Thesis Indigenous Peoples

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
their forests, struggles and rights

General Coordination: Ricardo Carrere
WRM Bulletin Research and Editing: Raquel Núñez
Translation: Sylvia Falcao - Elena De Munno
Edited by: Hersilia Fonseca
Cover design: Flavio Pazos
© World Rainforest Movement

International Secretariat
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This publication is also available in Spanish and French
The contents of this publication can be reproduced totally or partially without

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duly accredited and notified of any reproduction.
Published in December 2005
ISBN:
The elaboration of this publication contents was made possible with su-
pport fromNOVIB (The Netherlands) and from the Swedish Society for Na-
ture Conservation.
This book has been prepared with the financial support of the Rainforest
Programme of the Netherlands Committee for IUCN (NC-IUCN/TRP). The
viewsexpressed, the information and material presented, and the geogra-
phical and geopolitical designations used in this product only imply the
exclusive opinion of the authors.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
their forests, struggles and rights
World Rainforest Movement

CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK ......................................................................
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................
I) INDIGENOUS PEOPLES ............................................................
GENERAL ARTICLES ....................................................................
- Those who protect the forest ..................................................

- Capturing Carbon: Dilemmas for Forest Peoples ....................
- The need to listen to and learn from local communities ..........
- Forest peoples: A ray of hope .................................................
- Stopping human rights abuses is key to solving
forest crisis ............................................................................
- Indigenous Peoples: Guardians of the forests .........................
- Wilderness Parks or Community conservation?......................
- Indigenous Peoples and climate negotiations .........................
- Community View from UNFF: Interview with Freddy
Molina, ACICAFOC ................................................................
AFRICA
- Cameroon: Bagyeli struggling to be heard ..............................

- Kenya: Indigenous group faces October 1 Court date .............
- Rwanda: Dispossessed Twa people press for recognition .......
- Uganda: The Batwa organize to reassert their rights ...............
AMERICA
- Guyana: Empowerment of indigenous peoples through

participatory mapping .............................................................
- Peru: Camisea gas project undermines the rights of
indigenous peoples ................................................................
- Suriname: Chinese logging companies and tribal rights ..........
- Venezuela: Mapping a way forward .........................................
ASIA
- Indonesia: The struggle for self-governance

- Laos: The impact of the Nam Theun 2 dam on indigenous
peoples ..................................................................................
- Philippines: Indigenous peoples and the Convention on
Biological Diversity .................................................................
- Russia: Mapping Evenki lands in Central Siberia ....................
II) INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN VOLUNTARY ISOLATION
INTRODUCTION
- The Indigenous peoples’ right to live in voluntary isolation .......
AFRICA
- Cameroon: Does isolation still protect forest communities? ....

- Congo: The Northern Mbendjele Yaka use avoidance to
maintain autonomy .................................................................
AMERICA
- After the rubber boom .............................................................

- Argentina: The silent genocide of the Mbya Guarani ...............
- Brazil: Indigenous peoples in isolation and policies to defend
and protect them ....................................................................
- Colombia: The Nukak, the last contacted nomadic people .....
- Ecuador: The Huaorani people of the Amazonia, self-isolation
and forced contact .................................................................
- Paraguay: The last Ayoreo in voluntary isolation .....................
- Peru: Policy development for indigenous peoples in voluntary
isolation .................................................................................
ASIA
- India: Wave of poaching and exploitation hits isolated tribes...

- Indonesia: The Baduy people of western Java,
a living tradition ......................................................................
CASES OF IMPOSED CONTACTS
- ‘La Fumée du Metal’: The health impacts of contact ...............

- Central Africa: Land loss and cultural degradation for the
Twa of the Great Lakes...........................................................
- India: The sedentarisation of the Malapantaram in Kerala .......
- Papua New Guinea: First contact in a clash of world views ....
III) RELATED ARTICLES
- The Mumbai – Porto Alegre Forest Initiative, 2005 ..................

- Closing Statement of the International Indigenous
Forum on Biodiversity .............................................................
- Tiohtiá:ke Declaration
- The Vth World Parks Congress: Parks for people or parks
for business?..........................................................................
- The GEF and Indigenous peoples: some findings of a recent
critical study ..........................................................................
REFERENCES ...............................................................................
8 INDIGENOUS PEOPLES their forests, struggles and rights
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES their forests, struggles and rights 9
ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book gathers articles published in the monthly electronic bulletin
of the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) regarding indigenous peoples
and their struggles in defence of the forest. These peoples are the
guardians of the forest and none are more interested than they in
ensuring the conservation of the forests that have been their home, an
integral part of their culture and the source of their livelihood. In the
book, the major issues of indigenous peoples still living in voluntary
isolation are highlighted as a way of contributing to the protection of
their rights.
Most of these articles have been written in close collaboration with

the Forest Peoples Programme, with indigenous peoples’ organizations
and other people and members of organizations defending indigenous
peoples’ rights. The level of detail and analysis in the articles varies
considerably due to the nature of the bulletin.
Independently from the authorship of the articles, these reflect the

hopes and struggle of the indigenous peoples themselves and the
importance of external collaboration in the achievement of their
objectives. We hope that this book will provide an input and a tool to
enable more people and organizations concerned with forest
conservation to understand the fundamental role the indigenous peoples
play in this respect and thus increase their support in defence of these
peoples’ right to continue as guardians of the forest.
We have included in the References the numerous sources of

information that the various articles were based on. Those interested
in accessing them can also do so through our web page, entering
through the “bulletin” area and looking up the year and month
corresponding to the article in question.
The responsibility for this publication is shared between the editor

of the bulletin, Ricardo Carrere (WRM international coordinator) and
the many people and institutions that provided articles or relevant
information for the preparation of the articles. Responsibility for any
errors is entirely that of WRM.
INTRODUCTION
Pak Nazarius looked old but determined in the flickering torch light.
Hunkered down against the wall of the Dayak longhouse in the Upper
Mahakam river of east Kalimantan in the heart of Borneo, he was
explaining his ideas to a community workshop.
“In my community our understanding is that we have rights to our

land and the natural resources both above and below the land.
Everything up to sky belongs to us. Several laws and policies
have classified our forests as State forests and the minerals as
property of the State. We don’t see it like that. I have hair on my
arm, on my skin. Both are mine. I also own the flesh and bones
beneath. They are also mine. No one has the right to take me
apart. But the policy has cut these things apart and thus has cut
us into pieces. We want the land back whole”.
The community, whose lands had been taken over by a plantation

company, was examining how they could regain control of the forests
that they saw as rightfully theirs, but which the State had handed out
to a trans-national corporation. The discussion is just one example of
a worldwide movement of indigenous peoples seeking to reclaim their
rights to their ancestral lands and jurisdictions.
Facilitated by international communications, networks and supportive

NGOs, indigenous peoples in Central Siberia, the Amazon Basin, the
Congo, British Columbia and the Pacific can now learn about each
other’s gains and setbacks within hours or days. What started out as
a plethora of local movements for justice by peoples dispossessed by
colonialism, national development and corporate penetration, has now
developed into a global movement for the recognition and restitution of
collective rights.
Considering the continuing wave of expropriations and denial of rights

associated with the inexorable spread of dams, mines, oil wells, logging,
plantations, colonisation schemes and agribusiness into indigenous
peoples’ lands and forests, it is easy to overlook how much progress
indigenous peoples have made over the last forty years. Yet, in the
1960s it took several years before the world learned of the machine-
gunning of Amazonian Indians by land grabbers acting in connivance
with the inaptly named Indian Protection Service. The prevailing wisdom
of the time was still that these ‘backwards’ peoples were doomed to
extinction, hangovers of a previous age that must inevitably give way to
progress.
The international mobilization to counter this myth can be dated to

the mid-1970s when indigenous peoples from North America came for
the first time to United Nations to demand recognition of their right to
self-determination. They were soon joined by Aboriginal peoples from
Australia, Maori from New Zealand, Saami from Scandinavia and Indians
from Central and South America. Today annual meetings on indigenous
peoples at the United Nations bring together representatives of
marginalised ‘native’ peoples from all over the world. Their presence is
not only testimony to the spread of ideas but evidence of innumerable
local and national mobilisations, as communities have organised, created
new representative institutions, federated into regional bodies and joined
into national and international umbrella groups.
This outstanding mobilisation of indigenous peoples has not only

helped raise international awareness about their situation, it has also
helped to curb local processes of expropriation of indigenous lands
and destruction of forests and other valuable ecosystems. As political
solidarity has grown and both the extent and underlying causes of
dispossession have become clearer, national policies and laws have
begun to change. In some countries commencing with cases in national
courts, national laws and constitutions have been reformed. Since the
1980s, most Latin American countries have either overhauled their
constitutions or passed new ‘organic’ (framing) laws to recognise the
multiethnic and pluri-cultural nature of national societies and the rights
of indigenous peoples to their lands territories and natural resources.
Millions of hectares of indigenous lands and forests have been restored
to indigenous control as a consequence, though the process is far
from complete or uncontested.
In Asia too, the same process is underway. The Philippines

constitution recognises indigenous rights, Nepal has recognised that
the country is home to some sixty indigenous peoples and the new
land law of Cambodia provides for indigenous land rights. The High
Courts in Malaysia have recognised ‘Aboriginal Title’. Legal reforms
are underway in Indonesia that promise —but have yet to effectively
secure— recognition of customary rights.
In Africa, the same process has got underway more recently. Hunter
gatherer and pastoral groups, whose rights are so often disregarded
by national laws and policies, and other peoples pushed aside by major
development projects, have begun to take their concerns to the African
Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Commission has
itself just established a Working Group on Indigenous Populations/
Communities to ensure a fair consideration of their grievances on the
continent.
Recognition of Rights
The process in the newly invigorated African Union, follows the lead set
over the past two decades at the United Nations’ human rights
commission. As appreciation of the circumstances of indigenous peoples
has grown, the UN human rights committees have handed down a series
of judgements and recommendations recognising the collective rights of
indigenous peoples: to be considered subjects of international law as
‘peoples’; to self-determination; to exercise their customary law; to
recognition of their own representative institutions; to their lands and
territories; to control activities proposed for their lands.
These gains have echoed, and been consolidated in, a series of

international documents. In 1989, the International Labour Organisation
issued a revised Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples which
articulated a policy based on participation and the maintenance of
identity to replace its previous policy encouraging the integration of
indigenous peoples into the national mainstream. In 1993, after ten
years of intense study, the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous
Populations completed a draft United Nations Declaration on the Rights
of Indigenous Peoples. Shortly after, the Organisation of American
States (OAS) began a parallel process reviewing a proposed Declaration
on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.
The UN and OAS draft declarations have yet to be approved and

the ILO Convention has only been ratified by some 17 countries but
the norms they consolidate have nonetheless been widely accepted
and applied. The legal reasoning they embody has already found
expression in human rights tribunals, including the InterAmerican Court
of Human Rights, which has ruled, for example, that the State of
Nicaragua cannot hand out logging concessions on indigenous peoples’
lands without recognising their land rights and securing their consent.
Norms established by these human rights standard-setting bodies

have also begun to be accepted by international development agencies
such as the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme.
Special commissions established to examine specific sectors, like
the World Commission on Dams and the World Bank’s Extractive
Industries Review have laid particular emphasis on the need to accept
that no developments should be imposed on indigenous peoples’ lands
without their ‘free, prior and informed consent’ —a minimal expression
of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination, to control affairs in
their customary jurisdictions.
Environmentalists’ campaigns and alliances with indigenous peoples

have to some degree also succeeded in getting private sector umbrella
bodies to accept ‘best practice’ standards that include respect for
indigenous peoples’ rights. The Forest Stewardship Council’s Principles
and Criteria, which set out standards for logging and plantations,
recognises that companies must recognise indigenous peoples’ rights
to their lands, to prior, informed consent and to their sacred sites if
they are to qualify for ‘eco-labelling’. Similar standards have just been
adopted by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil for the setting up
of oil palm estates —a major cause of deforestation in South East
Asia, in particular.
Recently too, indigenous peoples have made similar gains in their

dealings with conservation organisations. The establishment of
‘protected areas’ like National Parks and Game Reserves, the classical
response of conservationists to environmental destruction, has led to
the takeover of huge expanses of indigenous peoples’ lands, sometimes
leading to their forced removal, collapse of their customary systems of
land use, impoverishment, social conflicts and repression. Pressed by
indigenous representatives at the recent World Parks Congress (Durban
2003) and World Conservation Congress (Bangkok 2004),
conservationists agreed to a ‘new paradigm ‘ of protected areas that
would respect indigenous rights in future parks and restore their rights
in protected areas taken unfairly from them in the past. In principle,
these gains have also been endorsed by the States that are party to
the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Practical challenges
This year saw the end of the first, and the launch of the second, United
Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous People, the major goal of
which had been acceptance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples. This was frustrated, however, by a number of
obstaculary governments, notable among which has been the United
Kingdom which has argued with increasing vehemence but uncertain
logic that there are no collective human rights, a view clearly at odds
with the rulings of many UN tribunals and the constitutions and laws of
many countries where indigenous peoples actually live. Indigenous
peoples are now calling for the maintenance of the United Nations
bodies considering indigenous rights. It is clear that, despite the gains,
much yet needs to be done before discriminatory views, which deny
indigenous peoples the same rights as those accorded all other
peoples, are overcome.
The success of indigenous peoples’ mobilisation and international

advocacy has also brought challenges of a different kind to many
communities. The emergence of a globally experienced cadre of
indigenous spokespersons, organised into coalitions, alliances, national
organisations and networks, has strained communications and even
mutual comprehension between them and the communities they come
from. Horizontal information sharing among indigenous leaders, often
from different countries and regions, has not been matched by vertical
sharing between leaders and the ‘grassroots’. The challenge today is
to re-knit etiolated indigenous structures of representation back down
to those who still make their livelihoods on the land, in whose name
the struggle is being fought. Yet the problem should not be exaggerated,
the same tensions in political representation are being experienced by
all human societies during this era of globalisation.
Getting the gains made at the international level —in terms of

recognition of rights— turned into practice at the local level is not just
a matter of communication and improved representation. International
judgements maybe more progressive, national constitutions, laws and
policies may have been changed, ‘best practices’ may have been
agreed by industry, but at the local level the vested interests that profit
from the denial of indigenous rights are often still dominant and
contesting change. A myriad of local struggles for land, voice and
livelihood remain to be fought before we can say that indigenous peoples
have secured justice.
Indigenous peoples’ recourse to the language of international human

rights also presents them with a challenge of another kind. To avoid the
accusation of double standards, indigenous peoples have recognised
that they also need to overhaul their own customary laws, institutions
and values to ensure they do not affront human rights within their own
societies. In different parts of the world, indigenous peoples have already
begun to question and reform customary norms: such as the subjection
of women; caste divisions; slavery-like practices; cruel and unusual
punishments. Some indigenous women lawyers have questioned the
widespread practice of polygamy in their own societies.
Major challenges also face indigenous communities that manage

to re-secure control of their lands and natural resource, their restored
‘commons’. New values, rising populations, circumscribed territories,
access to markets and cash needs, mean that many indigenous
peoples, like most other people on the planet, are putting greater pressure
on their environments. Achieving ‘sustainability’ in the context of
change, means developing new systems of regulating access to
resources, either by invigorating and redefining customary rules and
authorities, or by accepting regulation by State bodies and national
and international environmental laws.
Yet, ironically, one of the most acute difficulties facing indigenous

peoples in this era of change comes from the withering away of the
State not its extension. As the State’s capacity to regulate is weakened
through structural adjustment and trade liberalisation, and the power
and penetration of business grows, indigenous peoples increasingly
find they are dealing directly with trans-national corporations without
mediation. Even where principles like ‘free, prior and informed consent’
ostensibly give indigenous peoples a say over what happens on their
lands, the practical inequalities between historically marginalised
communities and huge companies with annual revenues greater than
many developing countries, mean that many negotiated agreements
get signed despite a widely felt undercurrent in the community of
powerlessness, manipulation and fait accomplit. Ensuring that such
communities have the capacity and resources they need to secure fair
outcomes requires more than goodwill.
Rationale for this book

This book has been produced by the WRM because we are convinced
that indigenous peoples are the best 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. Nearly all WRM publications have reported on their
many struggles to protect their forests, lands and identities but we
have now decided to publish this book 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.
The present material has been produced in close collaboration with

the Forest Peoples Programme —which together with FERN hosts
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 seek to reflect the hopes and struggles of indigenous peoples
themselves, as well as the importance of external collaboration for
achieving their aims. We hope that this book will help to encourage
more individuals and organizations concerned with forests and with
conservation to understand the central role played by indigenous peoples
and thereby to increase support for their rights.
We also hope this book 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 empower
them to defend what is theirs: their lands, their identities, their forests.
by Marcus Colchester,
Forest Peoples Programme.1
1
Forest Peoples Programme, 1c Fosseway Business Centre, Stratford Road, Mo-
reton-in-Marsh, GL56 9NQ, England. www.forestpeoples.org email:
[email protected]
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
GENERAL ARTICLES
Those who protect the forest
Tropical forests are disappearing at an alarming rate and the world is

increasingly conscious about the global impacts that this will entail.
However, people are less conscious about the causes of this process
and there is a tendency to blame local peoples for tropical deforestation.
In most cases, reality shows the exactly opposite situation.
Three main actors dominate the forest scenario: local peoples,

governments and transnational corporations (TNCs). While the former
are trying to protect the forest that provides to their livelihood and cultural
survival, they are being forced to confront —in an unequal struggle—
the combined forces of TNCs and governments, whose “development”
plans inevitably result in forest destruction.
This type of “development” includes industrial logging, oil exploitation,

mining, dams, pulpwood and oil palm plantations, shrimp farming,
monocrop agriculture, cattle-raising and other investments which result
in making the wealthy more wealthy and the poor poorer, destroying,
in the process, the forest which lies in its way and the people who
inhabit it.
At present, most tropical country governments seem to see their

role as that of merely competing with other Southern governments in
offering the best conditions for TNC investment, including subsidies
ranging from tax breaks to repression of opposition in order to ensure
the necessary profitability of foreign investments.
On their part, TNCs obviously feel unaccountable to anyone except

