Bulletin Issue 10 – March 1998

Responding to a request of our friends of CIMI, the WRM International Secretariat disseminated among WRM members and friends the more recent news about the long struggle of the Tupinikim and Guarani for their traditional lands (see below). We also sent letters to Brazilian authorities -including President Fernando Henrique Cardozo- expressing our concern for this situation and asking them to review their decision to expel the missionary Winfried Overbeek from the country, whose only “crime” has been to defend the indigenous peoples in their claims.

We have received a message from "Global Response", expressing the willingness of this organization to collaborate with WRM in areas of common interest. What follows is part of its letter of presentation: “Would you like to offer your support to communities around the world that are struggling to prevent environmental destruction of many kinds? Would you like to give children and teenagers a chance to work collaboratively with people of different countries and cultures, to protect the Earth? Do you want to hold corporations and governments accountable for environmental destruction and human rights abuses? If so, you may want to join Global Response and encourage children and teachers to join, as well.

The International Secretariat has received a message from the Brazilian social leaders Wigold Scaeffer and Miriam Prochnow expressing their gratitude for the letter we sent in November 1997 (see Bulletin nr. 6) to the Brazilian authorities, expressing our concern about their situation. They had repeatedly received death threats in relation to their defense of the Mata Atlantica rainforests and their fight against pollution and environmental degradation through APREMAVI -Association of Environmental Preservation of Alto Vale do Itajaí, in Santa Catarina. Wigold and Miriam are now carrying out their normal activities, even if the police was not able to identify the authors of the threats.

WRM's international coordinator was invited to present the movement's views on the recent devastating forest fires in the Amazon (see Brazil) in a Uruguayan television channel. The presentation was viewed by a large audience and we have received an important number of positive comments on it.

The Mexican Action Network against Free Trade (RMALC) has just published the Spanish edition of "Pulping the South: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Global Paper Economy", under the title "El papel del Sur: plantaciones forestales en la estrategia papelera internacional". We are working out with RMALC the details of its distribution and purchase mechanisms and we will let you know about how to obtain copies as soon as we sort it out. We wish to warmly thank Alejandro Villamar from RMALC for all his hard work to get the book published in Mexico.

The Kruger National Park is to be enlarged by 5,000 hectares, while by the same agreement recently concluded, the Makuleke community regains its right to 25,000 hectares of Kruger Park lands. Settlement of the Makuleke land claim came just in time for the celebration of the centenary of Kruger National Park on March 25. In 1968 the Makuleke community was forced to leave their lands now falling within the borders of the Kruger National Park. By the terms of the newly reached agreement with South Africa National Parks (SANP), the Pafuri area -at the northern boundary of the Park- will be returned to the community composed of 1,800 families, while maintaining the conservation status of the land. "We have here a very important piece of real estate, which should be preserved for our people.

News of huge forest fires -as the ones that affected Indonesia and those that are spreading in Roraima in the Brazilian Amazon- are disseminated worldwide. Nevertheless, fires at a smaller scale have also terrible consequences for local communities. This is the case of the fire that has affected the forest of Aleibiri, a village of 6,000 inhabitants in the Niger Delta in Nigeria. The carelessness of the Shell contractor was the cause for this desaster. A providential rain -that Chief priest of Aleibiri Firstman Mgbeke called an intervention of their ancestres and gods- prevented the fire to expand.

A group of Dayaks recently toured Australia to promote solidarity with their struggle for land rights and compensation from Australian-based mining companies, which account for more than 60% of Australian investments in Indonesia.

The timber empires of Bob Hasan and others are crumbling amid the economic crisis in Indonesia. A third of the country’s timber companies are facing bankruptcy. In mid-January Hasan’s Kalimanis Group said it had been forced to lay off 2.520 workers to avoid further losses. For the January to September 1997 period the company reported a loss of around US$ 3.4 million. The figures for the second half of the year are bound to be far worse. Employees have been encouraged to take voluntary redundancy with severance payments reaching up to forty times the monthly wage. The redundancy offer had to be closed early as so many workers were taking it up.

