Latin America | Politics

Legitimizing Non-State Combatants: The FARC Case

In a surprising announcement earlier this year, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez declared that the FARC are not a terrorist organization but rather “legitimate belligerents,” and should therefore not be treated as criminals by the Colombian Government. This declaration, and subsequent actions by Chávez giving de facto legitimacy to the FARC, have triggered a heated global debate among politicians, political scientists and bloggers both about the Venezuelan President’s intentions as well as the legal and political implications of granting the FARC the status of “legitimate belligerent”.

It is not my purpose here to explore Mr Chavez’ continued agenda of interference in his neighbors’ internal affairs – given its complexity, this is a topic that should be treated separately. But as a first step it is useful to evaluate to what extent the FARC can be entitled to a legitimate belligerent status.

In intra-State wars four criteria can help determine the legitimate combatancy of armed movements: military command structure, observance of war conventions, political goals, and popular representativeness. To what extent does the FARC meet these criteria? It is true that the FARC is indeed organized along military lines. But on the other three criteria the “People’s Army” falls short.

According to the Just War doctrine, war should be governed by the principle of distinction: i.e. acts of war should be directed towards enemy combatants and not towards non-combatants caught in circumstances they did not create. Contrary to this doctrine, over the last 15 years the FARC has committed unaccountable crimes against civilians in Colombia, indiscriminately using land mines in heavily populated zones, forcing the displacement of entire towns, recruiting underage boys and girls, and carrying out a methodic policy of kidnappings - according to some estimates the FARC currently holds 750 hostages, some of whom have remained captive for more than 10 years.

On political goals, maybe the organization was conceived by its founders as a vehicle to seize power and change social structures in Colombia, as its Marxist postulates imply, and maybe at some point it represented the political and moral views of a non-negligible segment of the Colombian population. Today, however, the FARC lack a coherent political agenda and it is not daring to argue that the organization wages war for economic gain only: it has set up a vast drug-trafficking network through which it collects hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Moreover, the FARC are involved in the traffic of arms and extortion of local entrepreneurs, which are both very profitable activities. According to the BBC, the FARC probably is the richest insurgent group in the world and according to various estimates earns between USD 200-400 million each year from the drug trade.

Finally, it is extremely hard to conceive of the FARC as an organization that represents the views of the Colombian people, after the huge demonstrations that took place last month in the largest cities of Colombia, as millions of citizens showed their contempt for FARC’s policy of violence against civilians. Today, the FARC can hardly be considered to act as moral proxy of the Colombian people, or even a substantial segment of it.

The actions that the FARC has conducted during the last 15 years are those of a terrorist organization, and therefore its members are nothing but criminals. The FARC’s record on the observance of war conventions is very poor, it lacks a genuine political agenda, and it is hardly representative. It cannot be a legitimate belligerent.

Ironically, if the FARC were granted legitimate belligerent status, maybe the Colombian justice system would not be legally entitled to prosecute the organization’s main leaders, but they could then be judged by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.

© 2008 The Discomfort Zone.