—and only to a certain extent— to their shareholders. They impose
their will, not only over apparently weak Southern governments, but
also on Northern governments and multilateral institutions. No-one ever
elected them to govern anything, but they are in fact increasingly
governing the whole world.
Within such scenario, local peoples struggling to protect their forests

constitute a ray of hope for the future. They are not only the main on-
the-ground opposition to forest destruction, but they also form the basis
for the establishment of worldwide alliances of people willing to protect
forests and forest peoples, which would be meaningless without their
struggles.
Additionally, local peoples are working out and implementing

alternatives —such as community forest management— for truly
sustainable and equitable livelihoods, away from the official and already
meaningless “sustainable development” discourse which governments
and TNCs have emptied of the meaning it initially carried.
The ray of hope represented by those peoples is, however, still not
strong enough and needs support from all organizations working for
the respect for human rights and environmental conservation. Such
support should not be seen, however, as “us” assisting “them”, but as
a collaborative effort to ensure present and future livelihoods for all
people on Earth.
The Ogoni and Ogiek in Africa, the Pataxo and Mapuche in Latin
America, the Karen and Penan in Asia, together with countless other
indigenous, traditional and peasant communities throughout the world
are showing the way. Their struggles are ours and the more support
they get, the more they shall open up avenues for humanity’s future.
(Extracted from WRM web site).
Capturing Carbon: Dilemmas for forest peoples
Global debates about the role of forests and plantations in climate

negotiations have paid little attention to the views of the 300 million or
so forest people who inhabit them. Historically marginalised and denied
recognition of their rights, forest peoples are demanding that their voices
be heard and that they be respected as the rightful owners of their
forests. While scientists are still unsure whether or not forests and
plantations do or do not act as long-term reservoirs or sinks, politicians
are already arguing about whether forests should or should not be
treated as commodities in the global carbon trade. Countries like the
USA, which are finding it hard to curb their emissions, are keen on the
idea of paying companies or countries in the South to ‘create’ carbon

sinks so unsustainable economies in the North can carry on polluting.
And some people in the South are keen to take the money and not ask
difficult questions.
There are clear risks and some possible advantages to be gained

by forest peoples if forests are made part of a global carbon economy.
The most obvious risks are that powerful interests in the industrial
North and in energy and forestry businesses in the South will gain a
determining stake in deciding what should happen to forests, once
again overwhelming forest peoples from making effective decisions about
their future. Likewise lucrative deals between carbon emitters and carbon
storers will provide powerful incentives for large enterprises to take
over community lands for plantations. Previous issues of this bulletin
have noted all too many examples of this process. On the other hand,
it is possible that recognition of the value of standing forests as carbon
stores could free up money to pay conservationists and forest peoples
to look after forests and protect them from destruction. The drawbacks
of such approach were highlighted in WRM bulletin 37 (“Can CDM
money be acceptable for forest conservation?”). In weighing up the
pros and cons, forest peoples have reached different conclusions about
what they should be demanding in the global negotiations.
All are agreed that indigenous peoples and other forest-dwellers

should be centrally engaged in climate negotiations and not relegated
to the side-lines. They have been divided, however, over whether or not
they should accept the inclusion of forests in the ‘Clean Development
Mechanism’ (CDM). In a powerful statement to the sixth meeting of
the Climate Negotiations in The Hague last year, indigenous
spokespersons from 22 different countries and representing 28 distinct
cultures, rejected the inclusion of forests in the CDM and called for the
establishment of a fund for use by Indigenous Peoples to address the
impacts of climate change. “Our intrinsic relation with Mother Earth
obliges us to oppose the inclusion of sinks in the CDM because it
reduces our sacred lands and territories to mere carbon sequestration,
which is contrary to our cosmovision and philosophy of life. Sinks in
the CDM would constitute a worldwide strategy for expropriating our
lands and territories and violating our fundamental rights that would
culminate in a new form of colonialism. Sinks in the CDM would not
help reduce GHG emissions, rather it would provide industrialized

countries with a ploy to avoid reducing emissions at source.”
A different opinion has been voiced by other forest peoples, notably

from Brazil, who have been working with the US NGO Environmental
Defense, itself an advocate of the carbon trade. “Our people have
proposals and projects for the protection of forest and for the lives of
our peoples. We need the means to expand and multiply these. The
CDM must not exclude forests and must not exclude our peoples. We
support the inclusion of forest protection, community-based forest
management, sustainable production, and economic alternatives for
indigenous and traditional peoples in the CDM.” In June this year,
representatives from the Brazilian organizations and Environmental
Defense toured Europe to explain their position. The meetings
highlighted the need for further discussions about the implication of
the CDM for forest peoples. (By: Marcus Colchester, WRM Bulletin Nº
48, July 2001).
The need to listen to and learn from local communities
The different cases addressed in this bulletin describe a broad range of

situations where forests are either being destroyed or conserved.
Contrary to the discourse of many experts, these cases show that
deforestation is more linked to policies implemented by governments
than to actions carried out by local communities. Additionally, they
show that cases where forests are being conserved are more the result
of organized community efforts than of government action.
Commercial logging —legal and illegal— is clearly a major cause

of deforestation, but it is still being promoted by governments. Large
corporations —mostly foreign— reap the benefits while impacts are
borne by local communities and within them particularly by women
and children.
There is no doubt that large-scale hydroelectric dams destroy large

areas of forests and with them the livelihoods of local peoples. However,
they are still being promoted. Here again, benefits go to the hands of
large companies —many of which foreign— while local communities
suffer the consequences.
The history of oil and gas exploitation and transport in the tropics is
a history of human rights abuses and environmental destruction. Entire
forest ecosystems are destroyed, including deforestation, wildlife
depletion and widespread pollution of waterways and underground water.
In spite of mounting local opposition, oil and gas activities continue
being promoted.
Mining is another extremely destructive and polluting industry, which

impacts heavily on local peoples. Here again the profits go to foreign
companies whose activities are promoted and supported by national
governments.
Even the apparently benign activity of tourism is in many cases

resulting in the destruction of forests to give way to large infrastructure
aimed at attracting tourists from abroad.
Large-scale pulpwood or carbon sink tree plantations are also

resulting in forest destruction, both directly and indirectly, and affecting
entire ecosystems —including biodiversity, soils and water— and local
peoples’ livelihoods. However, they continue being actively promoted
nationally and internationally.
Additionally, many sectoral or macroeconomic government policies

result in forest loss. Those policies may appear to have no relation to
forests, but their end result on forests may be devastating. For instance,
the promotion of certain cash crops for export, or high electricity tariffs
may encourage land clearance for agriculture or tree cutting for charcoal
production. In spite of that, government policies continue disregarding
those impacts.
Within the framework of the above examples, local communities

find it very difficult to protect the forests that constitute their homes
and sources of livelihood. However, in spite of the difficulties, they
continue struggling to achieve that aim. Not only do they try to oppose
the “development” projects that will affect them, but at the same time
they try to build alternatives to sustainably use those forests, among
which community forest management is perhaps the more well known.
In sum, solving the forest crisis implies changing those policies

—national and international— that are affecting forests and putting in
place new policies to provide local communities with an adequate

framework to protect what is in their interest to protect. Governments,
multilateral and bilateral agencies, corporations and other major actors
should begin by listening to and learning from those communities.
That would be the best starting point to ensure the survival of the forest
and its peoples. (WRM Bulletin Nº 50, September 2001).
Forest peoples: A ray of hope
Tropical rainforests are among the world’s most diverse and at the
same time most threatened ecosystems on Earth. While governments
have agreed on the diagnosis, they have failed in the implementation of
global and national measures for ensuring their conservation. Within
that context, it is important to highlight some fundamental issues which
have yet to be truly taken on board for forest conservation to be possible.
The first issue is that forests are not empty. Tropical forests have
been inhabited by indigenous and traditional peoples for hundreds of
thousands of years, well before the creation of most of the modern
national states. Each of those peoples have a very precise knowledge
of the boundaries of the territory used, managed and owned by them.
Linked to this knowledge, the second issue to highlight is that forest

peoples hold the rights to those territories by virtue of first settlement.
However these rights are not recognized by most national governments,
which declare that forests legally belong to the state. This legal injustice
—in most cases concocted by colonial rule— paves the way to forest
destruction through government concessions for large scale
exploitation, including industrial logging, mining, oil drilling, plantations
and many other destructive activities.
The third issue is that forest peoples hold the knowledge about the
forest. Proof of this is that for centuries they managed to live with the
forest while fulfilling all their material and spiritual needs through skillful
management. The causes of most modern destructive practices is
usually found in external pressures on forests from government policies
rather than in forest peoples’ themselves.
The fourth and perhaps most important issue regarding the future of
the forests is that forest peoples are the ones more directly interested
in their conservation, because forests not only ensure their livelihoods,
but are an integral part of their way of life, where respect for nature is at
the core of their culture. They are not mere “stakeholders” but “rights-
holders” and as such they are the most willing (and able) to protect
their resources in the long term.
Forest peoples thus constitute a ray of hope for the forests’ future.
They hold the rights and the knowledge and their physical and cultural
survival depends on ensuring their conservation. In many cases, forest
peoples are adapting their knowledge to a changing situation, working
out and implementing alternatives for sustainable and equitable
livelihoods, away from the official and already meaningless “sustainable
development” discourse which governments and TNCs have emptied
of the meaning it initially carried.
The ray of hope represented by those peoples is, however, still not
strong enough and needs support from all organizations working for
human rights and forest conservation. Being the main on-the-ground
opposition to forest destruction, forest peoples form a basis for the
establishment of worldwide alliances of people willing to support their
struggle. Such support should not be seen, however, as “us” assisting
“them”, but as a collaborative effort to ensure present and future
livelihoods for all people on Earth.
The Johannesburg Summit is an opportunity for governments to re-

commit themselves to forest conservation. The way to prove their
political will would be to explicitly acknowledge the territorial rights of
indigenous and other traditional forest peoples and to commit
themselves to incorporating this in their national legislation. This would
be the first step in the right direction, because it would create the
necessary basic conditions for making forest conservation possible.
Will governments finally do what needs to be done and allow this ray of
hope to shine? (WRM Bulletin Nº 61, August 2002).
Stopping human rights abuses is key to solving forest

crisis
A new report clearly links the disappearance of the world’s forests with
the horrifying catalogue of human rights abuses taking place as a result
of conflicts between forest peoples and the powerful government and
corporate interests within forests. Published by Fern, “Forests of Fear:
the abuse of human rights in forest conflicts” calls for governments,
environmental groups and aid donors to prioritise the defence of human
rights as the primary solution to solving the forest crisis.
“Forests of Fear” highlights the stories of over 40 cases of human

rights abuse, arising from such conflicts. Four detailed case studies,
three country analyses (Indonesia, Mexico and Canada), as well as
further examples offer evidence of human rights abuses including
murder, threat to life, disregard of land rights, illegal imprisonment,
forced resignation and torture. The examples include:
- Three children —Kenowuia Nury Bokota, Mauricio Diaz and Jorge

Anikuta— from Colombia’s indigenous U’wa population died during police
action to evict some 450 people from a road blockade using tear gas,
riot sticks and bulldozers. The U’wa have been mounting a massive
struggle against oil exploitation by US corporation Occidental Petroleum
in forest they claim to be their ancestral territory.
- A US Forest Service ranger, Buzz Williams, was accused of

insubordination after criticising environmentally damaging timber sales
in the Chattooga River corridor. He eventually lost his job. Williams’
superior, Tina Barnes, was intimidated, sexually harassed, demoted
and forced to resign when she supported him in his views.
Fern believes that without halting these abuses and creating a

climate in which the fate of forests can be discussed in an open manner
with all involved, there is little hope that the ongoing destruction of
world’s forests can be stopped.
Forests of Fear concludes with seven key recommendations,

including:
- defence of human rights must be made a priority in environmental

campaigns
- international database of corporations with a record of human
rights abuses should be established
- documentation of human rights abuses relating to forest conflicts
should be formally recognised
- the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders should be widely
adopted and enforced by governments. (WRM Bulletin Nº 54,
January 2002).
Indigenous peoples: Guardians of the forests
Brazilian military dictator Emilio Garrastazú 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.
Much has changed in thinking since then, though much still needs
to be changed in practice. But the fact is that no-one in his/her common
senses —except perhaps the President of a very powerful nation—
can think of expressing him/herself in that way without having to pay a
huge political price. Although many policies are still aimed at depriving
indigenous peoples of their rights and exploiting their forests, they now
have to be disguised under a “green” and “humanitarian” discourse,
precisely because the situation has changed.
These changes are the result of long struggles at the local, national
and international levels. Some of those struggles began under the
environmental banner and were aimed at protecting the world’s forests.
Other struggles originated in the defense of indigenous peoples’ rights
to their territories. Increasingly, people and organizations fighting under
the environmental or social banners, began to realize that the struggle

was one: that forests contained peoples and that those peoples were
the guardians of the forests. This new perception greatly strengthened
the struggle by uniting many more people around a common aim.
The struggle has been carried out in different arenas, ranging from
local opposition to specific “development” projects —logging, mining,
oil exploitation, dams, plantations, shrimp farming— to national and
international lobbying and campaigning efforts. At the same time,
indigenous peoples were creating their own organizations and networks
in order to participate directly at all levels, ensuring that their specific
viewpoints were reflected in the debates, especially in international
human rights fora . These parallel campaigns led to the establishment
of formal and informal alliances between the Indigenous Peoples
movement and NGO movements willing to work together for the common
aim of empowering forest peoples as the more just and practical way
of ensuring forest conservation.
The result of these activities is impressive. In relatively few years,

indigenous peoples have become increasingly visible and influential
and many of their concerns have been incorporated to international
and national legislation. They have become an actor to be taken into
account. Although some or many of their rights may be still unrecognized
in different countries —either in law or in practice— neither governments
nor corporations can ignore them any more.
The Amazon of the Brazilian dictator has now become a “forest

with peoples” fighting for their rights, while his “men without land” have
created a powerful landless peasant movement struggling for land held
by the local elite outside the forest. Similar changes have occurred
and are ocurring in many other countries throughout the world and all
the articles contained in this book reflect many of the processes and
struggles now taking place.
But despite those impressive advances, much still needs to change

in order to match theory with practice. As indigenous peoples know by
experience, legal recognition of their rights is a necessary but usually
insufficient condition to ensure full respect of those rights, particularly
within the framework of the globalized model now being imposed on
the world’s peoples by corporate power. In that context, empowerment

of indigenous peoples and other local communities is the way forward
to confront corporate control over people and resources. Within the
forest, this means that responsibility over forest management needs
to be transferred back to the traditional guardians and owners of the
forest: the indigenous peoples. Although still in its initial stages, this is
starting to happen, which opens up hope for the future of both forests
and forest peoples. (WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Wilderness parks or Community conservation?
Conservation 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’. It is this wilderness model, exported by western
conservationists, that became the dominant approach to nature
conservation throughout the tropics during the era of ‘development’
after the second world war.
Though fundamental to much western thinking about nature, many

indigenous peoples reject the notion of wilderness, as Jakob Malas a
Khomani hunter from the Kalahari, whose lands were classified as the
Gemsbok National Park, has noted:
“The Kalahari is like a big farmyard. It is not a wilderness to us. We

know every plant, animal and insect, and know how to use them. No
other people could ever know and love this farm like us.”
Ruby Dunstan, of the Nl’aka’pamux people of the Stein Valley in

Alberta, Canada, who have been fighting to prevent the logging of their
ancestral lands, has likewise remarked:
“I never thought of the Stein Valley as a wilderness. My Dad used to

say ‘that’s our pantry’. We knew about all the plants and animals,
when to pick, when to hunt. We knew because we were taught every
day. It’s like we were pruning everyday... But some of the white
environmentalists seemed to think if something was declared a
wilderness, no-one was allowed inside because it was so fragile. So
they have put a fence around it, or maybe around themselves.”
The results of the imposition of the wilderness model are shocking.

Millions of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands.
Millennial systems of natural resource management disrupted and
destroyed. Communities impoverished and deracinated. Rights trampled
and colonial forms of administration and enforcement imposed. Getting
sound data on the scale of these evictions is hard, they don’t get
recorded in the ‘red data’ books, but in India alone it is estimated that
600,000 ‘tribal’ people have been expelled from their lands to make
way for protected areas. These impositions have also bred conflict.
Protected areas imposed against the will of the local people become
management nightmares, conservation fortresses laid siege by local
people who have to ‘squat’ and ‘poach’ to stay alive. Ironically, too, the
expulsions of human settlements may even impoverish the biodiversity
of local areas, many of which were managed landscapes not
wildernesses, where customary land use systems helped sustain
ecosystem diversity and multiplied the niches for wild animals and
plants.
But aren’t forests better defended by securing local peoples’ rights?

Many conservationists don’t think so, arguing that native people are no
better than anyone else at conserving nature. The fact that, in the
past, forests were preserved in indigenous areas, they argue, was mainly
due to the lack of transport, low populations due to warfare and disease,
and simple technology. Once roads are built, communities pacified,
clinics curb child deaths and the people adopt chainsaws and pick-up
trucks, indigenous communities are as liable to destroy nature as
anyone else, they claim. They point to Indians selling timber from their
reserves in Brazil and the depredations of the bush-meat trade in the
Congo basin to underline their argument. However, other data support
the contrary case. For example only some 5% of the Brazilian Amazon
is locked up in Protected Areas, while over 20% is in officially recognized
Indian Reserves. Recent research by the Woods Hole Research Center

shows that forests in Indian reserves are in good shape and what forest
loss has occurred has been mainly caused by illegal invasions, not by
the Indians.
Most of the big international conservation agencies, like the WWF-

Internatiomal, the World Conservation Union and the World Commission
on Protected Areas, have now adopted policies that recognize
indigenous and ‘traditional’ peoples’ rights and promote their involvement
in conservation. In theory, these agencies should no longer be
establishing protected areas without first ensuring that the indigenous
peoples’ land rights are recognized, the people consent to the
establishment of protected areas on their lands and they participate
fully in management. The Convention on Biological Diversity also makes
(somewhat ambiguous) provisions securing the rights of indigenous
and local communities. These changed policies recognise a ‘new model’
of conservation, which promotes community-based conservation as
an alternative to the old exclusionary model based on establishing
‘wildernesses’. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given their history, it is the
large US-based conservation agencies that have been most reluctant
to endorse this new approach
Despite advances at the policy level, on the ground the situation is

not very encouraging. Few governments accept that recognising
indigenous peoples’ rights is a logical part of their national conservation
strategies. Most protected areas continue to be managed in the old
way, excluding communities, denying their land and resource rights
and obliging their resettlement. In part this is because most developing
countries adopted their conservation laws in the 1960s and 1970s,
when the exclusionary model of conservation was still being preached.
Another reason is that the local personnel of international conservation
agencies have often not even been informed about the new policies
adopted at headquarters, let alone trained to implement them. Besides,
many protected area administrators of the old school are reluctant
now to cede power to those they see as truculent native people grown
too big for their boots. The colonial mind-set dies hard. It will be some
time before these old dinosaurs die out. (By: Marcus Colchester, WRM
Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Indigenous peoples and Climate negotiations
As members of the global indigenous peoples’ health caucus,

Committee on Indigenous Health members prepared a number of
technical briefing papers for the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous
Issues —most of us who were attending the second session were
focussed on the activities of the so-called UN specialised programmes
and bodies. To most of the world today, this maze-like array of
formidable, monolithic organisations are confusing enough to
understand; for indigenous and tribal peoples, communities and their
mostly rural or desert/forest-based organisations, they more often than
not represent well-armed, determined organs of all hues of
institutionalised colonialism —neo-liberal colonialism, bio-colonialism,
the “un” free market and globalisation.
The Economic and Social Council’s new baby —the Permanent

