COLOMBIA

COLOMBIA WHEREAS in the past six months five journalists were killed, 14 were kidnapped and three were forced to leave the country after repeated death threats WHEREAS the armed conflict in Colombia has produced more violence and intimidation of the press WHEREAS the Colombian government has recognized the political status of and initiated formal negotiations with the left-wing Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), whose guerrillas have forced the El Tiempo daily managing editor into exile and are holding captive a kidnapped media executive WHEREAS Colombian army commanders have threatened journalists who work in zones of conflict WHEREAS amid the tense situation, the country’s Attorney General has expedited various stalled cases of murdered journalists THE IAPA EXECTIVE COMMITTEE RESOLVES to urge the Colombian government most actively and immediately to implement a journalists’ protection plan, whose creation was pledged by President Pastrana during his attendance of the October 1999 IAPA General Assembly in Houston to request President Pastrana demand that FARC guerrillas ¬¬¬– with whom his government is negotiating – respect the universal principle of press freedom, without which a negotiated, democratic solution of Colombia’s armed conflict is inconceivable to ask the Colombian government clearly instruct its security forces to neither consider journalists as “military objectives” in the zones of conflict nor hinder their work with intimidation or pressure to highlight the Attorney General’s Office advances in activating 16 trials for the murder of journalists and arrest 18 persons, among them the suspect accused of being behind the April 11, 1999 murder of Hernando Moreno Rangel.