TerrorismColombia Grants Amnesty to IRA Bombmakers

Last Wednesday, a Colombian court granted amnesty to three alleged IRA members, known as the “Colombia Three.” The decision put an end to a legal journey that saw the trio sentenced to seventeen years in jail for helping FARC, the Colombian leftist insurgency movement, produce explosives and build bombs.

The three have not served their sentence because they had managed to flee Colombia shortly before they could be imprisoned.

A judge with Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) was quoted by Colombian daily El Tiempo as saying that “despite the sentences,” there was not proof that “the three had been part of a terrorist group. Moreover, it is clear that none of the crimes for which they were convicted at the time had any victims. For this reason…a full amnesty will be issued.”

The court’s decision is likely to be controversial. Many Colombians did not support the 2016 peace and reconciliation deal between the government and FARC, with the main sticking point being the sweeping amnesty given to FARC commanders and fighters. During the 42-yer war (1964-2016), FARC killed 220,000 Colombians; drove 6.6 million Colombians out of their homes and into internal exile; and kidnapped 27,000 Colombians for ransom.

The Guardian reports that the three men in question, Niall Connolly, James Monaghan. and Martin McCauley, were arrested in August 2001 at Bogota International Airport for travelling on forged passports as they attempted to return to Northern Ireland. A police investigation found that the three had spent five weeks travelling FARC-controlled areas of southern Colombia.

The arrests posed a serious threat to two separate ceasefire deals: the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which had brought to an end decades of strife and bloodshed in Northern Ireland; and peace talks between the Colombian government and FARC, which were preceded by a cease-fire agreement.

The Colombian prosecution charged Connolly, Monaghan, and McCauley with training FARC militants to manufacture explosives and build bombs. The three were first acquitted, then convicted after an appeal by the prosecution in December 2004, and sentenced to seventeen years in prison on terrorism charges.

After the sentencing, but before they were to report to prison, they fled to the Republic of Ireland. They were questioned by Irish police but not charged with anything.

Ireland does not have an extradition treaty with Colombia.

The case had political ramifications in both Ireland and Colombia. In Ireland and Northern Ireland, it damaged the reputation of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, which had been trying to gain legitimacy as a normal political party without terrorist trappings. In Colombia, talks between the government and FARC broke down in 2002 and the two sides would not sign a peace deal for another fourteen years.

A lawyer for the trio praised the decision, telling El Tiempo: “At the time, they were accused of everything and the sentences are there to prove it. But definitely, none of them were militants of a terrorist group and the evidence compiled during that time was very weak.”

For the many in Colombia who believe that the FARC, its leaders, and its supporters – including their sometimes-partners in crime, the drug cartels — were never made to pay for the atrocities they committed, the court’s decision was a slap in the face.

Senator Carlos Felipe Mejia, a member of President Ivan Duque’s conservative Democratic Center party, called the JEP “a court tailored to narcoterrorism, a guarantor of impunity.”

The Democratic Center Party was formed by former president Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) in 2014. It was formed to fight the deal between the government and FARC, which was being negotiation by President Jose Manuel Santos, the leader of the centrist Partido Social de Unidad Nacional, which was led by Uribe until 2010 (Santos was the minister of defense in Uribe’s government).

Ivan Duque, the leader of the Democratic Center party, came to power in 2018 on a platform calling fr major revision of the deal with FARC.