Forum of Indigenous Issues is a functional commission that was
established in 2000, one of the achievements of the International Decade
of the World’s Indigenous People. With a bewildering mandate that
covers socio-economic, environment, health, culture, education and
human rights issues, the Forum’s members as well as the observers
who attend its sessions are all in the same boat, looking for an effective
rudder and fair winds.
It was clearly evident by the second session that for indigenous

peoples, the Forum has a mandate that is very different from our
expectations, quite different from the Sub-Commission’s Working Group
on Indigenous Populations (WGIP). The concerns for us are growing
as we become increasingly aware that the working methods and
decision making process of the Forum has large gaps and weaknesses
that need to be addressed very swiftly if we are to get any coherent
sense and useful function out of this new body.
Evidently, there is lots to learn and we are all “learning by doing”, as
many specialised organs and bodies of the UN are fond of saying. The
problem with this approach is that very little is actually learnt too late
by too few by this doing. The danger in this is that many indigenous
peoples and small communities are in a desperate struggle for survival
and extinction is too near, and this form of learning is really too expensive
for us.
Take for example, the negotiations and process under the Kyoto
Protocol of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
As an indigenous person involved in the anti-dams campaign in my
own province in India, I participated in a lobbying tour of some selected
Western European countries during late May and early June which
culminated in a press briefing during the 18th meeting of the Subsidiary
Body for Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA) of the Kyoto Protocol
in Bonn. This protocol was adopted to implement and make possible
some very unrealistic targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions
for the so-called Annex-1 countries (the industrialised culprits of global
warming) provided in the Framework Convention.
The Kyoto Protocol and its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)

is a notoriously cynical and vicious new arrangement and mechanism
to convert the last frontier after the “commons” - the very air we breathe
and live by - into a private, market driven “bazaar” of futures of enclosed
atmospheric spaces. In the near future, you may find that not only
your lands and forests but the air above and around your village has
been sold and owned by some multi- or trans-national company with
foreign shareholders in a distant land. The World Bank set up its
Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) to “learn by doing” how to fund destructive
and unsustainable and highly controversial projects such as large dams
and mono-culture plantations through private parties. These projects
are theoretically within the purview of the Bank’s operational policies
for indigenous peoples, environment, forests, gender, etc. but they hardly
see them being applied because it is “learning by doing”. Meanwhile,
indigenous communities in South East Asia along the Mekong, in
Indonesia, in Uganda, in Guatemala, in Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo
in Brazil are deprived of their lands, water, rivers, health and livelihoods.
So, we learn. For how much longer?
The CDM has no space for indigenous peoples, just as ten years
down the line since the Earth Summit of 1992 we have none at the
UNFCCC and its Protocol, despite indigenous peoples being one of
the “major groups” and our Rio and Johannesburg declarations and
plans of actions, Agenda 21, and so on. In fact, the CDM has nothing
to do actually with climate change! For, developed countries would
continue to burn fossil fuels at ever increasing rates while they buy
ever cheaper fictitious carbon credits to feel justified and morally
cleansed for polluting and ultimately destroying Earth. The CDM is

another global market, “it is not about charity” and “it is not about
development” as a government representative involved in the climate
negotiations candidly revealed. Organisations, brokers and certification
mechanisms for clean and sustainable development practices have
suddenly mushroomed in the West, highly paid consultants with
Bachelors degrees in accountancy from strange institutions travel
hurriedly to our distant lands to “inspect” project sites and “consult”
with stakeholders, constantly looking at their watches and electronic
notebooks, and ultimately to validate and write certificates that are
meaningless to us but would do us great harm.
So why do we continue to engage at all with such processes filled

with lies and devoid of morality and true commitments? We are now,
whether we like it or want it or not, forced to play this game in the field
we have agreed upon, by the rules we have acquiesced to, so we have
to play it well or never show up. With this belief, we shall continue to
attempt and support any activity that can enhance the usefulness and
effectiveness of the Forum. We must continue to encourage and exhort
the specialised UN agencies and bodies to become sensitive to our
voices, to respect our rights, and work with them within a mutually
respectful and consultative, cooperative partnership to achieve our
objectives. We must prise our way into these difficult negotiations, not
leave it to NGOs, claim our legitimate places and work our role if we
believe that these can serve our collective aspirations and agenda. We
must also have the courage to reject them outright and claim no part to
these negotiations if they are proven to be destructive to us, devoid of
morality and political commitment. That is the only way we can play a
constructive and positive role. The question, is this enough? (WRM
Bulletin Nº 74, September 2003).
Community View from UNFF: Interview with Freddy

Molina, ACICAFOC
Freddy Molina is a board member of the Asociación Coordinadora

Indígena y Campesina de Agroforesteria Comunitaria Centroamericana
(ACICAFOC). In English, this translates into the Coordinating Indigenous
and Peasant Farmers Association on Community Agro-Forestry in
Central America. ACICAFOC is a non-profit, social community-based
organization from Central America, which brings together associations,

cooperative societies, federations and grass roots organizations lead
by small and medium agro forestry producers, indigenous peoples and
farmer peasants. These groups work for the access, use and
management of the natural resources, seeking food security and
economic sustainability for their communities in harmony with the
environment. ACICAFOC is also a founding member of the Global
Caucus on Community Based Forest Management. Mr. Molina was
recently at the United Nations Forum on Forests and answered some
questions about his community, forests, and the UNFF.
1. Where do you live?

I live in one of the neighbouring communities of the Maya Biosphere
Reserve in the District of Petén, Guatemala, C.A. This reserve is two
million one hundred thousand hectares in size, and is made up of
national parks, biological corridors, community concessions and
industrial concessions.
2. Tell us about the community and forests where you live

My community bears the name of a tree, “El Caoba” (the mahogany
tree - Swietenia macrophylla) and nine (9) communities belong to my
organization. We came together around our community forest
concession, as its natural guardians, across 100 km. With regard to
our forests, we used to consider them our enemy. We would deforest
our lands to plant corn and beans and create pastureland for cattle.
Now the forests are our allies, since the Government of Guatemala
has given us a community forest concession, which provides us with a
livelihood, education and health through sustainable management.
3. What does ACICAFOC do, and what is your role in the

organization?
ACICACOF is a community-based process that belongs to us. It
has supported us a great deal in developing local capacity, it has helped
us see things differently, and has given us a new outlook through
experience-sharing and by clearing the way for us at all levels where
we now participate actively — not like before, when others spoke for
us to achieve projects that would supposedly benefit our communities.
I am the President of this distinctly community-based Central American
organization.
4. What are the main problems faced by your community and your
forests?
We have begun generating jobs, improving the quality of life, training,
decreasing poverty, changing attitudes, fostering respect for the forest
and teamwork. But so far we have not managed to involve all of our
neighbours because these are new processes. Those who have not
yet benefited from these processes continue to destroy the forest,
which is why we are creating comprehensive programs linked to the
forest, such as non-timber resources, eco-tourism, environmental
services for organic production, etc.
5. What is your national government’s approach to the rights of

indigenous peoples and communities, and to forest management?
Thanks to international conventions, external pressure, the
involvement of our indigenous people in the government and the peace
agreements, a lot of ground has been gained. There is still a long way
to go, even though indigenous peoples are receiving some recognition
and racism has decreased in recent times. In relation to forests, the
issue of community forest concessions in Guatemala is an outcome
of the peace agreements (nearly half a million hectares in community
hands).
6. Is this your first time at the UNFF? What do you think of this
process? What do you think you have gotten out of this process, or
what do you expect to get out of it? Are you happy you participated,
and do you feel that it was a good investment of your time?
This is my second time. This process is good and can be even
better. I had the opportunity to give a presentation on our experience. I
think that my experience has strengthened those of us who have always
believed that the best way to save our forests is to involve communities
in sustainable management. I also showed that the Guatemalan
experience must be taken into account.
7. What did you think of your government’s behaviour at UNFF 4?

Particularly in relation to the rights of indigenous peoples and
communities? And what did you think of the way the other Central
American countries acted?
I returned to my country very happy, there was a good representative
of the Government. We managed to coordinate our position with regard
to the rights of indigenous peoples and communities. I think it is

important to have a good team with a Central American influence.
8. If you had to send a message to the UNFF regarding a

recommendation for “action”, what would it be? What could the UNFF
do for the communities that depend on the forests of Guatemala?
I would recommend worldwide community dialog, and joining forces
to achieve international support that is direct, not through middlemen.
We should also always make sure that new alliances, communities
and other groups have strategic plans aimed at true community
empowerment; we must put a stop to making money off of the poverty
and ignorance of our peoples. (WRM Bulletin Nº 82, May 2004).
AFRICA
Cameroon: Bagyeli struggling to be heard
Since 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.
When France became the dominant colonial power earlier last

century virtually all lands in Cameroon became property of the State,
even though almost all land in Cameroon is held under customary
principles. This system has persisted to the present day —only 2.3%
of Cameroon’s lands have been titled since 1974, and most forest
lands located outside of protected areas remain extremely vulnerable
to outside exploitation of one form or another. Local people are rarely
consulted over how these lands are to be managed, and indigenous
peoples are particularly marginalised in the few public consultations
which do take place. For instance, now in the Ocean Department of
Cameroon local communities are coming to terms with the many
impacts of an oil pipeline that now traverses their lands, facilitating the
export of oil from the southern fields of Chad via an offshore pumping
station near Kribi, Cameroon.
The installation of the much-criticised, World Bank-backed Chad-

Cameroon pipeline through this forested region of South West Cameroon
has led to land and forest loss for many different communities, and it is
now well-documented how indigenous Bagyeli communities have lost
out in two different geographical areas. First, in the pipeline zone,
construction has left a 30 meter wide gap through the forest, traversing
land where Bagyeli hunted, gathered and cultivated, and this has led
to the loss of land and access to resources upon which Bagyeli
livelihoods have traditionally been based. The compensation programme
for the pipeline exacerbated these losses because some Bagyeli were
removed from the lands they were occupying by other local people,
who then stole their compensation, by claiming the pipeline was taking
land which they used for agricultural production. Not one Bagyeli has
received individual compensation for the losses that they experienced
due to the pipeline’s construction.
Secondly, new restrictions on hunting and forest access in Bagyeli

traditional areas near the border with Equatorial Guinea were brought
about by the gazettement of Campo Ma’an National Park. The protection
of this important area, which is traversed by a road used to export
timber, forms part of the environmental compensation for the pipeline.
However, its new status as national park means that Bagyeli hunting
and gathering communities who have operated there since recorded
history face being criminalised for continuing to pursue their livelihoods.
These examples illustrate a total disregard of local land tenure and
livelihood systems by those who prepared the pipeline plans.
Bagyeli do not possess identity cards —a requirement under

Cameroon law—, they face severe social discrimination, and they have
poor access to health and education services. Most do not possess
farming land of their own, and cultivate that of their stronger neighbours
in exchange for food. Bagyeli’s social marginalisation and the increased
suffering their communities have experienced since the pipeline was
proposed has led them to engage with national and international support
NGOs to develop strategies for their communities to assert their rights
with conservation authorities —who have joined in dialogue with Bagyeli
representatives from around Campo— and with local government and
pipeline agents, who have previously been unwilling to solicit to Bagyeli’s
views.
With support from the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) and two
local NGOs (Planet Survey and the Centre for Environment and
Development-CED), Bagyeli are beginning to secure identity cards and
engage regularly with government officials, and representatives from
the pipeline project, who have recently agreed to meet with them over
their plans for regional compensation measures. FPP and its partners
will also support Bagyeli to generate their own data for community
based maps of land use, using Global Positioning System technology
and working in collaboration with the majority Bantu communities, and
final maps will be produced for them by CED. These maps will form the
basis for future dialogues between Bagyeli and Bantu communities,
protected area managers, government agencies and pipeline authorities
to attain secure, communal land rights for the Bagyeli. (By: John Nelson,
WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Kenya: Indigenous group faces October 1 Court date
On October 1 2002, 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.
For decades, the Ogiek have fought first with the British colonial
and then the Kenyan government to live peacefully in the Mau Forest,
where they have lived for hundreds of years. The Ogiek’s current lawsuit
dates back to a 1997 case, when the group went to court to stop the
Kenyan government from surveying and allocating Mau Forest land to
others. Later that year, the High Court ordered that no Mau Forest land
would be allocated to settlers until all issues related to it were resolved
in court. But after years of threatening to evict the Ogiek from the Mau
Forest, the government announced in 2001 it would degazette 147,000
acres of the forest. Degazetting the land would eliminate its
environmentally protected status and allow settlers from other parts of
Kenya to move in. The Ogiek then sued, charging the government was
ignoring the 1997 High Court order since the Ogiek’s earlier lawsuit
had not yet been resolved.
Kenya’s development plans threaten both the Ogiek and the Mau
Forest, one of the largest water complexes in East Africa. Experts say
that reducing Kenya’s forestland would have dangerous environmental

consequences. The Mau Forest is a vital water catchment area,
absorbing water during the rainy season and gradually releasing it during
the rest of the year. According to scientists, the forest provides about
40 percent of the nation’s water supply. While the Ogiek’s way of life is
self-sustaining, the government has exempted three powerful companies
from a logging ban and allowed them to continue harvesting wood in
Mau Forest, destroying the Ogiek ecosystem in which the indigenous
group gathers honey, selectively hunts animals, and grows vegetables.
Although they agree with the government that Kenya lacks sufficient
agricultural land, Ogiek supporters argue that President Daniel arap
Moi is more interested in rewarding its supporters than providing more
food for its citizens and that most of the land has been given to Moi’s
close associates. Joseph Kamotho, the recently dismissed minister
for environment who has fallen out with Moi, says the Ogiek land issue
was used by “unscrupulous government officials to get more land for
themselves.”
As the gradual destruction of its forest continues, the community

has faced no justice in court corridors. For over a year, the Ogiek’s
case has been repeatedly delayed in court due to procedural problems.
In February 2002, the case was postponed because the government
lawyer handling the case was out of the country. In April, it was again
rescheduled after government lawyers said that they had not had time
to file their replying affidavits. In July, the judge scheduled to hear the
case was absent, and a substitute judge set a hearing for October.
Ogiek advocates hope that these frequent delays will end soon, but so
far the government has given no indication that it wants to resolve the
case quickly.
Many observers believe that changes in Kenyan politics in the next

few months may help the Ogiek’s legal case to move forward. Kenyan
law prohibits Moi from running for office in the upcoming presidential
elections, currently scheduled for December*2 . “The post-Moi Kenya
2
Finally, Mwai Kibaki won those elections by a large margin.
will be different and the Ogiek cases may finally be heard after
elections,” said John Kamau of Rights Features Service, a Kenyan-
based organization that has been monitoring the Ogiek’s case. “At
that time Moi will not be in power to protect his cronies, unless he
does so by proxy.”
In addition, draft proposals for a new Kenyan constitution should

help the Ogiek. Kamau pointed out that the draft of the new constitution
also calls for new laws on land and the protection of indigenous
communities from discrimination. “If the Constitution is adopted, then
the Ogiek can sigh with relief,” Kamau said. “But a lot needs to be done
to sensitize politicians on the issues at hand.” The draft, which needs to
be approved by parliament, would also create a new position of prime
minister that would be elected by the national assembly. The president,
who now has almost exclusive control over government policy, would be
limited to carrying out “special responsibilities” in such areas as national
unity. By reducing the president’s powers, the draft would make it more
difficult for Moi’s successor to stop the Ogiek’s case.
A number of Kenyan and international groups —including the Ogiek

Welfare Council, Rights Features Service, Survival International, and
the Digital Freedom Network— have maintained an international
campaign to protect the Mau Forest and the Ogiek’s way of life. (By:
Bobson Wong, WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Rwanda: Dispossessed Twa people press for recognition
The 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. Wildlife
conservation areas, established to protect gorilla populations and
watersheds, have evicted Twa communities in Rwanda, DRC and Uganda
even though the Twa traditionally do not hunt gorillas nor do their activities
affect watershed functions. In common with many other Pygmy peoples,
the Twas’ rights to forest lands and resources are not recognised in
customary or written law and the evictions took place without
compensation or alternative land provision.
Rwanda’s forests began to be felled centuries ago as incoming

Hutu farmers and Tutsi herders cleared land for agriculture and pasture.
Rwanda avoided the ravages of the Arab and European slave trades,
and its population increased as other people sought refuge there. Local
chiefs encouraged settlement on their lands because they gained power
and revenues the more ‘clients’ they had. Rwanda’s population
increased from 1 million to 7 million from the 1940s to the 1980s.
During the colonial period, land held by heads of clans was redistributed
and from the 1960s onwards government policy encouraged farmers to
expand into pastures, wetlands and forest areas such as around the
Volcanoes National Park, and migrate east into less densely populated
grazing lands. Between 1970 and 1986 the cultivated area increased
by 56%, meanwhile the average land holdings had been steadily
decreasing from 3 ha/family in 1949 to 0.7 ha in 1990. By the mid
1980s almost all land available for agriculture had been used up except
for the areas under national parks.
Up to the end of the 1970s land distribution is considered to have

been relatively equitable. Rwanda could feed its population; small farmers
were more productive than larger ones. However, farmers’ main method
of increasing the production from ever decreasing plots of land was to
reduce the fallow period, resulting in depletion of soil fertility.
Rwanda’s population is now 8.3 million, with an average population

density of 315 people per square kilometre (800 per sq km in the north-
west) making it the most densely populated country in Africa. Ninety-
one percent of the population depends on subsistence agriculture for
survival. Landlessness and inequitability in land distribution worsened
after the mid 1980s as land was expropriated by government for middle-
class housing, parastatal projects and industrial development. Land
also became concentrated in the hands of the emerging wealthy elite
who had off-farm incomes or were employed on the many foreign aid
projects, and who were able to buy land off indebted or starving small
farmers.
Rwanda’s forests have been drastically reduced from approximately

