UK Government: "Encouraging" Guatemala on Peace Accords
| June 30th, 2006This December it will have been ten years since the Peace Accords (Acuerdo de Paz Firme y Duradera) were signed in Guatemala after 36 years of civil war. As a campaigning group in the UK, we have always been really interested in what the UK government's view is on the issue of bringing the perpertrators of genocide in Guatemala during the civil war to justice.
In a recent exchange with the government, Tom Levitt MP asked two questions on the human rights situation in Guatemala. A GSN member followed up the responses by asking Tom Levitt MP if he could get clarification from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on a number of points. Mr Levitt got the following response (24-06-06) from Lord Triesman as the Minister responsible for Latin America.
When the UK government says “they [Guatemala government] have accepted responsibility for atrocities, apologised and arranged compensation”. Of course, as with all government- speak there is a grain of truth in this, with, for example, the setting up of the National Compensation Programme (Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento). But the process of compensation has yet to have reached anywhere near fruition- and is starting to lose its way. Certainly this is not enough to warrant Lord Triesman's rosy assessment.
The central point remains: the Peace Accords were signed nearly ten years ago and the Guatemalan government has never accepted, nor apologised for, nor arranged compensation for the crime of genocide. Because of this, but certainly not solely because of this, the cases against the perpertrators of genocide who remain in Guatemala, have avoided just punishment for their crimes. You need look no further than the latest debacle where Rios Montt was shielded from the Spanish investigation into his responsibility for genocide crimes last week (30-06-06), by the Guatemalan Constitutional Court.
Yeh ok you guys already know this. But our point here in the UK, is that the UK government has been careful to avoid describing the mass killings in Guatemala in the 1980s as genocide; it prefers the more generic term 'human rights abuses' in Guatemala (see Lord Triesman's response above, but also Douglas Alexander's response to Tom Levitt in Parliament).
We have, perhaps because of this, had difficulty in getting the All Parliamentary Party Group on Genocide Prevention to even consider Guatemala as part of its remit. We will continue to push the UK government for clarification on this point.
