- 25-01-2010 - Algemeen
U.N. Condemns Land Grabs in Native Territories
Millions of people around the world who belong to indigenous communities continue to face discrimination and abuse at the hands of authorities and private business concerns, says a new U.N. report released here Thursday.
It is happening not only in the developing parts of the world but also in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which champion the causes of human rights and democracy, the report says.
Despite all the "positive developments" in international human rights setting in recent years, the study's findings suggest that indigenous peoples remain vulnerable to state-sponsored violence and brutality, which is often aimed at confiscating their lands.
"Governments and the United Nations need to be serious about this," said Victoria Tauli-Corpus, chairperson of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, an advisory body that works with the 54-member Economic and Social Council, after launching the report.
The 222 page-report, entitled "State of the World's Indigenous Peoples", points out that an overwhelming majority of the indigenous population is condemned to live in extreme poverty. Its authors noted that while indigenous peoples are around five percent of the world's population, they comprise 15 percent of people living in extreme poverty.
The first-ever comprehensive report on indigenous peoples' rights comes as the U.N. is reviewing progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), globally agreed targets to reduce, poverty, disease and environmental destruction, among other issues, by the year 2015.
Explaining her findings, one of the report's authors, Myrna Cunningham, said indigenous communities in many countries are living in abject poverty because they have lost their lands to private interests that are often backed by state authorities.
She also raised concerns about the extrajudicial killing of indigenous people in some parts of the world. In this context, she cited the examples of Colombia and Peru, where extreme hostility towards native people has been well-documented by human rights organisations.
"There are several cases where indigenous peoples are being identified by governments as terrorists," Cunningham told IPS, adding that it was in clear violation of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The U.N. Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly in 2007. The historic document calls for the recognition of native populations' right to control their lands and protect their culture and language.
The report's chapter dealing with environmental issues suggests that most of the deforestation is taking place on indigenous territories due to massive operations by mining corporations. It says many of the business ventures on native lands are illegal.
"We have agonised over many ongoing situations," said Ben Powless, an indigenous activist in Canada who has attended numerous international meetings on climate change and biodiversity, including the U.N. summit held in Copenhagen, Denmark last month.
Powless said those situations included "the massacres of our relatives in the Peruvian Amazon, the evictions of our Masai families in Kenya, and the devastation of our communities by the impacts of climate change."
Large dams and mining activities have caused massive displacements of indigenous peoples in many countries. The study's authors documented several cases where native people were forced by the tourism industry to leave their ancestral lands.
The report points out that in many countries around the world, indigenous children are not only deprived of education, but also lack adequate access to health care and nutritious food.
That, according to Cunningham, is against "our right to self-determination".
The U.N. General Assembly fully recognises indigenous populations' right to exercise their right to "self-determination". However, some powerful countries, including the United States and Canada, have rejected the Declaration.
Contrary to the previous U.S. administration's stance, President Barack Obama seems willing to sign on to the declaration. ¨We are having a dialogue with the U.S. government," Tauli-Corpus told IPS. "We are doing all we can."
At the news conference, Tauli-Corpus raised hopes that at future talks on climate change, indigenous peoples' rights to control their lands and forests will be given due consideration. But not all indigenous leaders think along the same lines.
Recent negotiations on climate change have suggested that deforestation in indigenous lands could be tackled by means of carbon trading. Many indigenous peoples see that as a tool of corruption and a threat to their cultural survival.
"Carbon trading and carbon offsets are a crime against humanity and Creation," said Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. "The sky is sacred."
"This carbon market insanity privatises the air and sells it to climate criminals like Shell so they can continue to pollute and destroy the climate and our future, rather than reducing their emissions at source," he added in a statement.
Considering the fact that much of the world's forests are located in indigenous peoples' lands, Goldtooth fears that carbon trading would pave the way for more "land grabs, killings, evictions and forced displacement" of native communities.
