MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

De Roux delivers final report on Colombia's civil war to UN Security Council

“War damages everything it touches, it damages the attacked ones and those who are attacked,” De Roux stressed

Colombian Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux, who chairs the country's Truth Committee stemming from the peace agreement with former guerrilla fighters, Thursday appeared before the United Nations Security Council to deliver his team's final report.

De Roux's group penned during the last three years results of hundreds of hearings with victims, perpetrators, social organizations, and exiles from the domestic armed conflicts.

“I have come to tell you that the task is finished, a task that you have unanimously supported, here is the task,” De Roux told the Security Council plenary.

The Catholic priest insisted that the report opened questions about why Colombia reached the levels of barbarism it did and how to go bout it from now on so that things like it do not happen again: a conflict in which four out of every five victims were non-combatants.

“We have sought answers as to why this happened” and understood that “war is not simple” and that once unleashed, cultural, political, economic, and criminal “interests” unfold, leaving “an ethical vacuum, a forgetfulness of every human being,” De Roux explained.

“War damages everything it touches, it damages the attacked ones and those who are attacked,” he added.

De Roux then proposed a change to the “security system” in force in Colombia. “We made armed security to give security to the power, to the apparatus, to the properties, to the companies, even security to take care of the armed bureaucracy itself. But there was not enough security to take care of the people, the human being, that is why in the Colombian war eight out of every 10 dead were civilians,” he insisted while asking the international community not to give Colombia any more tools for war.

“That is why we ask today that if there are to be armies, they should be armies and police for peace, not for war, and we ask the international community not to give us anything for war; we want to make Colombia a world paradigm of reconciliation, after so much suffering,” the priest said while he also called for an end to the “war against drug trafficking” because it is planned in such a way that it only increases “the profits of the business” and does not come to an end.

“I hope that the lesson of Colombia will keep us away from wars on all sides forever and lead us to passionately seek the truth and the dignity of the human being. For Colombia and for the world there is a future if there is truth,” he added.