Colombia: UN agency voices renewed concern over mass displacements from conflict
Fighting between irregular armed groups in southern Colombia, threats and targeted killings of civilians are continuing
to sow tension in a region where more than 9,000 people have been forced to flee their homes this year, the United
Nations refugee agency reported today.
The absence of state institutions, including health and education, and the lack of stable economic opportunities are
compounding the situation in Nariño department, just one area of a country where more than four decades of civil
conflict have driven 2.5 million people from their homes, according to a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) team
just back from the region.
“The team found that protection concerns in the region remain high and extend to much of the civilian population,
including displaced persons and communities at high risk of forced displacement as well as those who have recently
returned,” UNHCR spokesman William Spindler told a news briefing in Geneva.
“In such a difficult environment, people in several locations showed a clear reluctance to talk,” he said.
Colombia contains the largest population of concern to UNHCR in any country in the world as more than 40 years of
fighting between the Government, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries have hit most regions of the Andean
country.
The team reported that there have been more cases of forced displacement in Nariño in the past few weeks. The village of
Santa Lucia, for example, is now empty following heavy combat between irregular armed groups at the end of May. Many
people are going to the provincial capital of Pasto.
The department, in the south-west of the country and bordering Ecuador, is one of Colombia's poorest and least developed
regions, with a population of about half a million. Ethnic minorities make up a relatively large percentage (8 per cent
indigenous and 18 per cent Afro-Colombians) and are very badly affected by the conflict.
This is the case all over Colombia, with a much higher incidence of forced displacement among ethnic minorities than in
the rest of the population.
In April UNHCR warned that a humanitarian emergency was looming for the indigenous communities, with some threatened
with extinction the armed groups encroached upon their land, even torturing and killing their leaders. It stressed the
close links these communities have to their ancestral land, on which their cultural survival depends.