30 percent at the beginning of the 20th century to 7 percent of the total
land area. In 1934, the Mukuru-Gishwati-Volcans forest complex in the
north of Rwanda was a single forest block of 833 square kilometres.
By 1955, it was divided into three discrete patches, and by 1998, only
18 per cent of the original forest remained. The largest forest in the
south of the country, Nyungwe, lost 26 per cent of its area over the
same period. Its area is now only 87,000 ha. Overall, 49 per cent of
Rwanda’s Afromontane forest disappeared between 1934 and 1998.
Clearance for farming and pasture land has contributed to the

reduction in forest cover, as well as harvesting of fuel-wood and timber
for housing and small scale mining. Production of export crops is also
a factor in forest destruction: half the forests around the volcanoes in
the north were cleared for pyrethrum plantations in the 1960s, and
areas around the Nyungwe forest were cleared for tea estates. After
the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were
killed by Hutu extremists, forests were further depleted by the
establishment of fuel-hungry refugee camps just over the border in
DRC and the need to rehabilitate thousands of refugees returning to
Rwanda after long periods of exile. These refugees were mostly
accommodated in former protected areas, including the Mutara Game
Reserve, two-thirds of the Akagera National Park and the Gishwati
Forest.
The loss of biological resources affects everyone in Rwanda, but

especially the Twa who originally depended on the forest. The Twas’
customary rights to forest lands were never recognised either by local
rulers or under colonial laws, with the result that as the forest was
cleared, the Twa became landless squatters except for a few families
that were given land by Rwanda’s former Kings, the Mwamis. The last
forest-dwelling Twa, the Impunyu, were cleared from the Gishwati forest
in the 1980s and 90s to make way for World Bank-financed projects
aimed at relieving human pressure on forests by increasing the supply
of wood products through industrial eucalyptus plantations and developing
a productive dairy industry using pastures in degraded forest areas.
Ironically, these projects were intended to protect the forest, but they
had the opposite effect: by 1994 two-thirds of the original forest had
been converted to pasture, almost all of which was allocated to friends
and relations of the President. Throughout this process, the Twa received
no compensation or remedial measures, nor were they included among
the thousands of people employed by the projects. Returning refugees
settling in the area and clearing land for subsistence farming have now
effectively completely destroyed the forest.
Conservation projects removed Rwandan Twa communities from

the Nyungwe forest reserve in 1998 and from the Parc des Volcans
(the oldest park in Africa, created in 1924 as the Albert National Park).
Older Twa living in southern Rwanda recall hunting for buffalo and
elephant in the Nyungwe forest and taking the horns and tusks to the
Mwami as tribute. Currently a mere handful of Twa are employed in the
parks as casual labour or trackers; they have no involvement in park
management or decision-making. While some conservation agencies
are carrying out development projects that include Twa communities
around the Parc des Volcans and Nyungwe forest, these generally
don’t address the fundamental issue of land and access to forest
resources.
The land situation in Rwanda is acute and that of Rwanda’s Twa is

very precarious. In 1991 it was reported that nationally only 50-57 % of
households had the minimum amount of land (0.7 ha) needed to feed
the average household of 5 people. However for the Twa the situation is
much worse —only 1.5% Twa households surveyed by the Forest
Peoples Programme and Twa organisations in 1993 and 1997 had
enough land to feed their families. Since colonial times there has been
virtually no land distribution to the Twa: in 1995, 84% of landed Twa
were still living on land given to them by the Mwamis. The Twas’ political
weakness makes them vulnerable to expropriation of their existing lands
by neighbouring farmers and local authorities. The marshes providing
clay for Twa communities’ traditional pottery are often allocated by
local authorities to other groups for farming.
The Twa are the poorest group in Rwandan society, lacking access
to formal education, housing and health care. Few of them know how
to farm, and most eke a living from pottery, casual labour and begging.
The Twa are marginalised and discriminated against because of their
identity, and have virtually no representation in Rwanda’s local or national
administration or decision-making processes. The Twa were victims of
the 1994 genocide, losing an estimated 30% of their population

compared to 14% of the overall population. The Twas’ losses have
never been acknowledged by the post-genocide Rwandan government.
They feel that they have been forgotten in the post-genocide
reconstruction of Rwandan society.
However, over the past few years there have been some positive
developments. Rwandan Twa have organised themselves, creating
NGOs to press for improvements in the situation of the Twa. These
organisations have made representations to the President of Rwanda
and to the Commission charged with the revision of Rwanda’s
constitution, calling for affirmative action on land and education and
requesting special measures for their representation in government
processes. The Twa NGO ‘CAURWA’ is working with 70 local Twa
associations, helping them to get land, learn how to farm and develop
non-agricultural income generating activities such as tile-making,
basketry and pottery. These activities are complemented by advocacy
work at local, national and international level and community capacity
building to enable the Twa to play an active role in national processes
such as Rwanda’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, the traditional gacaca
courts that will judge the thousands of prisoners accused of genocide-
related crimes and the national Unity and Reconciliation process, that
seeks to heal the wounds caused by Rwanda’s long history of ethnic
strife. (By: Dorothy Jackson, WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Uganda: The Batwa organize to reassert their rights
The 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.
The Tutsi moved into the area after 1550. Although recognizing Batwa
ownership of the high altitude forest, the Batwa were regarded as Tutsi’s
servants within the King’s courts. From about 1750, Hutu clans began
to move into the area, and from 1830 the Tutsi sought to establish
more direct rule over the territory, leading to conflict between the two
groups. The Batwa played an important role in these conflicts and the
Tutsi could not have established or retained this region as part of their
kingdom without the support of Batwa archers. Some Batwa established
themselves in powerful positions and claimed tribute from Hutu around
them, but most would pay tribute to the Tutsi kings by bringing them
ivory, animal skins and meat. Throughout this whole period —and up
until their forced expulsion by conservationists from the forests in 1991—
Batwa would also barter meat, honey and other forest products for
other products from the local community around them.
In 1991, the Bwindi and Mgahinga National Parks were established

which caused great suffering to Batwa and other neighbouring local
communities. In 1995 the conservation Trust became fully operational.
In spite of the resulting violation of the Batwa’s territorial and human
rights, the establishment of the parks was funded by the World Bank/
GEF which granted 4.3 million US dollars for resource management
and biodiversity conservation in Bwindi and Mgahinga National Parks.
The gazetted boundaries of Bwindi Park are 321 Sq.kms (over 80,000
acres) and Mgahinga Park is 33.7 Sq kms.(under 8,000 acres). The
parks are hilly islands of moist tropical and upland forest within a densely
cultivated region. The Batwa are by far the most affected group since
they no longer have access to their forest resources, and so their
forest-based participation in the local economy has been destroyed
and they have been reduced to landless labourers. Nearly 20% of the
Parks’ income is meant to be for park management, 20% for research
and 60% to local community development. As a result of the
development of an Indigenous peoples policy (as required by the World
Bank) —and in recognition of the devastating impact on the Batwa of
the creation of the National Parks— a proportion of the conservation
Trust’s community development budget was allocated to a Batwa
component, the most important element being a process of buying
small fields for individual Batwa families.
In addition to their forced expulsion from the living in or using their

forests, the Batwa of Uganda suffer severe discrimination at the hands
of other communities. They experience marginalisation and
discrimination, a lack of land, of access to formal education and to
employment and even to secure an area to put up temporary dwellings
involves having to work long hours in others’ fields. They are not
represented —locally or nationally. Instead of being able to base their
livelihoods in the forests using their traditional skills, they now depend
on labouring —and even begging— to support their livelihoods.
To make matters even worse, there has been very slow movement
in terms of achieving some form of compensation for the Batwa for
their loss of their territories. The conservation Trust’s buying of small
parcels of land for Batwa families finally started to get somewhere in
2000. Today, according to Mgahinga and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest
Conservation Trust (MBIFCT) a total of 326 acres has been bought for
the Batwa. The original owners of the entire forest have been
“compensated” with a mere 326 acres and, furthermore, there are many
more Batwa still lacking even such miserable patches of land. The
problem has been further compounded because the 4.3 million US
dollars funding for the conservation Trust was invested in an offshore
investment trust by the World Bank/GEF in the early 1990s. The funding
for the conservation Trust has therefore been dependent on the
performance of the international stock market. With the severe downturn
in stock markets the Trust’s income has suffered. As a result, in July
2002, the Trust announced that it was cutting the Batwa component
entirely. No more land would be bought for Batwa, but meanwhile the
Trust would continue to fund the other aspects of the National Park,
including the park guards who forcibly exclude Batwa from entering
the forest. The World Bank’s own research on the impact of the National
Parks on the Batwa had stated that without the Batwa component, the
Trust’s work would simply worsen the situation for the Batwa and would
therefore run counter to the Bank’s Indigenous Peoples Policy. That
situation now appears to be the case. Will there be enough international
pressure to ensure that the Trust continues with the Batwa component,
or is there a case in international law to argue for the return of the
forests to the Batwa?
The Forest Peoples Programme has been supporting the Batwa to

establish their own Indigenous organisation known as the United
Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda (UOBDU) which is
based in Kisoro in S.W. Uganda. UODU co-represents the 3000 or
more Batwa within the 3 Districts Kisoro, Kabale and Kanungu where
Batwa communities exist. The organisation has a Batwa Representation
Committee, which represents them in meetings/workshops with the
MBIFCT conservation Trust. The organisation has been campaigning
for land and forest access, and has represented Batwa views in
meetings with Government representatives and with NGO’s. As well

as continuing to argue their case, UOBDU is also providing a vehicle
for the Batwa to re-develop lost skills and bring together their expertise
in forest-related knowledge as a first step in reasserting their rights
and improving their quality of life. (By: Penninah Zaninka, WRM Bulletin
Nº 62, September 2002).
AMERICAS
Guyana: Empowerment of indigenous peoples through

participatory mapping
Despite 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. Since national independence in 1966, the Guyanese state has
titled just 6000 square miles of the 24,000 square miles recommended
for title by the Amerindian Lands Commission (ALC) —a body set up
by the British in 1966 to resolve the Amerindian land question in
response to consistent pressure from grassroots Amerindian leaders.
Indigenous peoples complain that Government’s repeated broken
promises on land rights issues constitute the large-scale theft of their
ancestral territories by the state.
Untitled areas on so-called “state land” are the subject of mining

and timber concessions issued by central government without prior
consultation with Amerindian Communities. Gold and diamond
concessions, for example, cover around 35% of the country —an area
that affects many of the traditional territories of the Akawaio, Macusi,
Wapichan and Wai Wai peoples. Indigenous communities protest that
poorly regulated commercial resource extraction dominated by
outsiders from the coast has caused environmental damage in their
territories and wrought social and cultural upheaval in their communities.
The indigenous struggle for land security and their rejection of top-
down destructive resource exploitation on their lands took a major step
forward in 1991 with the formation of the Amerindian Peoples
Association (APA). The APA unites more than 80 Amerindian
communities that represent all nine indigenous peoples of Guyana.
Many of the local APA “units” are linked to its central office in
Georgetown via a radio network. The APA works to promote indigenous
rights at the national level, to keep member communities informed of
government policies, laws and projects that may affect their welfare
and to raise local Amerindian concerns with central government. A key
part of APA activity involves training workshops for indigenous leaders
on the national and international laws relating to indigenous rights and
natural resources.
In 1994, Amerindian leaders from Region 7 of Guyana and APA staff

had a meeting with their country’s President in order to once again
press for inalienable title to the full extent of their ancestral territory
that covers 3000 square miles in the Upper Mazaruni. In response, the
President challenged them to show how they use their land and why
they demand ownership over such an extensive area.
Following a series of meetings in the six Amerindian communities

in the Upper Mazaruni, the Akawaio and Arekuna people decided that
they would need to map their traditional land and demonstrate that all
the forests and savannahs in their territory have been used and occupied
by them according to their custom for generations. They agreed that
drawing up their own map could help demonstrate that their view of
property, ownership and resource use is very different to the government
view.
In 1995 the mapping project began in the field with technical support
from the APA and international NGOs including the Forest Peoples
Programme and Local Earth Observation. A team of four indigenous
mappers were trained over six weeks in map work and the use of
Global Positioning System technology (GPS). Over nine months the
whole territory was mapped to show boundaries, past and present-day
settlements, natural resources and cultural sites using names and
categories defined by the communities themselves in accordance with
their language and traditions. The final community map showed the
whole Upper Mazaruni basin to be covered in an impressive blanket of

indigenous place names, extensive and multiple indigenous land uses,
burial grounds and special traditional areas such as bodawa: “hunting
and fishing reserves”. Since the map was published in 1998 it has
been praised by many individuals and organisations including the
Organisation of American States and the World Bank. Sadly, however,
the government of Guyana still refuses to acknowledge the map as a
legitimate claim to indigenous land ownership.
Undeterred by the stubbornness of the national government,

Amerindian communities throughout Guyana have been inspired by
the Upper Mazaruni mapping project. Since 1998, the APA has carried
out further projects with its own indigenous cartographers who are trained
in digitising base maps, inputting the field data and printing off draft
maps for verification by the participating communities. This in-house
team has worked with Arawak, Carib, Wapichan, Wai Wai and Akawaio
communities to complete four more community mapping projects
covering a total of 14,000 square miles. Two more projects are also
currently underway and several more are planned. The local mapping
teams for all these projects have been trained by an Arekuna Amerindian
tutor who first gained his skills as a team member on the original
mapping project.
Those who have participated in the mapping activities point out that
the projects have been an empowering experience in a number of ways.
They emphasise that traditional knowledge has been revitalised as
younger people have worked with elders to collect the information for
the maps. Mapping has also raised grassroots awareness about land
use and resource management issues. Community mapping has turned
out to be a useful tool for the defence of indigenous territories. An
increasing number of trained indigenous mappers are now able to use
the GPS technology and their own maps to pinpoint resource
concessions that overlap their boundaries. Likewise, they can spot
cases where companies have made incursions into indigenous lands,
plot this infringement on a map and show the company that they are
on Amerindian territory without permission. Already, companies have
been obliged to withdraw their equipment when faced with this strong
evidence.
The benefits of the pioneering community mapping work in Guyana

are now spreading to other countries. The indigenous tutor has already
helped Amerindian communities in neighbouring Suriname to map their
traditional lands in the lower Marowijne. Practical lessons gained
through the APA’s innovative mapping projects are now being shared
with indigenous peoples’ organisations in the Ecuadorian Amazon who
are preparing projects to self-demarcate their traditional territories. One
lesson from Guyana is clear: a combination of village-level capacity
building in land rights issues and participatory mapping can be
empowering for local people and also provide the basis for an effective
territorial defence strategy. (By: Tom Griffiths, WRM Bulletin Nº 62,
September 2002).
Peru: Camisea gas project undermines the rights of

indigenous peoples
In 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.
Critics point to the project’s potentially devastating physical

consequences: increased access by outsiders to the reserve will intensify
pressure on its resources and expose the inhabitants to diseases to
which they have little or no resistance. Equally grave are the projects’
violations of the internationally agreed rights of indigenous peoples as
well as undermining the right to say no to contact that is currently
being exercised by those peoples living in voluntary isolation. The project
is now at make or break time; support from the US banks, who are
currently evaluating the project, is essential if it is to go ahead but
activists are pressurising the banks to reject funding while the project
still fails to address the rights of the indigenous peoples within the
reserve.
The 443,887 hectare Nahua/Kugapakori reserve is the ancestral

home for Nahua, Nanti and Matsigenka peoples. Most of these groups
are in the initial stages of direct interaction with Peruvian national society.
These groups in initial interaction (with the exception of the Nahua), do
not speak Spanish, have only sporadic direct contact with some other
indigenous communities living outside the reserve and are highly
vulnerable to introduced diseases and exploitation by outsiders. At the
same time there are some Nanti and others of uncertain ethnic origin
who have taken a choice to avoid all direct contact with national society
and live in a state of voluntary isolation. Through remaining in voluntary
isolation, these peoples are exercising their right to say no to direct
contact with national society. These latter groups are even more
vulnerable to introduced diseases and live in remote headwaters of the
Timpia, Serjali and Paquiria rivers including the area where seismic
testing is taking place. The Peruvian indigenous federation FENAMAD
state that “contact by outsiders with these peoples would constitute a
serious threat to their fundamental rights to health, cultural identity,
well being and possession of land……and make possible their extinction
as individuals and as indigenous peoples”. Estimates of the total
population of the reserve range from 1000–2000 people.
Pluspetrol have acknowledged that unwanted encounters with the

peoples who live in voluntary isolation in the area of seismic testing in
the headwaters of the rivers Paquira and Serjali are possible. Testing
began in the reserve in May 2002 and Pluspetrol assured critics that;
“this contact will not be encouraged”, that they have reduced the seismic
area in order to avoid such encounters and that contingency plans are
in place. Plans consist of sending parties of local indigenous people
ahead of the seismic testing groups as well as vaccinating all workers
against potentially contagious diseases. In reality it is unclear what is
happening in the field. Some local Pluspetrol workers say there have
been reports of sightings but no direct encounters with “naked or
uncontacted Indians”.
The independent review of the environmental assessment (EA), that

was commissioned by local and national indigenous federations
COMARU and AIDESEP, concluded that “it cannot be assumed that

the (contingency) plan will effectively prevent harmful impacts like the
spread of introduced diseases that could prove fatal for the isolated
populations”. In fact, when Shell Oil conducted preliminary exploration
in the region in the 1980’s, over half the Nahua population died as a
result of respiratory diseases contracted from loggers. Pluspetrol have
responded by stating they are in the process of developing an
independent community environmental monitoring program albeit 3
months after work started in the reserve. The reports of sightings,
although denied by Pluspetrol in Lima —whose representatives stated
that these sightings are referring to the “traditional Matsigenka”
populations on the lower Camisea which neither explains their
nakedness or their sightings in the seismic zone— confirm the
conclusion of the independent review: “no matter how many precautions
are taken the only fully effective policy is to avoid working in those
areas known to be inhabited by such groups”. Aside from the physical
risks of inadvertant encounters, working in areas known to be inhabited
by such groups undermines their fundamental right to avoid all direct
contact with national society that they are currently exercising.
Pluspetrol’s EA acknowledges that the reserves inhabitants will be

both directly and indirectly affected by the project, whose plans within
the reserve include the construction of 3 wells and seismic exploration
in over 800km² of rainforest. The independent review of the EA however
identifies many threats such as increased colonisation, shrinking
resource base and poorer health that the EA did not acknowledge. As
a result there is a corresponding lack of concrete measures to
adequately address them. Article 7 of ILO convention 169 refers to
indigenous peoples rights’ to participate in the formulation,
implementation and evaluation of development plans that may affect
them. Ensuring adequate consultation is not simply a responsibility of
the company but an obligation of the Peruvian state who have ratified
ILO 169.
While some visits have been made by Pluspetrol to Nanti, Nahua

and Matsigenka settlements there has been no disclosure of the details
of these visits nor identification or development of methodologies of
engagement with groups who in the main have no working knowledge
of Spanish let alone understandings of seismic explosions. One of the

