Colombia to recruit 15,000 armed peasants for support

BOGOTA, Colombia -- President Alvaro Uribe's government plans to arm 15,000 peasants to support the armed forces in the fight against outlawed rebel and paramilitary groups, Colombia's defense minister said Thursday.

The recruits will receive military training, and a small salary paid for by a new 1.2 percent war tax being imposed on higher-income businesses and individuals in Colombia, Defense Minister Martha Lucia Ramirez said in a radio interview. The recruitment is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

The government is obtaining cost estimates for assault rifles, machine guns, mortars and grenade launchers from U.S. and European arms manufacturers, according to media reports. Uniforms and boots are also being made for the mainly poor farmers, who will live in their homes and protect their own neighborhoods.

Analysts and human rights monitors say the plan risks turning neutral civilians into targets of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, or the paramilitaries.

"You are turning these people -- as a legal matter, as a practical matter -- into combatants," said Arturo Carrillo, a professor and human rights law expert at Columbia University in New York. "If and when the FARC starts going after these people, they will not be in violation of international law."

The fighting pits the FARC and another leftist guerrilla group against Colombia's U.S.-backed military and the right-wing paramilitaries.

In theory, government forces are to back the peasant-soldiers in the event of an attack. But there are no government forces in 186 of the 1,000 counties, barely so in 227 others.