U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124.

Transcript

Laura Coates: Joining us now, though, is Steve Hege, the USIP's regional deputy director for Columbia. Good morning, Steve, how are you?

Steve Hege: Very good, Laura. Thanks so much for having me.

Laura Coates: I'm glad that you're here with us today. I'm learning about this thing called the Searching for Colombia's Missing. What is this?

Steve Hege: Yeah, Laura, thank you so much. As USIP, we're happy to have the chance to host at our Washington headquarters today the launch of a public exhibit of photographs and a documentary which outlines the work of Columbia's Missing Persons Search Unit, which was created by the 2016 peace accords with the FARC, one of many armed groups in Colombia, in the midst of an ongoing armed conflict which is now dating back over six decades. The Missing Persons Search Unit has a mandate to help to trace, identify and then return the remains of the more than 100,000 missing persons that have been forcefully disappeared throughout the context of Columbia's ongoing war. And this is a really inspiring effort, humanitarian effort, in the midst of, as I said, ongoing peace efforts with other armed groups, and something that the Missing Persons Search Unit is going to be able to highlight through this exhibit, and particularly some of the testimonies of victims themselves and even some perpetrators who are accepting responsibility for their role in forcefully disappearing Colombians.

Laura Coates: Did you say 100,000 people? I mean, take a step back for us. For people who might not know what's going on, what would have led to 100,000 disappearances?

Steve Hege: So we have an ongoing conflict, which is as I said dating back to one of the longest running armed groups, the National Liberation Army, which just completed 60 years of existence. And throughout the course of that armed conflict, there's been 10 million registered victims. So the numbers are probably much larger than that in terms of just victims of the armed conflict itself. So that's roughly one in five, so 20%, of the Colombian population itself has been officially registered as a victim of the armed conflict. And then as a subset of that, you have those registered cases of individuals who have been registered as having been disappeared, and their whereabouts are still unknown. And so what the Missing Persons Search Unit tries to do is a really fascinating search process in which they gather as much evidence, DNA evidence of family survivors, they gather evidence from individuals who have been a part of the armed conflict, from different armed groups that have demobilized, or current armed groups that are still there, to try to find these mass grave sites and then connect the remains with those families and return them in in a dignified fashion that corresponds to the different cultural norms of both indigenous, Afro-Colombian and mestizo populations across Colombia.

Laura Coates: I mean, there's a process now, in addition to trying to find and locate and return the loved ones, I mean, reconciliation and repair for what must be a torn social fabric that's been caused by this six decades of conflict.

Steve Hege: Absolutely. And I think there's been, you know, those amongst Colombia's most prominent victims will tell you, there is no more damaging victimization or occurrence than having loved ones for which there isn't a closure, that there isn't a process of grief that can be completed both in culturally sensitive ways, or just human ways in which we all grieve those that are loved ones who we lost in the context of really traumatic violence. And when remains can be identified and returned to their families, it's tremendously healing. And I will say as well, I mean, we'll have a chance in our launch events at our headquarters to hear specifically from individuals who have assumed responsibility from the armed forces, but many others from former guerrilla groups as well. When they accept responsibility and they provide further details about what may have occurred in the circumstances that generated a loved one's forced disappearance, this is even more healing and it really takes the process to a much deeper level for the victims in, sort of, restoring their own dignity, restoring the dignity of the narratives of the lives of the people that they've lost, and bringing some sense of closure to their grief so that they can continue to think about their lives, think about the role that they need to play in their communities, again, in the context of really egregious, ongoing armed conflict.

Laura Coates: It strikes me, of course, that for people to engage in this sort of behavior it suggests that just having an incentive of because it's the right thing to do is not going to be enough. What's the role of the government in trying to force this to come to pass?

Steve Hege: So there's a number of incentives, judicial incentives, that were created in the framework of the 2016 peace agreement with the former FARC, which do allow for alternative sanctions for both former members of the military as well as former members of the FARC. And that's just one armed group. There's, depending on how you count, there's four or five major armed groups across the country and then a whole range of smaller sort of criminal structures. But these incentives from the 2016 peace accord do allow for a reduced sentence. They do allow for alternative ways of carrying out that sentence, such as more restorative works to repair the social fabric that they've caused, the harm that they've caused to that social fabric. So there is that traditional incentive. But what we found is more than anything, a lot of perpetrators who accept responsibility and contribute to and even accompany victims in the search for their loved ones, going out to these mass grave sites. There's also just a human incentive of wanting to regain their own dignity and understanding the recognition from them, from their own lives, that the war and conflict really dehumanize them in so many ways, and that this way of engaging in what we call restorative justice efforts is a way to recover their own dignity, their own self-respect, and in some way regain a foothold in Colombian society, to be able to contribute in one way or another constructively,

Laura Coates: Really important to have this information. Thank you so much for joining us, Steve. And how can people, if they're in the D.C. area, how can they see the exhibit?

Steve Hege: Anyone who's in the D.C. area is more than welcome to join the public launch event this afternoon, from 3:30 to 5:00 at our Washington D.C. USIP headquarters, 2301 Constitution Avenue. And on our website, they can find a way to register, and everyone is more than welcome. And the exhibit and the documentary will be on display for the next month or so at our headquarters, and people can access tickets there online to be able to come in at any time.

Laura Coates: Thank you so much. Great talk to you.

Steve Hege: Thank you, Laura. I appreciate it.