Matsigenka groups living in between the Paquiria and Camisea rivers
say they were persuaded to abandon their homes by the advance parties
of Pluspetrol. Former residents of Shiateni say that they moved when
one of the advanced parties of Pluspetrol told them that the army would
arrest them or they would be decimated by diseases if they didn’t
relocate. This was denied by Pluspetrol who say that their advance
parties only established contact with these groups to inform them of
Pluspetrol plans. This relocation they say was an independent decision
taken as part of a traditional and seasonal movement. One possible
conclusion is that this illustrates the challenges of communicating the
impacts of gas exploration to people who have almost no working
understanding of Spanish let alone alien concepts of property, money
or even seismic explosions. Whether this is a genuine case of forced
relocation is unclear. However, what is clear from the rushed,
unsystematic and untransparent nature of all these visits is that their
purpose has been to implement the project with as little recognition of
the rights of the reserve’s indigenous peoples as possible.
Work in the reserve started in May 2002 yet engagement with its
inhabitants has to date been governed by the pressures of work
schedules rather than a respect for their internationally recognised
rights or concern for their health and security. The most worrying
problems are: the serious inadequacies in the EA regarding indirect
impacts for the reserve’s inhabitants, the real risks of potentially fatal
encounters between seismic parties and peoples in voluntary isolation
and a failure on the part of both Pluspetrol and the state to comply with
the legal obligation to consult as stated explicitly in ILO Convention
169. Perhaps most worryingly, project activities are undermining the
rights of those peoples living in voluntary isolation to say no to direct
contact with national society. Given these flaws, activist groups should
support the findings of the independent review that calls on the Peruvian
government to “protect these populations by not allowing industrial
activities within the reserve”. They should also urge the US banks to
reject funding proposals until the fundamental rights of the reserve’s
inhabitants are properly addressed by the Camisea consortium. (By:
Conrad Feather, WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Suriname: Chinese logging companies and tribal rights
Chinese 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.
This short article looks at one area of Suriname where the Chinese
have set up operations, the impact of those operations on the Saramaka
people, one of the six Maroon tribes living within Suriname’s borders,
and the measures the Saramaka have taken to seek respect for their
rights. Maroons are the descendants of escaped slaves who fought
themselves free from slavery and established viable, autonomous
communities along the major rivers of Suriname’s rainforest interior in
the 17th and 18th centuries. Their freedom from slavery and rights to
lands and territory and the autonomous administration thereof were
recognized in treaties concluded with the Dutch colonial government
in the 1760s and reaffirmed in further treaties in the 1830s.
The Saramaka people are one of the largest Maroon tribes,

amounting to around 20,000 persons living in over 70 villages located
along the Suriname River, one of the main watercourses in the country.
Ownership of Saramaka territory is divided among a number of
matrilineal clans. Members of the clans have rights to hunt, fish, farm
and gather forest produce in the area owned by their clan, but ownership
remains vested collectively in the clan. Despite this, Suriname presently
maintains that the Saramaka, and other indigenous and maroon peoples,
have no rights to their lands and resources, all of which are owned by
the state and can be exploited at any time.
The Saramaka first became aware that part of their territory had
been granted to a logging company when the employees of a Chinese
company calling itself NV Tacoba arrived in the area in 1997. When
they challenged the company, the Saramaka were told that the company
had permission from the government and any attempt to interfere with
its operations would be punished by imprisonment. A Chinese company
calling itself Jin Lin Wood Industries surfaced in the area in 2000. This
company has relations with Ji Sheng, another Chinese company
operating in Saramaka territory. A concession of 150,000 hectares held
by Chinese company, NV Lumprex, was also recently discovered in
Saramaka territory. Lumprex and Tacoba are ultimately owned by China
International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd., a company registered on
the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. This company uses the timber to make
wooden floor boards for shipping containers. Finally, a Chinese company
known as Fine Style is also operating in Saramaka territory.
Concessions held by the Chinese companies, which were granted

without even notifying the Saramaka, are presently guarded by active
duty Surinamese military personnel armed with military issue weapons.
According to eye-witnesses, these companies have caused widespread
environmental damage and substantially restricted the Saramaka’s ability
to use their forest resources. One Saramaka eye-witness, for instance,
stated that “The soldiers told me: ‘Leave the Chinese, go hunting here
(in an area where the Chinese have finished cutting already). But don’t
let the Chinese see you.’ Well, I went there: there was destruction
everywhere; the forest was destroyed. In Paramaribo [the capital] people
don’t know what the Chinese are doing. Should not someone control the
logging-activities of foreign investors? The Chinese cut hundreds of trees,
dragged them to a place and piled them up there and they abandoned
them in the forest. For us, people from the interior, it is terrible to see
cedar trees cut down that are so important for us. And all this destruction
made the animals flee away also.”
After discovering that their territory had been given to logging

companies, the Saramaka began organizing and held a series of
meetings. They decided to file formal complaints with the Suriname
government asking that the concessions be revoked and that their
rights to their territory be legally recognized. Three complaints were
submitted between October 1999 and October 2000, none of which
received any response. Faced with silence and increased logging activity,
the Saramaka decided to seek the protection of the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and filed a petition there in
October 2000. This petition cited Suriname’s failure to recognize
Saramaka rights to land and resources as defined by the American

Convention on Human Rights and active violation of those and other
rights due to the logging and mining concessions granted in Saramaka
territory.
On August 8, 2002, the IACHR issued a request to the Government

of Suriname asking that it “take appropriate measures to suspend all
concessions, including permits and licenses for logging and mine
exploration and other natural resource development activity on lands
used and occupied by the 12 Saramaka clans until the Commission
has had the opportunity to investigate the substantive claims raised in
the case.” This request, technically called precautionary measures, is
intended to protect the Saramaka people from human rights abuses
and environmental degradation caused by logging companies operating
in Saramaka territory while the IACHR conducts an investigation of the
situation and are only issued in extreme case that pose an immediate
and irreparable threat of harm.
This request was issued after the Saramaka had highlighted the
urgent need for the IACHR’s immediate intervention in order to avoid
irreparable harm to the Saramaka people’s physical and cultural
integrity caused by the logging activities. Writing in support of IACHR
intervention, Dr. Richard Price, an anthropologist and leading
academic expert on the Saramaka, wrote that without immediate
protective measures, “ethnocide —the destruction of a culture that is
widely regarded as being one of the most creative and vibrant in the
entire African diaspora— seems the most likely outcome.” And, “The
use of Suriname army troops to “protect” the Chinese laborers who
are destroying the forests that Saramakas depend on for their
subsistence, construction, and religious needs is an extraordinary
insult to Saramaka ideas about their territorial sovereignty. … Their
presence in the sacred forest of the Saramakas, with explicit orders
to protect it against Saramakas, on behalf of the Chinese, is an
ultimate affront to cultural and spiritual integrity. By unilateral fiat,
and through the granting of logging and mining concessions to Chinese
companies, the postcolonial government of Suriname is currently
attempting to expunge some of the most sacred and venerable rights
of Saramakas. In this respect, the destruction of the Saramakas’
forest would mean the end of Saramaka culture.”
The case filed by the Saramaka is the first time that either Suriname’s
failure to recognize indigenous and tribal territorial rights has been
challenged in an international human rights body. If successful, the
case may represent a precedent that will benefit all other indigenous
peoples and maroons in Suriname. The case is presently pending a
decision on the merits by the IACHR. The Saramaka have requested
that the IACHR make itself available to mediate a friendly settlement
that will hopefully result in a negotiated settlement withdrawing the
logging concessions and recognizing Saramaka territorial rights. Failing
that they ask that the case be submitted to the Inter-American Court
on Human Rights for a binding decision.
To-date, Suriname has failed to respond in any way to the allegations

made in the petition despite repeated requests from the Commission
to provide information on the case. Also, despite substantial press
coverage of the IACHR’s request for precautionary measures, Suriname
has failed to take any action to honour the request or to protect the
rights of the Saramaka to their lands traditionally occupied and used.
(By: Fergus MacKay, WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Venezuela: Mapping a way forward
The 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. In all, about 3,500 Indians scattered in some two
dozen settlements occupy the four million hectares of river, forest and
mountain that stretch between frontier “criollo” settlements on the lower
river and the Southern border with Brazil.
Ye’kwana tales and chants tell of a primordial time when one of

their culture heroes, Kuyujani, walked the boundaries of the territory
naming and creating the high mountains, waterfalls, sacred rocks and
pools. These stories constitute charters which establish the deep

spiritual ties that bind the Ye’kwana to their homeland. Sanema
spirituality is likewise deeply imbued with a knowledge of the power of
forests spirits and animal beings whom Sanema shamans communicate
with and embody through dreams, during nightly chants and through
the use of hallucinogens during daytime rituals. When Sanema fall ill,
the shamans recruit the power of these tutelary spirits to combat the
malign forces that cause disease. Veiled from our eyes in the day, the
spirits can be discerned in the roaring voices of waterfalls, in light
shining through foam and seed down, in the drip of water from pools in
the crotches of giant forest trees and in the calls of animals and birds.
The forest is alive —not just as a useful ‘ecosystem’ abundant in food
and ‘resources’— but as a veritable society of meaning and power that
gives these peoples their identity.
The Venezuelan government has long viewed the Caura river as a

potential source of hydropower. One proposed dam at the Para falls,
where the mighty Caura crashes over a hundred metre drop down to
the lower river, would impound the whole river. A second dam proposed
further up the Caura’s main tributary, the Mereveri, would divert over
half the river’s water across the watershed into the neighbouring Paragua
river, to supplement the water already flowing through the Guri dam on
the Caroni. Both options would mean the inundation of the Indians’
richest agricultural and hunting lands and require their forced relocation.
Electricity from these dams would be exported to Brazil to fuel
development in the State of Roraima, conveyed along power lines already
cut across the lands of the neighbouring Pemon people. Ecologists
can barely guess at the environmental implications, especially for the
million hectares of swamp forest in the lower river, which would likely
dry out if the river was to be dammed. The Indians are clear, however.
They don’t want the dams.
To avert these threats, the Ye’kwana and Sanema formed their own
inter-ethnic association, which they called Kuyujani. The association
—and the network of radio transmitters they have implanted— links
together all the widely dispersed settlements of the river and meets
annually to elect political representatives and decide strategy about
how to deal with the challenges facing the river basin —gold miners,
the agricultural frontier, tourism, and hydropower— and how best to
push for recognition of their rights to land. With technical assistance

from the Forest Peoples Programme, and funding from the IUCN-
Netherlands, Rainforest Foundation and Nouvelle Planete, the Indians
have mapped their territory. This has meant a trained team of Ye’kwana
and Sanema visiting every settlement and canoeing and trekking to
every area of significance in their domain. Using Global Positioning
System devices they then ‘geo-referenced’ all this information so it
could then be plotted on a base map with the help of the Universidad
Nacional Experimental de Guayana. The result is a huge and detailed,
highly coloured map which shows the Indians’ names for all the features
in their territory. Now, as part of second project, Kuyujani is developing
a ‘management plan’ for this area, based on self-run community-level
workshops to establish the customary system of resource management
and complement this with western ideas of resource management
through the training of eight community members at the University in
the biological sciences.
These pioneering initiatives have helped promote a shift in national

policy towards the Indians. In 1999, Venezuela adopted a new
Constitution recognizing, for the first time, indigenous peoples’ rights
to their ‘habitats’. In 2001, the Venezuelan Congress adopted a law
establishing a mechanism for the recognition of these ‘habitats’, which
was strongly influenced by the Caura model. The National Commission
required to enact the law was established in August the same year. In
early 2002, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) was informed
that the Venezuelan Congress had also ratified ILO Convention 169.
Meanwhile, discussion continues on a new organic law on indigenous
peoples, which would provide further recognition of indigenous rights
and institutions. Meanwhile, Kuyujani has submitted the first official
application to the National Commission to seek legal recognition of
the Upper Caura as the habitat of the Ye’kwana and Sanema. Kuyujani
leaders have also provided advice and training to other indigenous
communities in the Venezuelan Amazon on how to map and claim
their lands. As long as the Venezuelan government sustains its
commitment to this enlightened new policy, the basis has now been
set for a country-wide recognition of indigenous rights to their lands.
(By: Marcus Colchester, WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
ASIA
Indonesia: The struggle for self-governance
Since 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:
“Under colonialism Indonesia was colonised but the

communities had their freedom. Under independence the country
got its freedom but has colonised the communities. National
reform must mean giving freedom to the customary communities
if it is not to be a continuation of the dictatorship.”
AMAN estimates the numbers of those living in communities still

governed by custom at anywhere between 60 and 120 million people,
out of a national population of 200 million. These peoples claim rights
in all or most of the country’s forests but in doing so they face formidable
obstacles. Under the country’s forestry laws, some 70% of the national
territory was classified as State Forests under the jurisdiction of the
Forest Department. Most of this forest was then leased to logging and
plantation companies, which, in name of sustainable forestry, have
been denuding the country of its forests at a rate of some 1.2 million
hectares per year for the past two decades. That rate has now increased
to some 3 million hectares a year according to the national environment
organization, WALHI, mainly to feed the voracious appetite of domestic
plywood and paper-pulp businesses that can consume 70 million cubic
metres of timber a year (more than three times an over-optimistic official
estimate of a national sustainable yield of 20 million cubic metres).
Within State Forests all proprietary rights are by definition

extinguished, although customary communities may be permitted to
harvest some forest products if local companies allow. But outside
State forests mechanisms for the recognition of collective rights in
land are also effectively denied. AMAN is thus part of a broad civil
society movement calling for radical reforms in natural resource
management in line with constitutional agreed principles that recognise
that the current systems of natural resource jurisdiction and land tenure
are major causes of social injustice, conflict and environmental pillage.
National development policies have carved up the indigenous peoples’

territories both physically and in terms of overlapping administrative
jurisdictions. The peoples, though, want full authority over their lands
handed back to them. As Pak Nazarius puts it:
“In my community our understanding is that we have rights to

our land and the natural resources both above and below the
land. Everything up to sky belongs to us. Several laws and
policies have classified our forests as State forests and the
minerals as property of the State. We don’t see it like that. I
have hair on my arm, on my skin. Both are mine. I also own
the flesh and bones beneath. They are also mine. No one has
the right to take me apart. But the policy has cut these things
apart and thus has cut us into pieces. We want the land back
whole.”
The demands of the indigenous peoples are favoured, to some extent,

by the administrative decentralization effected by law in 1999. These
reforms have increased the powers of the local political class, on the
one hand intensifying pressure on natural resources to generate revenues
to pay local administrative costs and line the pockets of officials and
local croneys but on the other hand also bringing government nearer to
indigenous communities. In South Sulawesi, at indigenous insistence,
local laws have been enacted which now recognize the authority of the
Toraja people’s customary territorial institutions, lembang. In West Java,
a district law now recognizes the territorial rights of 52 Baduy villages.
These reforms presage a sea-change in relations between the State
and indigenous peoples, which are likely to play out in very diverse
ways, for good and ill, in the 360 or so self-administering districts that
now comprise Indonesia. (By: Marcus Colchester, WRM Bulletin Nº

62, September 2002).
Laos: The impact of the Nam Theun 2 dam on

indigenous peoples
In 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
USD100 million loan for a political risk guarantee on the proposed
1,000 MW dam.
The USD1.5 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.
If built, the dam would result in the forced resettlement of about

5,000 indigenous people. Water from the 450 square kilometre reservoir
would be diverted via a powerhouse to the Xe Bang Fai, another Mekong
tributary. A recent independent study found that 130,000 people, many
of whom are indigenous, derive “important livelihood benefits” from the
Xe Bang Fai and its tributaries. In May 2002, Bruce Shoemaker, one of
the authors of the study, explained to a US Congressional Hearing that
if the dam is built, “the flow of the river will be radically altered, flood
cycles changed, and rapids (the best fishing areas) submerged.”
In its decision framework paper, the World Bank states that “Project
preparation has focused on mitigating these negative impacts by
ensuring that the design and implementation of plans pertaining to all
of the Bank’s safeguard policies are carried out so as to meet or exceed
Bank standards.”
What the Bank does not mention in its paper is that the project has
already had a major impact on indigenous communities living in the
proposed reservoir area. For at least ten years, a Lao military-run logging
company, Bholisat Pattana Khed Poudoi (BPKP), has been clearcutting

the reservoir area on the Nakai Plateau. In 2000, a World Bank survey
found that BPKP was also running large-scale logging operations around
the reservoir, in forests that were supposed to be protected.
The International Advisory Group (IAG), which was appointed by

the World Bank to monitor the project, confirms that logging is affecting
indigenous communities. In April 2001, the IAG reported that “the
progressive clearance of forest and other vegetation from the plateau in
anticipation of inundation has resulted in the diminution of areas for
food and other NTFP [non timber forest product] gathering including
house building materials.” In a letter to the World Bank’s vice-president,
the IAG wrote, “In villages we visited, the people have if possible sunk
to a lower level of poverty than they were experiencing five or more
years ago.”
The indigenous people living on the Nakai Plateau and the

surrounding forests belong to 28 distinct ethnic groups, according to
anthropologist James Chamberlain, who was hired by the World Bank
in 1996. Chamberlain noted that among these people are “Vietic
ethnolinguistic groups [which] have not been well classified, and several,
the Atel, the Malang, the Arao, and the Salang-X, were hitherto
completely unknown.”
However, NTEC hired another consultant, Stephen Sparkes, who

worked for Norplan, a Norwegian consulting firm. Sparkes wrote that
“After conducting fieldwork in the area, I have referred to the Plateau as
a ‘melting pot culture’ since it is becoming more and more difficult to
distinguish one group from another.”
Sparkes’ work found the approval of NTEC and the developers

subsequently described the people living on the Nakai Plateau as
“‘indigenous peoples’ as a whole since the distinctions between groups
are not significant.”
Although the people living on the plateau were not consulted before
BPKP clearcut their forests, NTEC claims on its web-site that “there
have been more than 242 public consultation and participation briefings
and meetings which have already taken place at the local, regional,
national and international levels for the Nam Theun 2 project.”
More than 200 of these “consultations” took place between February

and June 1997 in villages on the Nakai Plateau and along the Xe Bang
Fai. BPKP was already logging in the reservoir area at this time.
Barbara Franklin, a consultant hired by the World Bank to monitor

consultation on the project was extremely critical of NTEC’s consultation
process.
After the NTEC consultation team’s presentations, Franklin asked

randomly selected villagers what changes the dam would bring to their
villages. She noted that “many of the villagers painted rosy pictures,
saying things like, ‘Everything will be better, because these people will
come to help us’.”
Franklin produced more evidence that the information that NTEC’s

consultants gave during their presentations was overoptimistic and
biased. In villages along the Xe Bang Fai, which would not be resettled
under the project, some villagers told her that they hoped they would
also be resettled.
In fact, many villagers simply did not understand NTEC’s

presentations, which were in the Lao language. Franklin pointed out
that in some of the villages on the Xe Bang Fai, many of the villagers
do not speak Lao fluently. The result, according to Franklin, was that
“many participants understood little or nothing of the meeting”.
NTEC’s consultants faired no better with their visual presentations.

