Transcript
PROCEEDING
MS. FERRIS: Okay. Good morning, everyone. My name is Beth Ferris. I’m a Senior Fellow here at the Brookings Institution and Co-Director of the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement.
Welcome to this event on Internal Displacement and Peacebuilding in Colombia. Colombia, of course, has a large number of internally displaced persons (IDPs), the second largest number in the world after Sudan. Colombia is also a country of contradictions with perhaps the best laws and policies in the world related to IDPs and yet sections of the country in which the laws are not acted on.
We’re joined on the video screen by Roberto Vidal of the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. Can you hear okay, Roberto?
MR. VIDAL: Yes. Yes, I can hear you.
MS. FERRIS: And we can hear you as well. So we’ll come to you in just a minute. I wanted to begin by saying that for the past couple of years we’ve been working with the Swiss Foreign Ministry and with Universidad Javeriana to look at the relationship between peacebuilding or construction of peace and internal displacement.
In most conflicts if there is a normal pattern, there’s a war, a conflict that displaces people, eventually there’s a peace agreement, and then processes of reconciliation and demobilization take place, a time in which solutions are found for internally displaced persons.
In Colombia, the process is different. The peace process is either nonexistent or stalled, and yet the government has taken measures to begin reconciliation -- peacebuilding, if you will. So we’re looking at the process of finding solutions for internally displaced persons while peace processes are still underway.
Our program this morning will begin with introductory comments by Ambassador Greminger from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. He is head of the Political Affairs Division IV which, in Swiss terms, deals with issues of human security, human rights, humanitarian affairs, migration and so on. We’ll then hear from Roberto Vidal. Roberto is a Professor of International Law at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, and he, together with his colleagues, have carried out the study which you have hopefully all received here. Unfortunately, in spite of lots of efforts over many months, Roberto was unable to get a visa to come to the U.S. for this event, and therefore we’re using our new technology to bring him not into our living room but into our meeting room to share with us the results of his study. He’ll speak for about 15 minutes, summarizing his research.
And we’ll then have two commentators. The first will be Veronica Gomez from the Inter-America Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and then Gimena Sanchez from the Washington Office on Latin America, both of whom have many years of experience in Colombia.
There are further details on the biographical background of all of our speakers in your introductory packet.
But now let me introduce Ambassador Greminger. You’re most welcome to the United States and to Brookings, and we look forward to the program. Thanks.
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