Colombia's beleaguered human rights defenders recently bid a sad - and, for some, fearful - farewell to Anders Kompass , Mary Robinson's main man in Bogota. Ana Carrigan reports.

The village was just a small farming co-operative, tucked away in the folds of the Andes. One day two truckloads of Colombian paramilitaries drove up the road and pulled up in the little square in front of the community store. They rounded up the women and children in the church, then took away the men and shot them, leaving 24 bodies strewn along the road.

Two months later, when the local priest brought Anders Kompass to meet the survivors, only eleven families still lived there. The other 40 had fled to displacement camps. On an open-air veranda overlooking the church, where graffiti read Peace Weeps, old farmers and young women came forward one by one to tell the Swede that they were very frightened, but they did not want to leave their homes.

They wanted to live and work their land as they always had done. The government had abandoned them since the massacre. The health service had not returned. The school teacher's salary had not been paid.

Please, they implored Kompass, we are tomato farmers. This is not our war. Please, do what you can to get us out of this war. Somehow.

The Colombian peace process was just three months old when Kompass arrived to take over the UN Human Rights office in April 1999. He was 44 years old, a seasoned, committed Latin Americanist with 25 years experience working for the Swedish Foreign Service and the United Nations in Mexico and Central America.

Kompass was shocked by the large numbers of Colombians who had no rights whatsoever - and by the official indifference to so much suffering. The greatest stimulus to his work in Colombia, he said, was to be in contact with people who have no voice. "In this job you are privileged. People give you a lot of information. That's also why you feel such responsibility. People tell you a lot. My job is to be their voice."

He knew that without agreements on international humanitarian law and human rights laws, civilians would never be free of the guerrillas and paramilitaries. He also saw very clearly that unless the civilian population was removed from the war, the peace efforts were doomed to lose popular support and would fail.

For a long time, his was a solitary moral voice, articulating a coherent message on behalf of Colombia's powerless, voiceless population. But in the swamp of moral and political ambiguities and confusion surrounding the peace efforts, no-one was listening. Human rights defenders are an endangered species, and Kompass was no exception. There was a real danger that someone might try ridding Colombia of this contemporary "turbulent priest".

Two months ago, after a prominent general accused him of being an enemy of the state and of the army, Kompass rented a bulletproof car.

Last month, Anders Kompass returned to Stockholm. Before he left, Colombia's human rights community organised an impromptu get-together in Bogota's Tequendama hotel. A choir of small children, formally dressed in scarlet surplices, led by a young woman in jeans and a smart black blazer, opened the proceedings.

"If you love life, and the earth," sang a choir of children, then segued into a medley of folk songs and folk rhythms from the many regions of Colombia to which Kompass's presence had so often brought a measure of protection to communities trapped in the war. There was poetry and laughter and speeches. But mostly, there was a deep sadness and anxiety. Everyone had known this day would come, but had hoped that somehow it wouldn't.

For people who had worked in his orbit for three intense years, it was hard to come to grips with what this meant. So they sat and listened quietly to the speakers; they applauded politely; they didn't whisper, or gossip.

"People go, and the institutions remain," one young man explained. "But in this case, the institution and the person had achieved such harmony that now we are facing a vacuum."

According to James Lemoyne, Kofi Annan's Special Representative to Colombia, Kompass's insistence on defending the principles of international humanitarian law and human rights laws have established them as an essential benchmark for policies towards Colombia. Lemoyne also says his Bogota office has set the standard by which all UN Human Rights Offices will be measured.

"On a personal level," Lemoyne says, "his courage and his ability to weather criticism and maintain his leadership of the human rights communities were quite extraordinary. Anders Kompass is a direct inheritor of the great Swedish tradition of ethical idealism and service. He is the walking embodiment of the values of Hammarsjold and Wallenberg."