During presentations in villages on the Xe Bang Fai, the consulting team
showed villagers a cross section of the proposed channel which would
take water from the power station to the Xe Bang Fai river. The channel
would destroy 60 hectares of villagers’ rice paddy land. Based on her
conversations with villagers after the meeting, Franklin commented that
“Most villagers thought they were looking at a picture of a well.”
Franklin concluded that it was “unclear whether or not women and

non-Lao speaking ethnic minorities have been consulted in a meaningful
way as required by World Bank Operational Directives.” The examples
from her own report, however, make it crystal clear that villagers have
not been consulted in a meaningful way.
NTEC states on its web-site that it is “committed to assisting

affected households to make an informed choice about resettlement
and compensation”. In other words the informed choice offered by NTEC
is not about whether indigenous peoples want their lands flooded, their
rivers destroyed, their forests logged or placed out-of-bounds in the
name of conservation, or even whether they want an enormous
hydropower project on their land.
Instead, NTEC is presenting the indigenous peoples of the Nakai

Plateau with a simple choice: either move or drown. (By: Chris Lang,
WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
Philippines: Indigenous peoples and the Convention on

Biological Diversity
The 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.
Biodiversity, however, has been decreasing dramatically and the

country is considered one of the most important hotspots (where
conservation measures are urgently needed) on the planet. As such,
the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is quite relevant to the
country and vice-versa. Indigenous organisations have been asserting
that the history of biodiversity erosion in indigenous peoples’ lands is
linked to the conversion of lands into mining and logging concessions
offered through political patronage, and inappropriate large-scale
“development” projects like dams, plantations, etc. The CBD’s provisions
most relevant to Philippine Indigenous Peoples are those being
discussed and advanced under the Ad-Hoc Open-Ended Inter-Sessional
Working Group on the Implementation of Art. 8(j) and related provisions.
At the last two CBD’s Conferences of the Parties (COP5 in 2000 and
COP6 in 2002) much of the work developed by the 8(j) Working Group
has been adopted as official CBD resolutions. One aspect of this work
that is particularly important for the theme being discussed here is the
call for effective participation of local and indigenous communities in
biodiversity management and policy-making at the local, national,
regional and international level.
The CBD, however, might not be completely open to giving full

recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights although there is
increasing realisation that environment and human rights should
be dealt in an integrated rather than sectoral manner. As Vicky
Tauli Corpuz —Executive Director of the Baguio-based Tebtebba
Foundation (Indigenous Peoples’ International Centre for policy
Research and Education)— put it “While it has established the rights
of the nation-state over genetic resources, the CBD only acknowledged
the need to respect, preserve, and maintain knowledge, innovations
and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying
traditional lifestyles. The right of indigenous peoples and local
communities to have control over their genetic resources is not even
included. With the sustained lobbying of indigenous peoples, however,
together with NGOs and sympathetic governments, the elaboration of
Article 8j has opened the space for the contracting parties to consider
the links between respect of knowledge, innovations and practices
and the rights of indigenous peoples over their territories and genetic
resources”.
The Philippines has been regarded as one of the most active and
progressive countries in Asia (and possibly in the world) in terms of
recognising the rights of indigenous peoples and developing legislation
to implement some of the recommendations stemming from the
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in relation to bioprospecting.
These were developed prior to the setting up of the Art. 8(j) Working
Group in the CBD. In May l995, President Ramos signed Executive
Order 247 (EO247), Prescribing Guidelines and Establishing a
Regulatory Framework for the Prospecting of Biological and Genetic
Resources Their By-products and Derivatives, for Scientific and
Commercial Purposes and for Other Purposes. Among the provisions
referring to indigenous cultural communities (ICCs), EO247 states that
the Inter-Agency Committee on Biological and Genetic Resources
(IACBGR) —which it set up— is mandated —under Section 7 (e)— to
“Ensure that the rights of indigenous and local communities wherein
the collection or researches being conducted are protected, ...The Inter-
Agency Committee, after consultations with affected sectors, shall
formulate and issue guidelines implementing the provisions on prior
informed consent.” In recent months, a new Wildlife Act that will have
an impact on the scope and implementation of EO 247 has been
adopted. The implementing rules and regulations (IRR) have yet to be

finalized and the Act itself has not been put into action, but it is expected
that these will impact on the definition and process of bioprospecting.
On October 29, l997, the President signed Republic Act 8371, An

Act to Recognize, Protect, and Promote the Rights of Indigenous
Cultural Communities/Indigenous Peoples, Creating a National
Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Establishing Implementing
Mechanisms, Appropriating Funds Therefore and For Other Purposes.
This is commonly known as the “Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA)
of 1997”. Since 1997, many of the IPRA’s strong points as well as
weaknesses have been highlighted, to the point that while many
indigenous groups still think that it can be used in a beneficial way,
some others have called for the repeal of the law. Apart from the
theoretical and practical ambiguities of the law —especially related to
the confusing presence of ancestral domains and ancestral lands, the
latter being individual claim, which opened the door to manipulation
and commercialisation of indigenous lands— one main criticism was
that the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) does not
represent the Indigenous Peoples as the Commissioners were mostly
appointed by the President without proper consultation and —especially
under the Estrada administration— were either corrupt or inefficient, or
both. The NCIP underwent radical restructuring during 2001 and a new
set of Commissioners elected through a more participatory process at
the provincial, regional and national levels, was instituted in mid-2001.
There seems now to be more trust that the NCIP will truly work in the
interest of indigenous peoples.
The Philippines can be considered an interesting testing ground for

participatory and rights-based approaches to biodiversity management.
This is illustrated by the National Integrated Protected Areas System
(NIPAS) Act 1992, and by the use of the IPRA law. The NIPAS Act was
introduced with the objective of developing a comprehensive protected
areas system and integrate the participation of local communities in
protected areas management and decision-making. The participatory
approach is supposed to happen mostly through the Protected Area
Management Board (PAMB), which is composed of government officers,
NGOs, and local community representatives. Several NGOs and
Comunity-Based Organisations, however, point out that in many cases
the PAMB has not been functioning effectively due to a number of

limitations varying from lack of documents in local languages and
resources for meetings and workshops, to the fact that the PAMB’s
chairperson is a government officer and that local people are usually
shy to voice their concerns in the presence of government officials. So,
at the end, the decision-making power still remains firmly in the
government’s hands.
Due to the fear of losing control over their resources and destiny,
some indigenous groups therefore opt to use the IPRA law to guarantee
their rights over land, resources, culture and life rather than rely on
externally-proposed participatory mechanisms. An illustrative case is
that of the Calamian Tagbanwa of Coron Island, Calamianes Islands,
North Palawan. The Tagbanwa of Coron Island have been living on a
stunningly beautiful limestone island surrounded by water once rich in
marine resources, their main source of livelihood. By the mid-1980s,
not having secure legal tenure over these environments, the increasing
encroachment by migrant fishers, tourism entrepreneurs, politicians
seeking land deals, and government agencies interested in controlling
various resources of the island, meant that they were fast losing control
over their terrestrial and marine resources to the point that they were
facing food shortages. They reacted by setting up the Tagbanwa
Foundation of Coron Island (TFCI) in 1985 and applying for a Community
Forest Stewardship Agreement (CFSA). They were awarded a CFSA
covering the whole island and neighbouring, small, Delian Island, (for a
total of 7,748 hectares) in 1990.
Soon after they realised that their main source of livelihood, the
marine waters surrounding the island were being degraded at an
alarming rate by dynamite, cyanide and other illegal and destructive
fishing. Through the use of an Executive Order passed in 1993 that
allowed the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)
to issue Certificates of Ancestral Domain Claims (CADC), and the help
of a national NGO (PAFID), in 1998 they managed to obtain the first
CADC in the country that included both land and marine waters, for a
total of 22,284 hectares. They produced high quality mapping of their
territories, an Ancestral Domain Sustainable Management Plan, and
followed up the development of the IPRA law, successfully using it to
obtain a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) in early 2001.
The title implies that the Tagbanwa are now in control of decision-
making concerning the use and sustainable management of the island’s
resources. As TFCI Chairman Aguilar puts it “we are a living example
of how IPRA can be used successfully by indigenous peoples”. The
CADC and CADT were put to prompt use when Coron Island was
selected as one of the 8 sites under a DENR (EU-funded) national
programme called the National Integrated Protected Areas Programme
(NIPAP), 1996-2001. The ultimate intention of the DENR was (and still
is) to gazette the whole island as a Protected Area, but this has so far
not materialised because the Tagbanwa fear that they would once more
lose control over the island, although they were promised majority
participation in the PAMB. Having gained a CADT over the island they
prefer to stick to their right-based approach to resource management
rather than accepting an uncertain participatory approach through the
PAMB. Several other indigenous communities in other parts of the
country are looking at CADT over land and water as a tool to secure
their rights.
The cases above suggest that the CBD can become a useful
convention to the Philippine Indigenous Peoples only if it contributes
to the development of participatory processes that genuinely confer a
certain degree of Indigenous Peoples’ control over decision-making,
and —even more importantly— openly recognizes and supports a
stronger link between biodiversity, indigenous culture and knowledge
and rights over territories and resources, thereby accepting right-based
approaches to biodiversity sustainable management and conservation.
Despite these positive and interesting developments in participatory

and rights-based approaches in the country, in the wider framework of
development and environment policy, it should be noted that the
economic growth paradigm of the Philippine government and its
commitment to the globalisation agenda of the WTO, the International
Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, is pushing for the further conversion
of land into industrial uses (the Mining Act of 1995 being a notorious
case), which will inevitably lead to more biodiversity and cultural diversity
loss. How these tensions will play out and which priorities will prevail
will deeply influence the future of biodiversity and indigenous peoples
in the country. (By: Maurizio Farhan Ferrari, WRM Bulletin Nº 62,
September 2002).
Russia: Mapping Evenki lands in Central Siberia
The 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.
Although Russians form the majority in the few cities and urbanised
villages of the region, aboriginal hunters and reindeer herders remain
the masters of the vast rural spaces today as they were in the 17th
Century.
This relatively stable situation has been recently disrupted with the
shift to monopoly market capitalism in the former Soviet Union. The
Central Siberian plateau is today seen as a vast ‘reserve’ for oil, gas,
coal, heavy metals and forest products. Foreign and domestic Russian
oil companies are vying both for access to the subsurface resources of
the region, as well as to rights to build all-weather roads and pipelines
to ship fuels and wood to foreign markets. The aboriginal people of the
region, once hailed as vanguard socialist herders and hunters, are now
searching for a new legal avenue to regain a say in the changing political
and economic climate around them.
The Forest Peoples Programme in collaboration with the Russian

Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) has started
training local Evenki hunters and herdsmen on how to create their own
maps of their traditional lands using portable Global Positioning Systems
devices and Geographical Information System software. It is hoped
that armed with these tools, the local aboriginal rights association can
make better use of existing Russian legislation that controls the access
that companies have to the taiga.
Land use mapping is a politically-charged issue in the Russian

Federation. Existing Soviet and new Russian legislation regulates
access to topographical maps and GPS technology at certain scales.

Nevertheless, recently passed federal legislation charges aboriginal
and non-aboriginal rural hunters with the responsibility of filing maps
and descriptions of their traditional lands with the federal government if
they want them to be protected from industrial exploitation. The Federal
law protecting ‘Territories of Traditional Land Use’ allows local
communities of aboriginal and non-aboriginal people to remove their
lands from the federal land reserve register and thus set them aside for
traditional, non-industrial use. The challenge of this collaborative project
has been to find a way to use modern mapping tools in a way that
respects current laws but which also provides as accurate as possible
data on the location of traditional sites so that they may be protected.
At present, the main oil consortia in the region are open to listening to
reasoned proposals for the protection of certain places for traditional
activity and there is great optimism in the region for reaching a negotiated
settlement.
The joint FPP/RAIPON project has started work in the most northerly
county of the Evenki Autonomous District in the taiga spaces drained
by the Lower Tunguska and the Vilui rivers. The region, however, is
vast and faces many challenges. In the northern Ilimpei county there
are no immediate threats to hunters and reindeer herders from industrial
development. However the destruction of traditional settlements and
hunting spaces has already started in the most southerly county of
the District around the village of Osharavo. Beyond the borders of the
Evenki Autonomous District, in Turukhansk County, Irkutsk Province,
and in the Taimyr Autonomous District industrial exploitation has
proceeded several leaps ahead with aboriginal lands already occupied
by pipelines, open-pit mining and clear-cut forestry blocks. There is a
lot of work remaining to be done in Siberia and FPP would welcome
collaboration from other human-rights organisations who would also
like to share this experience with land use mapping. (By: David G.
Anderson, WRM Bulletin Nº 62, September 2002).
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN
VOLUNTARY ISOLATION
Many people are unaware that there are still indigenous
peoples living in voluntary isolation —both contacted
and uncontacted— particularly in the tropics.
People are also largely unaware about the impacts
resulting from forced or free contacts of these peoples
with the outside world.
The Indigenous peoples’ right to live in voluntary

isolation
In a world characterized by information, there are issues that have

been made so invisible that the great majority of people do not know
that they exist. This is the case of the Indigenous Peoples living in
voluntary isolation. Most are not even aware that some of these peoples
have not yet been contacted by the predominating society and in other
cases, have resisted integrating it in spite —or as a result of — having
been contacted.
To this ignorance is added a second one: that the very existence of

these peoples is seriously threatened by the destructive advance of
“development.” Roads penetrating into the forests to extract timber,
oil, minerals or to promote land settlement for agriculture and cattle-
raising, can be labelled “roads of death” for these peoples. They bring
unknown diseases their bodies are unready for, the destruction of the
forests that provide for their livelihoods, pollution of the waters that
they drink, where they bathe and fish, confrontations with those who
intend to take over their territory, the death of their millenary cultures.
To understand the problem we need to divest ourselves of our “truths”

and try to put ourselves in their place. All of us live in territories with
very precise limits. They do too. All of us are jealous custodians of our
frontiers when faced with potential or real external aggression. They
are too. All of us have our feeling of nationality, with a specific language,
culture and knowledge. They have too.
What would we do if a group of armed foreigners entered our territory

without our authorization? The same as they do: we would resist in
every possible way, including armed resistance. However while we would
be considered to be “heroic patriots” they are classified as “savages.”
Why is this? Because we are the ones to describe resistance.
It is important to emphasize that these peoples were never asked if

they wanted to be Brazilians or Ecuadorians or Peruvians or Congolese
or Cameroonian or Indonesian or Malaysian. Each government (colonial
or national) simply drew up a map and determined that all the territories
included within its frontiers “belong” to the corresponding country or
colony. No matter that these peoples had been living on these territories
before the very creation of national states or foreign colonization. They
were in fact “nationalized.”
Again the question: what would we do if we had to face a similar

situation? Would we accept the imposed change of nationality or would
we resist it? Surely we would do everything possible to continue being
what we are and what we want to be.
The difference is that these peoples are in total inferiority of conditions

to resist the devastating advance of predominant society. For this reason,
all of us who believe in justice have the obligation to provide them,
under many forms, with the support that they need —although they do
not ask for it— to defend their rights and to stop the silent and invisible
genocide they are being subjected to.
In this respect, the first thing we can do is inform the world that
they exist, as an initial step towards the objective of gathering
determination in defence of their right to live in their territories in the
way they themselves decide, including the right to remain outside a
society they have no wish to belong to.
In addition to this, we must do everything possible to protect their

territories from outside invasion linked to activities such as logging,
mining, oil exploitation and settlement. In the first place, this implies
legal recognition of their rights by the State and strict compliance with
legal provisions vis-à-vis possible non-authorized invasion. It also implies
that the State explicitly excludes these territories from its development
programmes.
In fact, we should not be surprised that there are peoples who do

not want to integrate a society such as the one we live in, that thrusts
millions of people into poverty and hunger and that destroys everything
it touches (climate, forests, grasslands, wetlands, soil, air). These
peoples are neither poor nor ignorant. They are different and are showing
enormous wisdom in wanting to maintain their isolation. In the
contemporary world where so many people dream of living on an idyllic
tropical island, they are integrating something very similar. But it is
increasingly difficult for them to defend themselves from external
aggression. Let us help them to live on their own island until the day
comes when they freely decide to integrate the predominant society
—if ever they decide to do so. (By: Ricardo Carrere, WRM Bulletin Nº
87, October 2004).
AFRICA
Cameroon: Does isolation still protect forest

communities?
Indigenous Baka number 30-40,000 and live in the southern and

southeastern areas of Cameroon. They are associated with, among
other local communities the Bagando Bakwele, Knonbemebe, Vonvo,
Zime and Dabjui farmers. About 4,000 Bagyeli and Bakola live in the
southwest, and are associated with Bulu, Ngoumba, Fang and Bassa.
Most Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola still rely on hunting and gathering to
secure their livelihoods, and even though some also cultivate annual
crops, often on the lands of these Bantu patrons, the majority still rely
on the forests. Many local communities recognise them as “people of
the forest,” who their ancestors found when they arrived.
Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola in general retain many aspects of their

forest-based culture, including non-hierarchical social structures coupled
with community recognition for individuals’ special skills, relatively small
communities, an aversion to social conflict, proximate planning horizons
and, to those from “outside”, an opportunistic circumspection. For
almost all Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola, their forest is their ancestral
home, their reliable grocery, the root of their existence, and their
customary right, and forests throughout Cameroon’s southern forest

zone are dotted with their favoured hunting and gathering grounds and
their hidden sacred places. Their primarily hunting and gathering lifestyle
combined with subsistence trade is associated with high physical
mobility, which means that they can be difficult to locate at certain
times of year, and their places of work and home are rarely accurately
recorded - most are literally off the map.
Cameroon’s indigenous forest communities’ geographical and social

isolation has enabled many of them to retain their forest-based culture
since pre-colonial times, while the world around the forest has undergone
radical changes. The same applies to indigenous hunter-gatherer
communities who have established permanent villages for cultivation
outside forests, since the vast majority of them are also completely
marginalised from civic and government structures in Cameroon. This
socio-political marginalisation reflects the gross discrimination that
Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola face when they leave the security of their
forest and communities, where they are powerful and relatively secure,
for the amenities of the roadside or neighbouring local villages, where
they may be mocked, cheated, and unfairly treated by government
and civic authorities. This unsavoury treatment means that many Baka,
Bagyeli and Bakola prefer to stay in the security of their forest community
and to remain uninvolved in the “affairs of the village.”
Indigenous forest peoples’ isolation also means that most of them

still have almost no access to modern health care, or formal education,
and most are unable to speak and read French, the official language
that dominates the forest zone in Cameroon. Until recent moves by
the Cameroon government and NGOs to enable formal registration few
of these people had their own identity cards, and almost all were absent
from official census data and electoral lists. Thus they have been unable
to stand up to powerful outsiders who sought to abuse their rights and
the forest remains an important refuge.
Despite a long history of trickery and persecution by people entering

the forests to extract resources such as rubber, wildlife, timber, minerals,
and data on the flora and fauna, Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola in general
are very open to outside influences. Their traditional forest coping
mechanisms, however, are proving unable to protect them from the
increased demands on forests in which they have lived for aeons. Since
the introduction in 1994 of Cameroon’s new forest law there have been
significant investments by donors in Cameroon’s protected areas
network to support older parks and to establish new conservation
“planning regions”. This has been extensively documented in WRM
Bulletins. Campo Ma’an, Boumba-Bek and Lobéké National Parks were
all established by the Cameroon government with donor support since
1995 and all overlap the traditional lands of Baka, Bagyeli or Bakola.
The fact that these communities were “off the map” when the parks
were established has led to a situation where their forest rights, and
hence their right to isolation are denied through the application of non-
discretionary rules to protect endangered flora and fauna. Many of these
new rules undermine indigenous peoples’ hunting and gathering
lifestyles, even though their rights to resources and to “traditional
sustainable use” of them are protected by national and international
legal provisions, and international agency guidelines. Current plans by
Conservation and donors. (By: John Nelson, WRM Bulletin Nº 87,
October 2004).
Congo: The northern Mbendjele Yaka use avoidance to

maintain autonomy
The Mbendjele Yaka “Pygmies” live in northern Congo-Brazzaville.

