Mennonite Weekly Review

On May 31, the Israeli military entered international waters, raided a six-ship flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, and killed nine activists.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

In response to the international outcry, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to allow a U.N. committee to investigate — with the proviso that it would not question Israeli military personnel.

Among the appointments to the U.N. Panel of Inquiry, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon named outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe as vice chair.

Given that that Uribe’s government has sent Colombian military officers to Israel for training and received support from the Israeli military for Colombian counter-insurgency activities, the appointment seems inappropriate.

Uribe’s military connections with Israel are not the only problem. This is the same Alvaro Uribe who referred to human rights organizations as “rent-a-mobs at terrorism’s service who cowardly wave the human rights flag.”

His government tried to deny a U.N. human rights commission the right to publish a report on Colombia and later complained about U.N. investigator Philip Alston when Alston reported that the Colombian military “committed a significant number of unlawful killings in a pattern that was repeated around the country.”

Among these killings were thousands of civilians kidnapped (or lured to remote areas with the promise of employment), murdered by the military and presented as “guerrillas killed in combat,” for which military personnel received financial rewards, promotions or vacations abroad.

The Colombian military referred to these victims as “false positives” — a “positive” being military lingo for a dead guerrilla.

When an international human rights mission investigated a mass grave containing about 2,000 bodies next to a military base in the town of Macarena, Uribe paid a solidarity visit to the soldiers at the base, rather than the victims’ families.

Referring to the human rights workers who publicized the war crime, Uribe told the soldiers: “Terrorism combines means of struggle, so some of their spokespersons talk of peace; others come here to La Macarena to look for ways to discredit the armed forces and to implicate it in human rights violations. We will not fall into that trap. Stay firm!”