Brazilian military dictator Emilio Garrastazu Medici may well be considered as one of the most prominent examples of the racist and destructive approach to forests that prevailed during the second half of the 20th century in most tropical countries, where similar examples of promoters of such approach can be easily identified throughout Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America. When inaugurating the Transamazonian highway in 1970 --the beginning of the end for many indigenous groups and large expanses of Amazon forest-- he stated that this would open up a "land without men to men without land". For him, indigenous peoples did not even exist, while forests only meant land to be cleared for "productive activities". Women --indigenous or not-- apparently did not exist at all.
Bulletin Issue 62 – September 2002
Indigenous People
THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
Indigenous peoples are the guardians of the forests. No-one is more interested than they are in ensuring the conservation of forests which are their homes, an integral part of their culture and provide for their livelihoods. All the previous WRM bulletins have reflected many of their struggles to protect the forests, but we have now decided to focus the entire bulletin on indigenous peoples, in order to both highlight the problems they confront and the solutions they are implementing to ensure the recognition of their rights as a first --though crucial-- step to seriously address the ongoing forest crisis. The present bulletin has been produced in close collaboration with the Forest Peoples Programme --which together with Fern acts as the WRM Northern Office-- and with other people who are either members of indigenous peoples organizations or who support the rights of indigenous peoples. Regardless of the authorship of each article, they all reflect the hopes and struggles of the indigenous peoples themselves, as well as the importance of external collaboration for achieving their aims. We hope that this bulletin will help to encourage more individuals and organizations concerned with forest conservation to understand the central role played by indigenous peoples in this respect and thereby to increase support for their right to continue being the guardians of the forests. We also hope this issue will make clearer to forest activists why we consider protecting human rights to be such a central issue for those concerned to curb deforestation. What indigenous peoples are calling for is respect for their rights --to ownership and control of their lands and territories, to exercise their customary law, to assent or refuse developments planned for their areas, to self-determination. Respect for these rights is not only a matter of justice, but will also result in empowering them to defend what is theirs: the forests.WRM Bulletin
62
September 2002
OUR VIEWPOINT
LOCAL STRUGGLES AND NEWS
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7 September 2002Since the 19th century the land rights of forest dwellers in Cameroon have not figured in the major decisions by the rulers. All forest lands, defined as vacant and without owners --“vacant et sans maitres”-- became property of the state, and many forests were then opened for timber exploitation, which closed those areas for hunting by Bagyeli, Baka, and other so-called "Pygmy" hunter gathering communities, whose presence across Southern Cameroon predates the colonial State.
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7 September 2002On October 1, an indigenous group living in Kenya's Mau Forest is scheduled to have its case heard in the country's High Court. The hearing is the latest attempt by the Ogiek people's long effort to protect their forest homeland from destruction.
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7 September 2002The indigenous inhabitants of Rwanda are the Twa, a ‘Pygmy’ people who originally lived as hunters and gatherers in the high altitude forests around the lakes in the Albertine Rift area of central Africa, in the present-day countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In some parts of DRC, Twa are still able to live a forest-based existence. However, in most other areas the Twa have had to abandon their traditional way of life as their forests have been destroyed by logging, agriculture and "development" projects.
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7 September 2002The Batwa (so-called Pygmies) are the Indigenous peoples of south-west Uganda. According to historical records and oral histories, only the Batwa inhabited this area until at least the mid sixteenth century. They have been mostly hunter-gatherers, some in the mountainous forests, and some in forest savannah or lake environments.
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7 September 2002Despite decades of lobbying successive governments for full legal recognition of their traditional land rights, the 55-60,000 Amerindians in Guyana still find themselves in one of the most precarious land tenure situations in South America: many communities lack any legal land title whatsoever, while the others can only count on an insecure title which covers just a fraction of their ancestral territory, and which can be revoked unilaterally at any time by the Minister of Amerindian Affairs.
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7 September 2002In December 2000 the Argentina-based company Pluspetrol won the concession to extract natural gas from the Camisea basin in South East Peru. However, Pluspetrol’s intention to conduct seismic and drilling operations within the Nahua/Kugapakori state reserve has attracted controversy because of potential impacts on its indigenous inhabitants living in voluntary isolation and initial stages of direct interaction with national society. Block 88 superimposes the Nahua/Kugapakori reserve, that was established by the state in 1990 to protect the Nahua and Kugapakori (also known as the Nanti) indigenous groups from the dangers of contact with national society. The group headed by Pluspetrol also includes US company Hunt Oil and the Korean SK corporation.