Mbendjele claim shared ancestry with other forest hunter-gatherer
groups in the region such as the Baka, Mikaya, Luma or Gyeli. The
Mbendjele calls all these groups Yaka people. Outsiders frequently
refer to these groups as Pygmies, and occasionally members of these
groups do too. They are forest-living hunter-gatherers considered the
first inhabitants of the region by themselves and their farming neighbours,
the Bilo. Each Mbendjele associates her or himself with a hunting and
gathering territory they refer to as “our forest”. Here, local groups of
Mbendjele travel between ancestral campsites in favoured places where
they will gather, fish, hunt and cut honey from wild beehives depending
on the season and opportunities available. From time to time Mbendjele
camp near Bilo villages to work for money or goods and occasionally
make small farms. In spite of this, Mbendjele value forest activities and
foods as superior to all others.
Negative stereotypes of the Mbendjele are widely held by the diverse

Bilo ethnic groups in the region, and often publicly asserted. Typically
Mbendjele are said to be chimpanzee-like, backward, impoverished,
lazy, disgusting, stupid, and childish. They are regularly segregated
from Bilo. They may not eat or drink together with their neighbours, sit
together on the same bench, or share a cup or a plate. They may not
sleep in the same houses. Sexual relations are forbidden, although
they occur clandestinely. Many villagers deny that Mbendjele have
any basic human rights, frequently describing them as their ‘slaves’.
Some Bilo claimed to have the right to physically abuse and even kill
Mbendjele who disobey them.
Despite such negative portrayals, Bilo value their relations with

Mbendjele greatly. Mbendjele are essential labourers for the farming
economy at key moments such as at harvest. They are considered
great herbalists and healers, and genuine ritual experts. Their
performance and musical skills are widely admired, and they perform
all the major ceremonies of the Bilo. Villagers greatly value the forest
foods Mbendjele provide. Wild honey, game meat, especially elephant
and pig, caterpillars, seasonal fruit and wild nuts are considered the
finest local delicacies.
Questions that approach their relations with Bilo from the point of
view of innate inferiority and subordination visibly annoy Mbendjele.
The Mbendjele ideal of their relationship with Bilo is based on friendship,
sharing, mutual aid and support, and on equality and respect for one
another. When Bilo do not fulfil these expectations they can simply be
abandoned.
In stark contrast to the Bilo conception of the Mbendjele as their

slaves, the Mbendjele consider themselves free from commitment and
binding ties. Able to leave and go whenever they like, they will find new
friends if they are not satisfied. In this way the Mbendjele exert a
pragmatic and tangible power over the Bilo that allows them to resist
domination and maintain their autonomy.
Since Europeans first observed them Mbendjele have used this

power in their relations with Bilo. Travelling widely in the Mbendjele
area in 1906, Bruel described his experiences at the Pomo (Bilo)

village Mene on the Ndoki. When he first visited there were many
Mbendjele. On his second visit the Mbendjele had all gone and the
Pomo were complaining that they no longer got meat or ivory, but
that they were frightened to look for the Mbendjele in the forest. Bruel
observed that these relations ‘… are voluntary and result from different
needs each wishes to satisfy. As soon as relations turn to their
detriment, as soon as the Babinga [Mbendjele] think they have reason
to complain about their [Bilo] associates, they break the relations,
emigrate and often go far away in the forest where they will make
new friends.’
Bruel explained that the Mbendjele’s mobility permitted them to

maintain their autonomy, and disagreed with claims by other (unnamed)
European observers that ‘the Babingas are the serfs of the sedentary
populations.’ The same practices are observable today, and perform a
similar purpose. Mbendjele that were with Sangha-Sangha Bilo before
the 1990s are steadily abandoning them in favour of the Bongili and
Bodingo Bilo. They explain that these new partners are more generous
and respect them better than the Sangha-Sangha did.
The use of avoidance in hunting and gathering societies is widespread

and employed to deal with various problems from food shortages to
dispute resolution. The facility with which avoidance is used depends
crucially on people remaining highly mobile and not losing access to
vital assets when they move. Without fixed assets to guard (such as
fields or harvested crops), a hunter-gatherer’s entire household can be
quickly packed into a woman’s basket, and new huts quickly, but
skilfully built at a new location. Mobility also serves to regulate resource
use, by ensuring that when natural resources are low, people move on,
allowing resources to replenish.
This ease of movement makes avoidance an effective response to

conflict. Rather than suffer a difficult, unpleasant or exploitative situation
hunter-gatherers often prefer to move away. Maybe because of internal
conflict between members of a camp, or between different camps, or
in relation to non-hunter-gatherers. Movements can be permanent when
people feel grossly abused.
During my fieldwork in Congo I got to know one such group of

Mbendjele. In 1991 Sangha-Sangha Bilo paid Mbendjele to conduct a
large three-day Ejengi ceremony for them. During the rite some young
Bilo kicked dirt on Ejengi’s food as a sign of their dislike for the
Mbendjele. This act provoked a huge brawl in which many were injured
and fatalities were only narrowly avoided. One young Mbendjele man
was set upon by several Bilo youths wielding sticks, and beaten
unconscious.
Ngbwiti and Ekwese were disgusted by this behaviour and decided,

along with all the other Mbendjele, to abandon the Sangha-Sangha.
Some years later some Mbendjele returned and renewed their relations
with the Sangha-Sangha. Ngbwiti and Ekwese never did.
Indeed, they resolved never to return to the ‘suk-suku’ (perpetual

argument and fighting) of Bilo villages. They prefer to stay in a very
remote area of forest known as Ibamba. Ngbwiti explained to me:
“Our forefathers had their eyes on the Bilo. Our fathers told us
to do the same. ‘You children of afterwards look after our Bilo.
There they are.’ But now we say ‘Aaaaa, what kind of people did
you leave us with? Why did they give us these Bilo? They are
always tying us up like animals [cheating and deceiving
Mbendjele]. They don’t think we are real people. No, we and the
forefathers are animals! So, we left them there with that thought.
They treat us badly; their path is a bad one. So we said ‘OK,
that’s enough, we’ll never stay in the same place as them again’.
So we left there and came to Ibamba. Now we are well. We
took our eyes off the Bilo.” (Ngbwiti, 50-year-old kombeti of
Ibamba. Ibamba, March 1997).
Ngbwiti and his group have been living entirely in the forest since
1991. They have renounced regular access to the goods obtained
through contact with Bilo. Sometimes visiting friends and relatives bring
them small gifts of salt, tobacco and old clothes. When I last visited
the forest in 2003, they were still in Ibamba. (By: Jerome Lewis, WRM
Bulletin Nº 87, October 2004).
AMERICA
After the rubber boom
When the first ‘conquistadores’ travelled down the Amazon in the 16th
century, they found populous settlements, hierarchical chiefdoms and
complex agricultural systems all along the main river. The ‘Indians’,
they reported, raised turtles in ponded freshwater lagoons, had vast
stores of dried fish, made sophisticated glazed pottery, and had huge
jars, each one capable of holding a hundred gallons. They also noted
these peoples had flotillas of canoes and traded up into the Andes and
down to the mouth of the great river. Their numerous warriors carried
wooden warclubs and thick leather shields made of the skins of
crocodiles and manatees. Behind the large settlements, they noted
‘many roads that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways’
some so broad they likened them to a royal highway in Spain. These
stories were later discounted as the puff of promoters trying to magnify
the importance of their ‘discoveries’, for since the late 18th century the
banks of the Amazon have been almost entirely depopulated. During
the 20th century the archetypal Amazonians were ‘hidden tribes’, groups
of hunters, gatherers and shifting cultivators, who lived isolated in the
headwaters of the main rivers, eschewing contact with the national
society.
With the benefit of hindsight and new insights from history and
archaeology, we can now see that these two perceptions of Amazonia
are strangely and tragically related. Archaeology now teaches us that
lowland Amazonia, even in areas of poor soil and blackwater like the
Upper Xingu, was indeed once quite heavily settled. Regional trade
and dynamic synergies between Amazonian peoples had led to the
sub-continent being densely peopled by widely differentiated but inter-
related groups, who specialised in local skills to work and use their
specific environments in diverse and subtle ways.
The onslaught of western societies brought much of this complexity

to an end. Warfare, conquest, religious missions and the scourge of
old world diseases reduced populations to less than a tenth of the pre-
Colombian levels. Slave raids, both by European soldiery and by other
indigenous groups, who traded the ‘red gold’ of enslaved ‘Indians’ for
the products of western industries, stripped the lower rivers bare of any
remnant groups. Raiding, slaving and competition for trading
opportunities with the whites created turmoil in the headwaters. The
myth of the empty Amazon became a reality, as any survivors moved
inland and upriver to avoid these depredations.
In the late 19th century, overseas markets and advances in

technology created new possibilities of exploitation. In particular, the
discovery of the process of vulcanisation, led to a global trade in a non-
timber forest product, rubber, which could now be hardened for industrial
use. The onerous task of bleeding latex, yoked to global trade, yielded
fortunes for entrepreneurs prepared to penetrate the headwaters, enslave
local tribes and force them to work the scattered stands of rubber
trees. International capital flooded in to make the most of these
opportunities. Tens of thousands of indigenous people perished from
the renewal of slaving, the torching of settlements, the starvation of
survivors, the forced labour and diseases. The process also led to
further waves of surviving indigenous peoples fleeing deeper into the
forests, seeking to break off contact with a changing world that brought
them death and cultural degradation.
Of course, not all the indigenous peoples in the Amazonian

headwaters are refugees escaping the brutalities of contact, but the
impact of the outside world on even the remotest headwaters is often
underestimated. For many indigenous peoples in the Amazon and also
in other parts of the world, the search for isolation has been an informed
choice —the logical response of peoples who have realised that contact
with the outside world brings them ruin not benefits. Life in the forests
without trade may have its hardships, not just because the absence of
the metal goods like axes, machetes, fishhooks and cooking pots
makes subsistence harder work, but also because customary trade,
barter and exchange between indigenous peoples were also once ways
of making life more varied and richer. But it is these peoples choice.
21st century industrial societies are now being drawn into the last
reaches of the Amazon, where these indigenous peoples now live in
voluntary isolation, for other globally traded resources —not slaves or
rubber this time, but timber, oil, gas and minerals. If we deplore the
horrors of death and destruction that ineluctably accompanied previous
penetrations of the Amazon, can we now show that modern industrial
society is more civilised? Can we respect the choice of other societies
to avoid contact and leave them in their homelands undisturbed until,
perhaps, some future time when they themselves decide on the risky
venture of contacting a world that they have learned by bitter experience
is not safe to interact with? If we can’t, then it is almost certain that
future generations will condemn us for the same avarice, indifference,
selfishness and greed, for which we today condemn the conquistadores
and the rubber barons. (By: Marcus Colchester, WRM Bulletin Nº 87,
October 2004).
Argentina: The silent genocide of the Mbya Guarani
The Mbya Guarani are an ancient forest people with their roots in the
Amazon. In Misiones, a province in the northeast of Argentina, they
have 74 communities and a total population of approximately 3,000
people. Their culture is as rich as the biodiversity of the Paranaense
forest that they have always used and protected.
Two of these communities, the Tekoa Yma and the Tekoa Kapi’i
Yvate, summarize the Mbya Guarani’s fierce struggle to preserve their
identity and continue living in the forest. Comprising some 20 families,
their dealings with Western society only started to be important in
1995. As in many other Indigenous communities, their greatest bastions
of independence and cultural safeguard are their women and the Opygua
(priest) of the Tekoa Yma, Artemio Benitez. They continue to struggle
to make their voluntary isolation from the yerua (white people) understood
and respected. But the logging companies, the chainsaws and the
Misiones Government’s lack of sensitivity continue to harass them.
At present they live within the Yabotí Biosphere Reserve, where

they obtain their food, their medicinal plants and building materials
from a mosaic of Paraense forest environments, covering 6,500
hectares. Unfortunately their territory coincides with the so-called “Plot
8” and “Plot 7” considered “private property” by their present holders,
the Mocona Forestal S.A. company and Marta Harriet (see WRM
Bulletin 86). The Mocona Company, with the approval of the Government,
recently attempted to enclose them in 300 hectares, representing less

than 5 per cent of the territory they presently use to live in. In some
way, white people taking over as owners and as governors, have shrunk
their territory and their forest in order to expand plantations and the
good business of those who call themselves civilized.
Of the total area originally covered by the Mata Atlântica and

Paranaense forests, only 5 per cent remains. This loss of biodiversity
and continuity is particularly critical in environments where the Tekoa
Yma and Tekoa Kapi’i Yvate are located. The lack of natural medicines
and food caused by the frantic extraction of trees is threatening their
health and their survival. This is of unusual gravity, not only in terms of
human rights, but also in terms of demographic criticalness.
The Mbya communities of Tekoa Yma and Tokoa Kapi’i Yvate are
the result of long processes of sedentary cycles, preceded by limited
migration episodes. These movements have taken place throughout
centuries. While the sub-tropical forest evolved, with its own fluctuations
due to internal and external causes, one of its species, the Mbya,
established successive transitory territories. If the resources available
and their use established a good balance and the dreams of their leaders
did not advise against it, they settled in the same place for a long time.
If some crisis broke up this relationship, or dreams suggested a change,
the community migrated, but only to settle with their sedentary features
in another more appropriate place.
The life strategy of any group of hunters-gatherers with subsistence

agriculture or a long food chain, has specificities that are not well
understood by other human groups whose strategy, on the contrary, is
based on agro-productive systems with a very short food chain.
In fact, when human populations invented agriculture some 5,000-

10,000 years ago, they shortened the old, long food chains. They
eliminated the living forms that existed on the soil and then planted,
replacing forests or large ranges of pasture lands, by a single protected
species. Shortening the food chains and the success of farming and
animal husbandry fed the first urban revolution with their surplus, and
from then on, massive growth of the human population.
For decades now in Misiones an unequal battle between these two

life strategies has been taking place.
On the one hand are the Mbya communities, who are the longest
standing inhabitants of the territory. Various communities, among them
the Tekoa Yma and Tekoa Kapi’i Yvate, continue to preserve a long
food chain strategy. They are hunters, gatherers and fisher-people,
with a deliberately reduced practice of agriculture.
On the other hand are the white communities of European origin

who very recently entered the Paranaense forest. These groups brought
with them a short chain productive strategy, totally different from the
one practiced by the Mbya. Instead of living in harmony with the forest,
they needed deforested areas to grow their protected species.
The Mbya communities integrated the Paranaense forest over 3,000

years ago without developing the notion of private property adopted by
the white population that entered more recently (sixteenth century and
onwards). Objectively what happened was that their “total territory”
was invaded as from the sixteenth century by white groups, mostly of
European origin, who had totally different strategies for appropriating
land and for production. This explains the rapid disappearance of the
sub-tropical forest, the establishment of short chain agro-productive
systems and the multiplication of permanent urban settlements.
While the white people were appropriating space “fixing” private

property territories, the eviction of the Mbya generated their
underprivileged incorporation into white settlements and fewer chances
to live in a traditional way for those who still remain living in the
Paranaense forest, such as Yaboti. In this environment, recognized by
UNESCO as a Biosphere Reserve, legal and illegal ransacking of their
resources continues. This has reduced local biodiversity seriously and
in some cases, irreversibly, as it has reduced the Mbya’s possibilities
of subsisting uniquely from the forest.
For many white people, the success of a culture is measured by

grandiose buildings and objects that they produce, and the time they
last. For nature, success is measured by the length of time a population,
such as the Mbya, have lived in the forest without the forest or the
Mbya themselves disappearing. There are peoples whose inheritance

is almost immaterial, but this does not mean that they are “less evolved”
or “less developed.” They are peoples and cultures that have achieved
what many of our civilizations have attempted but not attained: to adapt
to the environment and to themselves.
The Mbya communities of Tekoa Yma and Tekoa Kapi’i Yvate have
the natural right to continue living where they are today for two
fundamental reasons: firstly because the area they occupy is what a
hunting, fishing, gathering people with small scale agriculture needs,
and secondly because that area is part of the mobile territory that their
forefathers have used for centuries.
The peoples who have the most right of “ownership” of the forest are
those who have lived in the forest as part of it for centuries, without the
need to become its owners. (By: Raúl Montenegro, WRM Bulletin Nº
87, October 2004).
Brazil: Indigenous peoples in isolation and policies to

defend and protect them
In the first place, it is important to clearly define what we are talking

about when we refer to peoples or populations in “voluntary isolation.”
This term and similar ones (such as “separate,” “isolated,”
“autonomous”) attempt to describe “a situation or a historical context.”
The background or basis they all have in common is that they seek to
define peoples (ideally) or populations (perhaps closer to reality) that
have little or no systematic contact with Western agents (in general
commercial companies or missionaries). That is to say, they do not
“depend” on our economic system to survive —and even less so on the
symbolic system. In general such “autonomy” originates in the
geographical context— and there are many peoples and human
populations that could be included in the definition of “isolated” on the
basis of a certain geographical niche that is inaccessible to systematic
contact (populations of the Andes, the North Pole, Kalahari, the African
or Asian deserts, the mountains of New Guinea, etc.). These peoples
and populations have a residual contact with the dominating economy
(and ideological system) and continue to maintain independent
standards of survival with relation to the dominating economy in function
of internal social and cultural resistance established voluntarily.

However, what we have seen is that such autonomy can last while the
niche they occupy is not the object of a (“capitalist”) valuation of the
natural resources (or the symbolic ones, in the case of “strategic”
territories for the Western powers).
However, this context does not apply to Indigenous Peoples or

populations “in isolation” in the Amazon. In this context, when we define
Indigenous Peoples and populations “in isolation” we are referring to
peoples and populations who are closer to the state in which Christopher
Columbus would have found them. They are not only in geographical
isolation, but mainly, in historical isolation. This is the crucial difference
in relation to the other peoples and populations “in voluntary isolation”
on the planet. It is true that throughout this time (500 years!), they
sought or took refuge in isolated regions, or rather, regions that were
not coveted by the mercantile (or missionary) rage of our “expansion
front”. In the Amazon (mainly the Brazilian Amazon but also in the
Bolivian, Peruvian, Colombian, Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Guyanese
Amazon) we estimate that there are still dozens of Indigenous Peoples
living almost in the same way as they lived five hundred, six hundred or
a thousand years ago: garbed in their feather headdresses, or loincloths,
surviving on hunting, fishing, gathering and small-scale agriculture with
stone axes and fire, suffering from no virus diseases in a fully abundant
environment. They may even know some of our instruments (iron
instruments, glass bottles, plastic containers, etc.) that reach their
hands by accident or because of previous contacts that were disastrous
to them.
It should be emphasized that they remain in this state because, on

the one hand, the conditions in the immediate surroundings of their
habitat enable them to do so and also because these peoples
aggressively produce and mark a distance (a frontier) with relation to
us or to other already contacted Indigenous Peoples, seeking to
maintain their living conditions through aggression and open (but
disproportionate) conflict. However, not all of them have managed to
maintain this distance.
It is a fact that today the majority of the isolated peoples in the

Amazon are living in an extremely serious situation vis-à-vis the advance
of predatory (logging and mining) frontiers towards the last virgin areas
in the region. Harassed and attacked by these predatory expansion
fronts (which very often have recourse to already contacted Indigenous
Peoples and their enemies in the past), they have started to use fleeing
strategies, decreasing the signs of their passage or changing their
subsistence patterns —not opening clearings visible from planes,
changing the form of their dwellings to camouflage them in the
vegetation, moving more frequently and dispersing their population.
Under these circumstances, many of these peoples —if not the
majority— stop carrying out their rituals, radically change their
subsistence routines and even those of procreation, by avoiding
conception or even by aborting.
In Brazilian legislation (Law Nº 6001 of 19/12/73) the denomination

