Fr. Brendan Forde, Colombia

“When I was in Central America there was a villager who said to us: When soldiers burned our village they said this is the law, so I thought the law meant the right of the army to kill us.” Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje.

I live in Colombia and I am a member of a Franciscan itinerant community which accompanies the victims of violence and intimidation by different armed groups. For the past year I have lived with the Kogi indigenous people that inhabit the Sierra Nevada in the north of Colombia. The Kogi are profoundly spiritual. The Sierra where they live is the first creation of La Madre, the religious leader of the Kogi. The Sierra is the origin and centre of the rest of the world, and they the Kogi were created to protect it. In their hills live the “Mothers and Fathers” of all existence, hence the harmony of the whole cosmos depends on the care and veneration they give to the Sierra. They are responsible for the whole world. They are our “Older Brothers and Sisters” and only they have the wisdom to carry out this responsibility. They say when the last Kogi dies, the cosmos dies also. When the Spaniards arrived 500 hundred years ago they numbered 300,000 but now there are about 5,000 left.

Two years ago the armed groups invaded their mountain. The Farc, the left-wing guerrilla army, prevent the Kogi from going to their sacred places, where they listen to La Madre and discern what she wants them to do. Likewise, the AUC, the rightwing paramilitary group and the allies of the government army, control the foot of their mountain and stop food supplies reaching the community. They have killed six Kogi this year. When one of the Kogi protested to the leader of the paramilitaries he was told “We have a right to kill Indians”. Ironically, the Kogi call us, the white people, “the civilised”.

In this conference, it has been mentioned that women and children are particularly vulnerable to human rights abuse. I would like to put on record that in all my years, having lived in various countries and with different ethnic groups, I have never met a people who treat their children with such respect and gentleness. They never raise a hand or a voice to them and although they are very poor materially they are the happiest children I have ever met.

Colombia has good laws to protect the indigenous. The problem is they are not put into practice. Laws are very strange. They all depend where you are looking at them from. When laws are promulgated in the stately buildings of the great cities they can appear very reasonable and just. When they arrive at the villages and mountains they are usually accompanied by machine guns and bayonets. Laws for the poor mean that the army has the right to take their lands and kill their people. A piece of paper written in some unknown city has more power than the existence and permanence of a people who have lived on their land for over a thousand years.

Recently there has been much talk of the Kyoto Treaty and the protection of the environment. Much money and time are spent on meetings. Here in Colombia the Kogi people sees this not as a task, but as the whole purpose of their lives. Their mission is to make sure they respect creation so that there is peace and harmony in the whole world. For them there is no material gain. They do this for all of us. And now we the “civilized” are killing them.

I leave the last word to one of their leaders Jose Gabriel Alinako: “You the whitemen are destroying the earth which is our mother. You are destroying the lakes, the rivers and the trees. You are poisoning the air and killing the animals and now you are killing us. Who is going to defend our Mother? Who is going to defend us?”