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7 September 2002Chinese logging companies are relatively new arrivals in South America. In Suriname, at least two have been operating since 1997. The widely reported ban on domestic logging in China, in part prompted by devastating flooding related to forest loss, is one obvious reason for the internationalization of Chinese logging. According to Surinamese government statistics for the years 2000-01, Chinese loggers were by far the largest producers of round wood and China was by far the largest export destination for Surinamese round wood, exceeding the next highest destination fourfold.
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7 September 2002The Caura river in Venezuela is the last large affluent of the Orinoco which has not been polluted, carved up, dammed or diverted by mining, roads, logging and large-scale development projects. The upper reaches are home to two ethnic groups, ‘Amazonian Indians’. These are the Ye’kwana, a people with a tradition of well-developed shifting agriculture and of building huge conical collective dwellings, who have been in the area at least as long as historical records relate; and the Sanema (Northern Yanomami) a more mobile group of hunters, gatherers and incipient agriculturalists who moved into the area from the south about a hundred years ago.
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7 September 2002Since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, a vigorous national struggle for recognition of indigenous rights has found voice in Indonesia. Embodied in the Alianzi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN - the Alliance of the Peoples Governed by Custom of the Archipelago), this movement is demanding recognition of the rights of the indigenous peoples to their lands and to self-governance. Based on the constitutional recognition of adat (custom), the movement seeks to restore to the communities the power lost to the State in the centralising reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. As Pak Nazarius, a Kanayatn Dayak from West Kalimantan and Cooordinator for AMAN’s central region notes:
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7 September 2002In July 2002, the World Bank released a "decision framework" on its involvement in the proposed Nam Theun 2 dam. The paper explains how the Bank intends to make a decision on whether or not to give a US$100 million loan for a political risk guarantee on the proposed 1,000 MW dam. The US$1.5 billion dam has been studied for more than a decade. The project developer, the Nam Theun 2 Electricity Company (NTEC), is a consortium of Electricité de France with Harza Engineering, the Electricity Generating Company of Thailand, Ital-Thai and the Lao government. Without the World Bank's guarantee, commercial financiers will not risk getting involved.
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7 September 2002The Philippine archipelago is extremely rich in both biological and cultural diversity. It is one of the world's 12 biologically mega-diverse countries and hosts about 127 main cultural groups.
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7 September 2002The uplands between the Yenisei and the Lena rivers are one of the last regions of unbroken boreal forest --"taiga"-- in Eurasia. This region is the homeland to Evenki, Ket, Sel’kup, Sakha, and Dolgan aboriginal hunters and herders. Although Cossack frontiersmen used the Yenisei, Lena, and Lower Tunguska rivers as their main route to subdue and integrate Eastern Siberia into the Russian Empire in the 17th Century, the central Siberian plateau escaped most of the dislocations of Russian and Soviet industrialism in the 19th and 20th Century. The central Siberian taiga remains sparsely populated and one of the main ecological niches for waterfowl, migratory and domestic reindeer, and a host of fur-bearing species ranging from the Arctic fox to the coveted Yenisei sable.
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7 September 2002The weekend of the 21st and 22nd of September PIPEC (Pacific Indigenous People’s Environment Coalition) held a workshop on the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The workshop was opened by the new Conservation Minister for New Zealand, Chris Carter, and had representatives from most of the Pacific nations' communities here in Aotearoa, along with Maori representation. Nearly all of the Pacific academics working in the tertiary sector attended, as did a representative of Siosiomaga Society from Samoa.
GENERAL
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7 September 2002Conservation through the establishment of ‘National Parks’ was an idea born in the United States during the 19th century at a time when it was waging war on Indians and colonizing the ‘Wild West’. The world’s first National Park, Yosemite, was established on the lands of the Miwok people after a bitter war and was followed by the eviction of the remaining people from their land. Setting up the park at Yellowstone also triggered conflict with the local Indians. Nearly all the main National Parks in the USA today are inhabited or claimed by indigenous peoples. Yet according to US law these areas are ‘wildernesses’, defined by the US Wilderness Act as places 'where man himself is a visitor who does not remain'.