Colombia’s former president Alvaro Uribe and former Cuban leader Fidel Castro clashed Monday over Uribe’s appointment to a United Nations committee that is to investigate the Israeli attack on a humanitarian flotilla earlier this year.
Castro wrote in a Cuban newspaper that Uribe’s appointment was a “folly” and “absurd,” pointing out ongoing criticism over Uribe’s human rights record and Colombia’s high levels of impunity.
“As if a country full of mass graves with bodies of assassinated people, some with up to two thousand victims, and seven Yankee military bases (…), didn’t have anything to do with terrorism and genocide,” Castro wrote.
In a press release responding to Castro’s op-ed, Uribe accused Castro of echo-ing the “slander” of “political protectors of narco-guerrilla terrorism.”
According to Uribe, he achieved the demobilization of “narco-paramilitary terrorism, the weakening of narco-guerrilla terrorism, the effective protection of the radical opposition and the prospering of liberties.”
The former Colombian president was appointed vice president of the U.N. panel that will investigate the May 31 Israeli attack on a humanitarian flotilla in which ten activists were killed.
