrastructure), united front (use
of fellow travelers, both internally and abroad, witting and un-witting,
especially human rights organizations), and military action."

And third there is the contradiction between the need for civilian defense
and the taboo the U.S. assigns it. "By refusing to work with Bogota to find
an approach to popular mobilization that will work, Washington has made the
situation much, much worse. Indeed, it has demanded that the military
spread itself still more thinly by 'going after' yet another foe, the
autodefensas [self-defense groups.]"

In the wild Colombian countryside, the need to legalize rural population
defense is critical. It is a human right. Mr. Marks says that, "By refusing
to mobilize the population, Bogota ensures that people's war is waged out
of control in every nook and cranny. By encouraging Colombia to adhere to
this misguided approach, the U.S. pours oil on the flames. The result in
many areas is pathos." That's an involvement that the U.S. might want to
reconsider.