IPS
- 25-01-2010 - Algemeen
CAMBODIA: Minority Languages Face Extinction
One of Cambodia’s oldest languages – S’aoch – appears headed for extinction in the next decade. Other languages spoken by its minority people are lining up to take the place of the 6,000-year-old language in the most endangered category.
Dr Jean-Michel Filippi, a linguist who has studied the S’aoch language for a decade, has recorded 4,000 words of S’aoch and is preparing to write a grammar for the language. But even he holds out no hope for it. That is because just 10 people in a small village in southern Cambodia speak S’aoch fluently, and none of them uses it in daily conversation.
Filippi says the imminent extinction of S’aoch means his efforts to preserve something of it are critical. "That is because a language is a unique vision of the world," he says. "It’s very specific and a very peculiar classification of reality."
According to the United Nations’ cultural body the world’s remarkable diversity of 6,700 languages is dying out at the rate of one every fortnight. By the end of this century just half will remain, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) warns on its website.
The work done by linguists like Filippi to document dying languages is important for a number of reasons. Filippi says that long after it is gone, a language could have uses in diverse areas such as commerce, psychology or artificial intelligence. A case in point, he says, is Navajo, the Native American language that was used by U.S. forces in World War II in the Pacific to encrypt radio transmissions, and whose story was popularised in the film ‘Windtalkers’.
Blaise Kilian, joint programme coordinator of UNESCO in Phnom Penh, says there is inevitably more than one reason for language death. The most obvious is that too few people are fluent.
"But you also have the environment and the way people themselves – especially the new generation – react to the changing environment," says Kilian. "And how much they are interested in preserving and transmitting their own language."
Filippi says the imminent demise of S’aoch has less to do with the low numbers of people who speak it, and much more to do with the attitude of the people themselves.
"Survival depends on one thing: Does the minority want to protect and save its own culture?" he asks. In the case of the S’aoch, he adds, that desire is lacking.
That is because after the murderous Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power in Cambodia in 1979, the S’aoch people found themselves unable to return to their original village. Instead they settled in a village called Samrong Loeu near the port town of Sihanoukville in the country’s south.
But without fields to work, they faced enormous difficulties. Filippi says the impoverished S’aoch now aspire to the lifestyles enjoyed by their relatively wealthy Khmer neighbours, who have fields, motorbikes and houses. And so they have put their own language and customs behind them and adopted the language of the majority Khmer population.
"When you are put in a position of economic inferiority, you tend to reject your own culture," Filippi says. That rejection has gone so far that Filippi struggles to get the surviving S’aoch even to recall their folk tales or religious ceremonies.
The case of S’aoch is not unique to Cambodia, which UNESCO estimates has 19 endangered languages. Others in trouble include Somray and Poa, with around 300 speakers each, Samre, with 400 speakers, and So’ong, with 500 speakers.
But even minority languages with just a few hundred speakers face distinctly different outcomes. Filippi says the Somray language of south-western Cambodia is likely to survive several more decades at least even though it has just a few hundred speakers.
That is because the animist religion of the Somray requires that prayers are accurately rendered in their own language to be effective, a compelling reason for the villagers to ensure their children grow up fluent.
Some languages are much more widely spoken, such as Tampuon, P’nong, Kuong and Jarai, each of which has up to 30,000 speakers living in the country’s north and north-east. Provided their communities back the effort, the chances of language survival are much higher.
Kilian says the first step to revitalizing a language is to determine its chances of being saved, and then create an orthography – a specific writing system – for educational materials. Those materials can then be used in education programmes.
In the case of Cambodia, some of that educational work is carried out by non-government organisations such as International Cooperation Cambodia (ICC) and Care International.
ICC has produced highly regarded books in minority languages, some of which Care uses in a bilingual school programme that was started in 2003. ICC also runs adult literacy programmes and records folk tales and other cultural aspects of minority life in the country’s long-neglected north-east.
Ron Watt, Care’s education adviser, says the bilingual schools education programme now has 128 teachers using four languages and teaching in 25 schools. Last year around 1,900 children were enrolled, almost half of them girls.
