COLOMBIA:More people are killed and maimed in Colombia by mines than any other country in the world, writes Juan Forero in Bogotá
Colombia's largest rebel group, already accused of executing 11 civilian hostages last month, has been accused by Human Rights Watch of increasingly planting landmines that kill and maim more people than in any other country in the world. The mines killed or hurt 1,113 people last year, nearly a third of them civilians.
The report, Maiming the People, says the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, which has been fighting the state since 1964, has sown anti-personnel mines throughout the country to slow an increasingly offensive-minded army. The smaller National Liberation Army, or ELN, has also been using mines widely.
Human Rights Watch says Colombia bucks a worldwide trend that has seen governments and rebel groups shift away from using mines.
"The only place these weapons are constant, where they use them and where they justify them as weapons of the people - for being cheap and easy to make - is Colombia," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of the group.
"Because of the guerrillas, these weapons are causing more and more deaths to civilians in Colombia. It's incredible that the Farc and ELN continue acting with such scorn for fundamental values."
The report appeared likely to further tarnish the Farc, which remains a potent force but has little public support. Last month, the rebels revealed that 11 regional politicians the group had kidnapped in 2002 were killed in a Farc camp. The government characterised the slayings as cold-blooded murder.
The rebels have defended their use of mines. Francisco Galan, a spokesman for the ELN, told Human Rights Watch that international humanitarian law did not apply to the group.
Farc claims it does not target civilians. Raul Reyes, a spokesman for the group, said in a recent interview with Colombia Journal, an online report, that "the minefields are used against the public forces, never against the civilian population, never". He acknowledged that civilians sometimes suffer but said that "the norm is that one must try and ensure that there are no civilian casualties". However, government statistics show that last year 320 civilians stepped on mines, 66 of them children. Fifty-seven civilians died.
Alvaro Jimenez, who directs the Colombian chapter of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, said mines not only kill and maim but have led whole farming communities to abandon towns laden with mines. That has worsened the hemisphere's most serious humanitarian crisis, which has seen three million people displaced from their homes in the last two decades, according to the UN.