Colombia apologises for military's extrajudicial killings of civilians

Colombia’s government has issued a long-awaited public apology for the extrajudicial killings of 19 civilians who were slain by the military and registered as rebel fighters during one of the most violent periods of the nation’s civil war.

“These (killings) should have never happened,” Defence Minister Ivan Velasquez said on Tuesday at an event in front of the nation’s congress attended by the victims' relatives.

“We ask you to forgive us for these crimes that embarrass us in front of the world,” Velasquez said in a speech.

At Tuesday's event, the mothers, sisters, sons and daughters of the 19 victims were invited to speak. Many carried photos of the victims, and wore t-shirts with their names.

While the relatives thanked the defence minister for attending the event and issuing an apology, most said they were not ready to forgive.

And they said the ones who should be apologising to them are the politicians that were leading Colombia when the murders of their relatives occurred, including Juan Manuel Santos, who was Colombia’s defence minister between 2006 and 2009.

“Santos should be the one who shows his face here and asks for forgiveness,” said Florinda Hernandez, whose son Elkin Gustavo Hernandez, was murdered by the military in January of 2008. “We don’t want this to happen again, and we are still seeking justice for the murders of so many people.”

The apology comes as Colombia’s government attempts to make amends with communities affected by decades of armed conflict and broker peace deals with rebel groups that are still fighting the military in rural areas despite a 2016 peace deal between the government and the nation’s largest rebel group.

“False positives”

The killings took place between 2004 and 2008 as Colombia’s military intensified its campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — the rebel group that made peace with the government in 2016.

The killings involved young men from poor neighbourhoods who were lured away from their homes with false promises of jobs in other parts of the country.

Once they arrived at their destinations, the victims were shot by soldiers who dressed their corpses in camouflage, or placed weapons next to their bodies, and presented them to their superiors as rebels killed in combat in order to secure promotions and vacation time.

Courts in Colombia have been ordering the government to apologise for these cases —known here as “false positives” — since 2015, as part of a set of reparation measures which also included prison sentences for some of the soldiers and officers involved.

But the administrations of Presidents Juan Manuel Santos and Ivan Duque had skirted around the orders to apologise in public because they were reluctant to recognise that during the nation's armed conflict the military committed war crimes that were just as serious as those carried out by rebel groups, said Gimena Sanchez, a Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin Americaö a human rights group.

Sanchez said the recently elected government of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, has been more willing to collaborate with investigations into war crimes, including those undertaken by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a transitional justice system created by the 2016 peace deal.

“This is incredibly important to the victims families,” Sanchez said. “Those family members had to deal with the stigma of supposedly being family members of guerrillas.”

According to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, Colombia’s military committed at least 6,402 extrajudicial killings between 2002 and 2008, as commanders pressured their troops to provide more results on the battlefield, and placed an emphasis on increasing the number of enemy casualties.

The peace tribunal recently charged a former commander of Colombia’s army for the murders of 130 civilians between 2002 and 2003 in Antioquia province.