Declaration of the Women´s Consultation for Peace, Colombia

Declaration of the Women´s Consultation for Peace,
8 - 9 May 2002, Bogotá, Colombia

(Free translation)

Resistance to the War
In all modesty, but also with all determination of spirit, I propose that we make now and here a commitment to build and produce a memory ark capable of surviving the atomic flood. A bottle with sideral survivors thrown at the oceans of time, for the new humanity to learn from us what the cockroaches will not be able to tell them.

That there was life here, that suffering and injustice prevailed, but that we also knew about love and were even able to imagine happiness.

Gabriel García Márquez.

The women gathered in Bogotá on the 8th and 9th of May 2002 manifest that:
1. The countless facts produced by the machinery of war, as an expression of the authoritative power and the systematic violation of human rights and International Humanitarian Law, place us openly against the war. We make an appeal to resist the different prejudices, to redeem life, to achieve political and autonomous practice in the communities at the regions and towns..

2. Due to the deterioration of the armed conflict in Colombia, we denounce facts that are not told about the war, like the sexual violations to which women are submitted in regions where there is confrontation among the armed actors, like intimidation in case of socio-political participation, forced domestic labour, prohibitions to bury the dead and the forced displacement, all of which damage the physical integrity and dignity of women. The construction of peace is the result of the political negotiation of the armed conflict, of the economic, social and cultural conflicts affecting the Colombian society and of the construction of shared living where conflicts turn into empowerments for new relations to deal with the differences.

We demand from all armed conflicts:

1. Respect of the human rigths and International Humanitarian Law
2. Non usage of the civil population as human shield or military target during confrontations and hostilities
3. Rejection of the bodies of women as a war territory
4. Undertaking of a strong national and international campaign documenting the violations of human rights and international humanitarian law as well as the resistance against war

We, the women gathered at the National Consultation, in the context of diversity and difference, commit ourselves to keep our process moving closer to the construction of a new country. In this moment we give path to the pain that makes our bodies to shiver in the face of the ethnic genocide in the Choacan region . We demand justice and reparation. Punishment to the responsible State officers and armed actors manouevring at the ethnic territories.

Finally, we make an appeal to offer solidarity to the communities of Bojayá and Vigía and to continue resisting the war so that life may flowrish.

9 May 2002. Bogotá- Colombia.