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...Commission is planning other reforms over the next few weeks, including a relocation policy, whereby refugees who land on the shores of Europe's Mediterranean countries would be transferred to other E.U. member states. In theory, the measures could make the E.U. a secure haven for refugees from the world's trouble spots. But nervous European governments will have to open their doors far wider if they want to staunch the perilous Mediterranean crossings that thousands make every year...
Last year, 380,000 Colombians were forced off their land amid fighting between rebels, paramilitaries and the army, a 24% increase from 2007's figure, according to the Bogotá-based human-rights group Codhes (the Spanish acronym for the Human Rights and Displacement Office). Colombian officials, in turn, put the number of displaced at 294,000 for just the first six months of last year. "It's the million-dollar question," Marie-Helene Verney, spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Colombia, says of the perplexing trend. "Something is going on." (See pictures...
What's happening, analysts say, is that rather than winding down, the country's 45-year conflict is evolving. In the 1990s and in the first half of this decade, campesinos were often driven off their land en masse by rebels or their foes, the paramilitaries. Following Mao's advice to separate the water from the fish, the warring factions depopulated the land to disrupt the enemy's civilian support network. According to Codhes, such scorched-earth tactics have uprooted more than 4.5 million people since 1985, leaving Colombia (pop. 45 million) with the world's second largest population...
...number of new armed groups at eight. But the New Rainbow Foundation, a Colombian NGO that investigates the war, puts the number at 82 and says they have between 4,000 and 10,000 fighters. The militias often clash with guerrillas and with each other for control of land that can be used for growing coca - the raw material for cocaine - or for smuggling narcotics. (See pictures from Colombia's drug underworld...
Human-rights groups also accuse these new militias of working hand-in-glove with legitimate businesses to take control of large swaths of land to mine gold, drill for petroleum and produce palm oil for Colombia's booming biofuels industry. Says Jorge Rojas, who heads Codhes, "In almost every case where there is a big palm-oil development, there is widespread forced displacement." Adding to the confusion, members of the Colombian Army have been accused of killing civilians and dressing them up as rebels and of driving farmers off their land in guerrilla strongholds...