"The education ministry is very keen on this and now they are replicating it, with three more schools set to open next year," he says.
Under the bilingual education system, children in Grade 1 use their own language for 80 percent of classes, with the rest of instruction undertaken in Khmer. The proportion of minority languages used drops over the following two years, and by the time Grade 4 begins, all teaching is in Khmer.
Watt admits that the programme is not perfect.
"People with a language development bent would say that this isn’t a classic language maintenance model, let alone a language development model," he says, explaining that he would prefer to see instruction in minority languages continue after Grade 3. But the current programme is "much, much better than doing nothing."
UNESCO’s Kilian says the Cambodian government seems broadly receptive to preserving cultural aspects of the country’s heritage, likely in part because of their tourism value. He points out that Cambodia is known to tourists for Angkor Wat and the Khmer Rouge, but little else. That means ensuring its cultural diversity is sensible.
But no matter what efforts are taken, Cambodia will certainly have lost some of its languages by the end of the century. For the doomed languages there is little that linguists can do other than record as much as possible of the language, folk tales and customs so that when tongues like S’aoch eventually die, something of what they represented still remains.
(END)
- 25-01-2010 - Algemeen
BRAZIL: 'Colonisation Made Us Poor,' Say Indigenous Peoples
We weren't poor until colonisation made us poor, indigenous leader Marcos Terena said at the Rio de Janeiro launch of a United Nations report on the State of the World's Indigenous Peoples.
While indigenous peoples make up around 370 million of the world's population - roughly five percent - they constitute about one-third of its 900 million extremely poor rural people, the U.N. study says.
In Brazil, the 2000 census found that 38 percent of indigenous people lived in extreme poverty, more than twice the national figure of 15.5 percent, said Giancarlo Summa, head of the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) in Rio de Janeiro. "There is no indication of any significant improvement in the last 10 years," he said.
There are 230 indigenous groups in Brazil, speaking 180 languages and occupying 14 percent of the national territory, where they make an important contribution to nature conservation but have an extremely limited political role, said Terena, the head of the Indigenous Peoples Memorial, a museum for indigenous culture and crafts in Brasilia.
"We do not have a voice in decisions about indigenous territories," which are selected and demarcated by the government based on anthropological studies. Autonomy is still a distant dream, he said, although in other countries the struggle for self-determination has made more progress.
"We have not managed to get an indigenous president for the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI, the government agency for the protection of native peoples)," unlike Afro-Brazilians who do preside the institutions in charge of their welfare, he said.
Terena, a pilot who works for FUNAI, belongs to the Terena ethnic group, who live in several villages in west-central Brazil. He has been an outspoken leader of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UNI) since the 1970s, and later in other associations and forums actively struggling for indigenous peoples' rights.
Because of his track record of social activism on behalf of his people, Terena was invited to take part in the launch ceremony of the report commissioned by the U.N. on the "Situation of the World's Indigenous Peoples" at UNIC's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro Thursday.
The report was simultaneously released in countries with significant indigenous populations, including Australia, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa and the United States.
Among the startling statistics in the publication is that indigenous people have a lifespan up to 20 years shorter, on average, than non-native people in their countries. Poverty, malnutrition and infectious diseases conspire to shorten their lives, the report says.
There were 734,127 indigenous people in Brazil in 2000, according to the official census, which asked each person to identify their ethnic group or skin colour. But Terena estimates that today close to one million people identify themselves as indigenous persons, making up five percent of the national population.
The number of people identifying themselves as indigenous has grown rapidly since the 1980s, when an ethnic pride movement encouraged many people, including city dwellers, to reclaim their indigenous heritage.
Between the 1991 and 2000 censuses, the number of people declaring indigenous identity doubled, an annual increase of 10.8 percent that must be attributed both to the birth rate and to people accepting an ethnic identity they had formerly denied.
Most of the native population lives in the impenetrable Amazon jungle, where their ancestors were saved from genocide at the hands of colonisers, unlike the indigenous people of Brazil's southeastern coast. There are still isolated Amazon tribes that have never had contact with the outside world.