Kanchanaburi March 6, 1998: Sulak Sivaraksa and some 50 students and activists who have been camping in the forest were arrested and taken out of the Huay Kayeng forest about noon time. Kancahnaburi governor was present at the event to instruct some 20 officers to take away the activists. Even though Sulak was shown a letter requesting him to testify to the police on the charge filed by PTT (Petroleum Authority of Thailand) before the arrest, the other activists were taken away without being informed properly on what charge they were taken.

There is a complete report and other significant information from the Indigenous Perspectives in Forestry Education Workshop, hosted by British Columbia University in Vancouver, Canada, between 15 and 18 June 1997. The Workshop got together delegates of aboriginal associations, universities and industry from different countries, aware of the need to address the knowledge, issues and concerns of indigenous peoples (see WRM Bulletin nr. 3)

The state of Roraima, in northern Brazil is on fire. A disaster similar to the recent fires in Indonesia is taking place and government responsibility is also similar. As in Indonesia, the Brazilian Amazon is continuously being set on fire to open up the area to "development", through a process beginning with road-building. Such roads serve as vehicles to government-promoted colonization processes, which entail the destruction of forests through logging, conversion to agriculture and cattle raising, mining, hydropower development, etc. In this scenario, fires don't "occur"; they are the cheapest and more commonly-used mechanism to clear the land for "development".

MESSAGE FROM COICA Dear brothers and friends: Many thanks to all for the dozens of expressions of solidarity that we have received, especially those from the United States. The day before yesterday we received a new letter from the IAF that, as you can read, ratifies to terminate and break all relations with COICA and their organizations. We have also received the view of the members from the North American embassy in Ecuador with the same objective of OUR RETRACTION OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE CONGRESS, not only of the assumed threats against Miller that do not appear in that resolution. It is evident their interest is that we abandon our campaign against the patenting of Ayahuasca.

Responding to the immediate and increasing threat of oil exploration on their lands, the U'wa people have issued a statement demanding that both the Colombian government and Occidental Petroleum recognize their right to refuse or accept oil activity on their land as a precondition to any dialogue about oil development. The statement also demands an immediate withdrawal of the military presence in U'wa territory, which has increased dramatically over the last month. The U'wa, a nation of 5,000 living in the Andean cloud forests, have previously stated that any extraction of oil on their land will lead to their committing mass suicide, a possibility still open (see WRM Bulletin nr. 1).

APCOB (“Apoyo para el campesino indígena del oriente boliviano”: "Support to the Indigenous Peasant of Eastern Bolivia") is a Bolivian NGO that "during the last 18 years has been fighting for the conservation of natural resources and the improvement of socioeconomic status of indigenous peoples that inhabit the lowlands of the Eastern region of the country."

We have received the following comments on WWF's campaign from Paul Romeijn, Director of Treemail (E-mail: info@treemail.nl, Web: http://www.treemail.nl). We believe that this is an important contribution to the forest debate and that it is useful to share it with our readers. These are the comments: An international campaign to increase the proportion of forests under protection, to at least ten percent of the forest surface in each country, has been launched by the World Wildlife Fund: the FORESTS FOR LIFE campaign. This initiative has involved HRH Prince Philip, who has personally and directly asked heads of states around the world to join in. According to WWF's advertising material:

On March 6th the Brazilian Ministry of Justice finally decided to demarcate only 2,571 additional hectares for the Tupinikim and Guarani. The argumentation of the Ministry denies all the studies done uptil now by FUNAI which arguments the necessity of extending and demarcating 13,579 hectares, as requested by the indigenous peoples. This decision is exactly the same proposal that Aracruz Celulose put forward to the indigenous peoples in a meeting on February 18th, which clearly shows that the authorities acted defending the interests of the company. The Commission of the Tupinikim and Guarani declared that they rejected this decission and announced immediate actions to resist it.

The forest near the village of Long Lamai was in flames last week after Penan people refused to let timber company workers into their lands, to which the latter reacted by setting th forest on fire. Local people were worried that the fire might extend to larger areas. This region is being targetted by a Malaysian-German technical co-operation project which put in place a comprehensive Forest Management Information System. Samling was the first logging company involved in the project by providing two concession area in Upper Baram as a pioneer testing ground.