Brazilian indigenous people have the same health, education and human rights problems, and are as socially and economically marginalised, as native peoples elsewhere in the world.
The worst conditions are found in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which borders on Bolivia and Paraguay. The Guaraní Kaiwoá people, especially, are in permanent conflict with large landholders over land ownership; their leaders and young people have been murdered, the suicide rate is up among teenagers, and they are plagued by alcoholism and hunger.
Crammed together on insufficient land to support their way of life, outside cities that have grown prosperous on monoculture crops like soy and sugar cane, indigenous groups are demanding demarcation and enlargement of their territories, to cope with their growing population. But the prospects are not promising.
Landowners with legal title to their properties are putting up fierce resistance, and have taken legal action to suspend the handover of some indigenous lands already earmarked and approved by the national government. And the armed forces are opposed to creating indigenous reserves on the country's borders, claiming they are a threat to national sovereignty.
Recent years have seen a dramatic deterioration in health, with outbreaks of hepatitis, malaria and other diseases in some regions. Different government bodies have provided medical assistance to indigenous peoples, but they remain vulnerable.
Brazil has strong indigenous rights laws, but they are not enforced, Terena complained. "Paternalistic policies" that fail to respect the self-determination of indigenous people only hamper solutions to their problems, he said.
While multilateral bodies like the World Bank make approval of loans conditional on respect for indigenous rights, in Brazil native peoples continue to lack any influence over policies that directly
- 15-01-2010 - Algemeen
Inuit groups launch lawsuit over EU seal ban
Groups representing Inuit in Canada and Greenland filed a lawsuit Wednesday that seeks to overturn the European Union’s ban on importing seal products.
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Inuit Circumpolar Council (Greenland) filed the suit in the European Union’s General Court.
“It is important for Inuit across the Davis Strait to unite and fight this unethical legislation,” said Aqqaluk Lynge, president of ICC (Greenland) in a news release.
“On top of the climate change issue, we must contend with animal rights extremists who fundamentally do not respect our way of life, and who use disinformation to further their cause at our expense.”
ITK president Mary Simon said the European ban smacks of racism and hypocracy.
“It is bitterly ironic that the EU, which seems entirely at home with promoting massive levels of agri-business and the raising and slaughtering of animals in highly industrialized conditions, seeks to preach some kind of selective elevated morality to Inuit,” she said.
The ban passed overwhelmingly in the European Parliament this past May, despite the opposition of a handful of conservative politicians, including Peter Stasny, the former Quebec Nordique hockey player.
While the bill contained an exemption for seals hunted by Inuit, but Canada has rejected that clause because the ban still dried up demand for seal pelts and caused prices to plummet.
“The EU has demonstrated more interest in keeping non-Inuit out of the market than finding ways of including Inuit,” said Duane Smith, president of ICC (Canada). “As such, it is hard to support such an unclear, flawed, and unfair regulation. They left us with no alternative but to sue.”
The federal government is already challenging the ban at the World Trade Organization, a move ITK supports.
The lawsuit also comes as Gail Shea, the federal fisheries minister, is in China, in part to drum up interest for Canadian seal products.
With a market of 1.3 billion people and little in the way of an animal rights movement, the world’s most populous country is seen as a possible saviour for the Canadian seal trade.
A federal news release calls China the world’s largest consumer of fish and seafood.
“Sealing is about more than fur,” Shea said in the release. “The trade of other seal products such as oils and meat represents a growing share of what is already a multi-million dollar business.”
- 15-01-2010 - Algemeen
Chile apologises over treatment of indigenous people
Chile's president has apologised to the descendants of a group of indigenous people who were shipped to Europe in the late 19th Century and exhibited.
The remains of five Kawesqar Indians, from the country's southernmost region, were honoured in a ceremony after being flown back to the country.
Taken in 1881, they were displayed as curiosities in European cities.
President Michelle Bachelet said the government had been guilty of "neglect in the face of such abuses".
"As we near the bicentennial of our independence, we have to confront both the brightest points and the darkest moments of our history," she said in Santiago.
She said the mistreatment of the indigenous people was due to racist attitudes towards "our indigenous forefathers, whose human dignity was trampled upon".
The bones were discovered in the Swiss city of Zurich where they had been kept for more than a century.
The five, who died there - some of tuberculosis - were among a group of 11 tribespeople captured by German explorers in 1881.
Six were allowed eventually to return to Chile and one died during the voyage home.
From Santiago, the remains of the five who died in Europe were flown to Punta Arenas, in the far south of Chile.
They will be buried in a traditional indigenous ceremony at a remote island close to Tierra del Fuego.
- 15-01-2010 - Algemeen
Black Mesa Wins! Peabody’s Coal Mining Permit Revoked
On January 5, 2010, Judge Robert G. Holt revoked Peabody’s coal mining permit at Black Mesa, because the U.S. Office of Surface Mining (OSM) failed to provide a supplemental Draft Environmental Impact statement (EIS) when it issued the permit in December 2008.
“As a result,” Judge Holt states, “the Final EIS did not consider a reasonable range of alternatives to the new proposed action, described the wrong environmental baseline, and did not achieve the informed decision-making and meaningful public comment required by NEPA [National Environmental Protection Act].”
The permit was supposed to “guarantee” Peabody’s operation until 2026, or “until the coal runs out.” Now it’s on hold—-a welcomed turn of events in the decades-long struggle against the project, as Wahleah Johns, co-director of Black Mesa Water Coalition stated on January 8, 21010:
“As a community member of Black Mesa I am grateful for this decision. For 40 years our sacred homelands and people have borne the brunt of coal mining impacts, from relocation to depletion of our only drinking water source. This ruling is an important step towards restorative justice for Indigenous communities who have suffered at the hands of multinational companies like Peabody Energy. This decision is also precedent-setting for all other communities who struggle with the complexities of NEPA laws and OSM procedures in regards to environmental protection. However, we also cannot ignore the irreversible damage of coal mining industries continues on the land, water, air, people and all living things.”
“This is a huge victory for the communities of Black Mesa impacted by coal mining and proof that Peabody can’t have its way on Black Mesa anymore,” adds Sierra Club’s Hertha Woody, also a member of the Navajo Nation. “Coal is a dirty, dangerous and outdated energy source that devastates communities, jeopardizes drinking water and destroys wildlife habitats. This decision is yet another example of why it no longer makes sense to burn coal to get electricity.”
Just a few weeks ago, the EPA issued its own decision and withdrew Peabody’s water permit, after the Black Mesa Water Coalition, To’ Nizhoni Ani (“Beautiful Water Speaks”), Diné CARE and several other groups raised concerns the company was violating NEPA, as well as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.
The diverse group of defenders, some of whom were recently blacklisted for being “a threat” to the Hopi and Navajo Nations, also alleged the EPA did not fully consider the environmental impacts of Peabody’s waste ponds, and failed to provide opportunities for public involvement in their decision-making process.
“For three-and-a-half decades, Peabody’s coal mining operations on Black Mesa have been dependent on the sole source of drinking water for Navajo and Hopi communities. Between 1969 and 2005, Peabody pumped an average of 4,600 acre-feet of water annually from the Navajo Aquifer, causing significant damage to Navajo and Hopi community water supplies. The permit … would have allowed Peabody to continue discharging heavy metals and toxic pollutants into washes, tributaries and groundwater relied on by communities,” states the Sierra Club in a December Press Release.
Following the decision, Nicole Horseherder of To’ Nizhoni Ani, who lives about 20 miles away from
Peabody’s Black Mesa Complex, said “I am very happy about the EPA’s decision to withdraw the permit. I am glad to see a federal regulatory agency finally doing its job. In the course of our struggle to protect the water and bring awareness to the impacts of this coal mining operation, we have never had such a favorable decision by any agency charged with regulating the impacts of Black Mesa.”