“isolated Indigenous Peoples” appears as a legal concept defining
human populations with a pre-Columbus culture that have kept
themselves geographically and socio-culturally at a distance from the
Western population, which subsequently became the majority
population in the country. This isolation is so strong that no knowledge
exists of their demographic composition, just some traces of their
existence and little or no indication of their material culture, customs
or languages.
The physical, ethnical, linguistic, cultural and cosmological

specificities of isolated Indigenous Peoples are an invaluable human
heritage. Its diversity and existence are threatened every day by the
actions of a segment of national society with the only objective of
irrational exploitation and getting rich at the cost of the native populations
and total degradation of the natural resources and biodiversity
concentrated in their territories.
The frequency of records of isolated Indigenous Peoples is

concentrated in remote territorial niches, many of these in strips along
the frontiers of Amazon countries —demanding multi-national efforts.
In South America, only Brazil has a specific coordination for matters
concerning isolated peoples, the “Coordenação Geral de Índios
Isolados— CGII” (General Coordination for Isolated Indigenous Peoples),
linked to the official Indigenous body of the Brazilian Government,
FUNAL. This department has records of 38 reports on isolated peoples
in Brazilian territory. The resistance undertaken by these peoples is

also seen in the protection of vast areas of Amazon ecosystems, as
their physical and cultural reproduction is traditionally made possible
by using natural resources in a way that is fully compatible with the
conservation and protection of the ecosystems where they live.
The presence of Indigenous Peoples in isolation has been confirmed

in various South American countries. In Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador,
Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela, the existence of Indigenous Peoples
living in the same conditions of social isolation and secrecy has been
recorded, resisting penetration in their domains, frequently with violence.
In any of these countries the situation is always the same: forced to
migrate, deprived of their traditional territories, submitted to all sorts of
tragedies during the successive cycles of expansion and appropriation
of economic and social frontiers undertaken by national societies in
Amazonian territory.
Colonizing actions and occupation of the Amazon territory for

centuries have been based on predatory activities, disorderly extractivism
and the exploitation of slave labour, promoting the drastic depopulation
and extinction of innumerable Amerindian peoples. An unknown portion
of Indigenous Peoples subsists under conditions of “isolation,”
undertaking a bitter and silent struggle to survive the exterminating
action of the enveloping society. Public ignorance of concrete data
making their “social visibility” possible to civil society and an absolute
absence of specific legislation guaranteeing State protection, safeguard
and support, have maintained these peoples, and what is left of them,
permanently exposed to extinction, promoting continued environmental
dilapidation and degradation of their habitat.
The rhythm of extinction of peoples in isolation estimated in Brazilian

ethnography, in accordance with the few researchers devoted to the
issue, is enough to express the devastating genocide of the saga. The
anthropologist, Darcy Ribeiro, exemplifies the dramatic depopulation
that took place between 1900 and 1957 in his comprehensive work
“Os Índios e a Civilização” (published by Cia. das Letras, 1996) stating
that over this period of 57 years, 87 ethnic groups which had maintained
themselves in isolation have disappeared. In spite of the fact that new
peoples in isolation have been “discovered” in more recent decades,
the proportion of extinguished peoples or peoples in permanent contact

with national society is considerably greater, in a bitter statistic, a
task still to be carried out. Statistics and demographic charts will never
be able to express the human and cultural content of so much
extinguished life, still taking place under indifference of civil society
and the acquiescence of governments.
Therefore, Indigenous Peoples in isolation are seen as the last and

least favoured pariahs, without a voice, without a physical presence,
without any social or even human recognition, only and sporadically
remembered by the isolated voices of more informed segments of
society. This dramatic picture only goes to reaffirm the immense and
urgent social responsibility corresponding to the national States in this
process, as well as that of the diverse sectors of society committed to
democracy, human rights, environmental conservation, and the cultural
and immaterial heritage of humanity. It is the State’s duty to assign
substantial efforts aimed at the protection of Indigenous peoples in
isolation to satisfy their essential needs and implement public policies
and legal measures that reaffirm their constitutional and ethnic rights
and their specific and differentiated protection. (By: Gilberto Azanha,
WRM Bulletin Nº 87, October 2004).
Colombia: The Nukak, the last contacted nomadic

people
The Nukak are a nomadic people from the Colombian Amazon, officially
contacted in 1988. The present population is estimated at 390 people,
distributed among 13 local groups, located in the inter-fluvial area
between the Middle Guaviare and the High Inírida. Nukak as a tongue
is understood by the Kakua or Bara from the Colombian Vaupes and
both are classified as part of the Maku-Pinave linguistic family.
According to Nukak oral tradition, and ethnographic and linguistic

information, they are a branch of the Kakua that emigrated to the North.
One of the reasons for this displacement to their present territory was
to evade the rubber merchants who used the indigenous peoples as
slave labour at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the
Nukak’s sophisticated knowledge and management of the fauna and
flora of the zone point to an earlier occupation.
In the twentieth century, the Nukak remained isolated from their

native territorial neighbours and agents of national society for over 50
years, among other reasons because they were afraid of alleged
cannibalism by white people and other natives. In 1965 a group from
the western sector attempted to peacefully approach a peasant.
Unfortunately this episode ended in a confrontation leading to the death
of several Nukak and the capturing of a couple. Following this ill-fated
event, they isolated themselves in the forest, but only eight years later,
in 1974, the groups from the eastern sector established contacts with
the North American missionaries from the New Tribes Mission. In 1982,
the contacts were permanent and in 1985 they already had a work
station inside the territory.
During the eighties, in the areas bordering the northwest frontier of

the Nukak territory the rhythm of colonization increased due to the
favourable price of the coca leaf. This illegal crop attracted waves of
peasants, trades-people and adventurers, seeking an opportunity to
improve their living conditions. Thus, encounters with the peasants
became increasingly inevitable because of the overlapping of the areas
that both groups occupied. In this context and following the kidnapping
of a white child by a Nukak group in 1987, the first flu epidemic and the
appearance for the first time of a group in Calamar —a peasant village
in the Guaviare— in April that same year, all the local groups gradually
started visiting the colonized areas.
During the first five years after mass contact, the Nukak lost close
on 40 per cent of their population as a result of respiratory diseases
that started as flu. The age groups showing the greatest number of
deaths were those over forty and under five years of age, thus leaving a
large number of orphans. In fact, close on 30 children and young people
were adopted by the peasants and some women also married peasants.
All this led to an interruption in the transmission of their technical and
ritual knowledge and a loss of confidence in their Chamanic practices.
Relations with the peasants were established quite quickly by the

groups in the western sector occupying the oldest and most densely
settled area, while for the groups in the less settled eastern sector
where they had the support of the missionaries, the process was slower.
At the mission station the Nukak found medical care, they were
supplied with metal tools and seeds and had interlocutors to get to
know the world of the white people. This generated a centripetal effect
and attenuated the motivation to migrate to settled areas. When the
Missionaries’ work station was abandoned in 1996 for public policy
motives, this accelerated the expansion of the effects of contacts among
the western sector groups.
Institutional action initiated to care for the Nukak has mainly been
concentrated on health matters, on guaranteeing legal recognition of
their territory and on protecting their rights as Indigenous people.
However the scope of these initiatives and legal actions has been limited,
given the extension of the area they occupy, the mobility and dispersion
of the population, discontinuity due to administrative problems
characterized by a lack of consensus in defining the type of intervention
and limitations on circulation in the area, imposed by the self-named
Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC). This organization is disputing
control of the area with the paramilitary groups operating in the zone.
Additionally the Nukak territory is surrounded by close on 15,000
peasants and located in one of the most dynamic agricultural frontiers
of the Amazon.
Today, 16 years after the Colombian Government recognized the

existence of the Nukak, they are now becoming sedentary and only
one of the local groups in the eastern sector of the territory still maintains
its nomadic treks through the forest in a permanent way. Most of them
have built houses and have cultivated plots of land near the settled
areas of their territory, mainly occupied by peasants who grow coca
leaves. This activity is also a main source of employment for the male
Nukak population and has contributed to displace activities such as
hunting and gathering and has also facilitated the incorporation of agro-
industrial food. Regarding health, the causes of morbidity have widened
to include malnutrition and venereal diseases and the birth rate does
not enable them to recover their population, as one out of two children
dies before the age of five. It is also known that the groups in the
western sector have problems with alcoholism, they have been involved
in conflicts with firearms and at least three young men were involved
with the FARC. Contrasting with this, recently celebrity magazines
and programmes have devoted space to a Nukak top model, who

probably had been adopted by the peasants.
In the meanwhile, institutional meetings still continue on the type

of suitable intervention and the Nukak’s capacity to face changes or to
manage the budget that the State annually assigns to the populations
in the Indigenous reserves of Colombia (transfer resources). Although
six years ago it was concluded that the management of such resources
belonging to the Nukak warranted a consultation with all the leaders of
the local groups and commissions were set up for this purpose, they
did not have any continuity. Today these resources cover the budgetary
validity of eight years (1996-2004) and amount to over 400 million pesos,
which cannot be executed until the Nukak decide on what they want to
invest in.
Getting to know the opinion of the Nukak regarding their learning to

live with the peasants and in general with the white man’s world is a
pressing task, as well as designing with them the strategies required
to improve their living conditions. However, getting to know what the
Nukak think or implementing any type of programme with them will not
be feasible until there is the institutional will to consult them and respect
their decisions. Also needed is the comprehension of the actors in the
armed conflict to allow implementation of the actions all this requires.
Paradoxically, this means to allow the Nukak to be contacted, that is
to say, to establish a dialogue with them on their territory. (By: Dany
Mahecha Rubio, WRM Bulletin Nº 87, October 2004).
Ecuador: The Huaorani people of the Amazonia, self-

isolation and forced contact
Huaorani culture and society is shaped by their will to self-isolation.

Very little is known about their past, except that they have for centuries
constituted nomadic and autarkic enclaves fiercely refusing contact,
trade and exchange with their powerful neighbours, be they indigenous
or white-mestizo colonists. Ever since their tragic encounter with North
American missionaries in 1956, the Huaorani have held a special place
in journalistic and popular imagination as “Ecuador’s last savages”.
Despite the “civilizing” efforts of missionaries, they have largely retained
their distinctive way of understanding the world. Relations with outsiders,
seen as murderous enemies, are fraught with hostility and fear; there
seems to be little space for communication and exchange, other than
complete avoidance or the threat to ‘spear-kill’.
For the last sixty years, Huaorani history has unfolded in response
to oil development, although it is only recently (in 1994) that oil has
been commercially extracted from their land. In 1969, a decade after
having «pacified» the Huaorani, the Summer Institute of Linguistics
(SIL) received government authorisation to create a protection zone
around its mission. The ‘Protectorate’ (66,570 hectares, or 169,088
acres) represented one tenth of the traditional territory. By the early
1980s, five-sixth of the population had been called to live in the
Protectorate. On April 1990, the Huaorani were granted the largest
indigenous territory in Ecuador (679,130 hectares, or 1,098,000 acres).
It is contiguous with the Yasuní National Park (982,300 hectares, or
2,495,000 acres), and includes the former Protectorate. The population
(around 1,700) is now distributed in thirty or so semi-permanent
settlements organised around a primary school, except for one, or
possibly two, small groups that cling to autarky, and hide in the remote
forested areas of the Pastaza province, along the international border
separating Peru from Ecuador.
The non-contacted Huaorani, known as the Tagaeri and the

Taromenani, comprise between thirty and eighty people. The Tagaeri
used to live in the Tiputini region, which became the heart of the southern
oil fields in the early 1980s. The Tagaeri decided to separate permanently
from the main Huaorani population when the SIL mission caused a
major population displacement by actively encouraging the eastern
groups to come and live under SIL authority within the Protectorate.
Relatives of the Tagaeri who now live in the Protectorate say that the
latter’s decision was partly due to intra-tribal feuding (they did not want
to live in the territory of their enemies), and partly to their straight
refusal to integrate; they did not wish to receive “the benefits” of
civilisation. In other words, it was their political decision to live in
isolation.
During the next thirty years, many raiding and killing episodes
marred the interactions between Tagaeri and outsiders. Famous for
their fierceness, the Tagaeri have ‘spear killed’ oil workers, missionaries,
and others whom they saw as intruders. Most famously, they killed an
Archbishop from the Capuchin Mission and a Colombian nun from the
Laurita mission in July 1987. And their people have been wounded and
killed as well. In the early 1990s, various informants told me that military
helicopters had thrown rockets on Tagaeri longhouses, and that Tagaeri
dwellings had been burnt down by company security guards. There
was once a plan to exterminate them all. And then the hope, especially
amongst missionaries, that they would finally surrender and accept
‘pacification’. Oil exploration in the block where the Archbishop and
the nun had been found dead was suspended, and the government
promised to grant protection to the non-contacted Huaorani who kept
fleeing away from the blocks operated by PetroCanada, Texaco,
PetroBras, Shell, and Elf Aquitaine. The implicit policy, though, was to
push them further to the south, in the hope that they would cross the
border with Peru, and cease to be a national problem.
We now know that there were other indigenous groups refusing

contact on the Peruvian side, where oil extraction and colonization
has been far more intensive than in Ecuador. They too have gradually
come to take refuge in the border area, at the confluence of the Curaray
and Tiguino Rivers. The Huaorani mentioned the Taromenani (literally
the giant people living at the end of the path) to me several times, but
the descriptions of these ‘similar but different’ people were so
extraordinary that I assimilated them to the vast category of fantastic
beings that are said to people the forest.
These non-contacted groups, whatever their provenance and

trajectory, all live like refugees in their own lands, by choice. They no
longer prepare clearings, but plant root crops and maize under the
canopy to avoid being spotted by helicopters. They cook late at night,
so that the smoke rising from their hearths does not give them away.
They are on the move at all times, endlessly searching for quieter
hunting spots, and better hiding places. According to my Huaorani
friends, they hate the noise of machines and engines, and choose to
flee to the same places where the monkeys and the peccaries flee.
These self-isolated groups have suffered a great deal because of

the loss of their territories, the invasion of oil companies, and the
continuous encroachment of poachers, loggers, drug traffickers, tourist
companies, and other adventurers. They also fear the ‘pacified’,

‘Christian’ Huaorani, who dream to ‘civilize’ them. They too have become
enemy outsiders. These fears are not unfounded. More than once, I
heard young Huaorani men boast that they will attempt to pacify the
Tagaeri. “Ingesting rice and sugar like us”, they told me, “the Tagaeri
will become wholly tame and gentle, like toddlers”. Some added that
this would greatly please ‘the company’ (the term they use to describe
the vast and complex consortium of companies, subsidiaries,
contractors, and subcontractors that work in partnership with
PetroEcuador), which, in return, will behave generously towards them,
by offering them all the cash and all the goods they ask for.
Non-contacted groups are not a threat to any one, except to

intruders; they only want to be left alone. As I argued some years ago,
we need to invent a new human right for all the groups still hiding in the
Amazon forest: the right of no-contact.
In continuation, let me illustrate the predicament of these non-

contacted groups, and the persecution to which they are subjected,
with two stories:
1. The ultimate modern dream: film the first contact. In the Spring of
1995, I was contacted by a Californian TV company which was
developing a new project entitled “The Tagaeri: the Last of the Free
People.” This series of three programmes proposed to ‘document’ the
first contact between the Tagaeri and the ‘botanist’ Loren Miller (the
man who patented the plant from which Northwest Amazon Indians
make the hallucinogenic locally known as ayahuasca or yagé).
According to the script, the first episode would show how Christian
Huaorani contacted their savage brothers, and managed to convince
them of the virtues of western civilization, with the help of the army.
The second episode would focus on the encounter between the chief
Tagae and Loren Miller, the former sharing his knowledge of medicinal
plants with the latter. The third part would centre on the western botanist
“telling the world of the great possibilities of scientific research and the
potentialities of Tagaeri land for ecotourism”. The TV company, which
was seeking the support of CNN and the National Geographic for this
project, had to back off in the face of a wave of protests from the
indigenous peoples organisations, COICA, and various other indigenous
rights organisations. They graciously sent a message expressing their

“agreement with the many enlightened individuals who expressed
concern and disagreement with our project”. They added: “We ask
that you respect the right of isolation, of privacy and of non-contact of
the Tagaeri population of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Tagaeri are a
community that live with the natural jungle and they made the choice
not to integrate the western civilization. Please respect their decision.”
But the project was too tantalising, and, in the following years, various
contacts were attempted by tourist companies and/ or TV crews. For
instance, one Belgian tourist guide, a former mercenary in the French
Legion, guided ‘survival expeditions’ in Tagaeri land. A British student
expedition managed to provoke a group of non-contacted Indians
(possibly Tagaeri). A member of the expedition got speared in the thigh;
the whole episode got filmed, and was heroically shown on Channel 4
in 1997.
2. Christian Huaorani slaughter savage Huaorani. In May 2003,

around 15 non-contacted Indians identified by the press as Taromenani
were speared to death by nine Huaorani ‘warriors’. The army recovered
twelve bodies (nine women and three children) from the raided
longhouse. A spokesperson for the army declared that: “the patrol will
not interfere with the customs or ancestral sanctioning procedures of
the Huaorani, the armed forces are very respectful in this sense.”
Everyone in Ecuador became an expert in ancestral customary law or
Huaorani culture, and avidly debated the issue. Why they had done
this, what it meant for the nation, what should be done about such
fratricide, and so forth. The ‘Ecuadorian Network for Legal Anthropology’
was formed to analyse the Tagaeri-Taromenani-Huaorani conflict from
a legal perspective, and propose a reform of the Ecuadorian judiciary
system in a way that would accommodate different legal systems,
including Huaorani revenge killing. The President of the tribal organisation
(ONHAE) and other Huoarani representatives were eventually asked to
comment on the slaughter. They emphasised the increased level of
interference from illegal traders and loggers in Huaorani territory. On
the 25th of June, the national press reported that ONHAE had decided
to forgive the nine warriors, who had been involved in a killing raid for
the first time, and had sworn to renounce violence and not seek revenge
in case the Taromenani decided to strike back. Young Huaorani would
phone me day and night during this stressful period to keep me informed
of the developments. I kept asking them whether they (or any one
else) had spoken to the warriors, but it seems that no one was interested
in knowing what they had to say about the whole affair. Could they
explain what had happened? Despite the distance, I could perceive
some of the internal and external reasons that had pushed these men
to kill. First the Babeiri had been in conflict with the Tagaeri for several
decades. The hostilities were rekindled when PetroCanada relocated
the former in the traditional territory of the latter, where they were
confronted to all the ills of the frontier culture —alcohol, prostitution,
dependency on alms, and so forth. Living along the oil road, the Babeiri
were constantly solicited by loggers and traders of various sorts. The
Babeiri raided the Tagaeri for a wife in 1993, as a result of which they
lost a young man, wounded by retaliating Tagaeri. In November 2002,
a logger’s boat overloaded with illegal timber collided with a Huaorani
dug-out canoe. Several Huaorani were killed. All these factors somehow
converged in giving the nine men the determination to carry out the
raid. It was reported that the ‘warriors’ comprised the father of a woman
killed in the November 2002 accident, and the brother and the brother-
in-law of a man killed in the same accident. Without the personal
accounts of the warriors themselves, all inference is open to debate.
However, it is clear that there is a direct relation between increased
extractive activities and the rise of violent conflict between ‘pacified’
and ‘non-contacted’ Huaorani. It would be wrong to blame violence
simply on tribal vengeance and savagery, as so many Ecuadorian and
other commentators have done. (By: Laura Rival, WRM Bulletin Nº 87,
October 2004).
Paraguay: The last Ayoreo in voluntary isolation
The Ayoreo live in a zone of their ancestral territory called Amotocodie.

Modern maps show it as an extensive area of virgin forest with the
geographic coordinates 21º 07’ S and 60º 08’W marking its centre,
some 50 km to the south of Cerro Leon. They amount to some 50
people, subdivided into various groups. They approach but rarely, a
watering place on some farm to drink water and perhaps a farm worker
may have seen them from afar. Sometimes, white hunters find their
trail in the forest or holes in trees where they have harvested honey. In
1998 a group of six warriors attacked a farm as a warning. On 3 March
2004, one of the groups comprising 17 people came into contact with
the surrounding society and settled on the border of their ancestral

habitat. The 2002 Indigenous Census of Paraguay does not record
them because they cannot be interviewed, because they are invisible.
Throughout the last sixty years all the other members of their people,
the Ayoreo from the Bolivian and Paraguayan Chaco, have been forcibly
removed from their enormous habitat by missionaries and now survive
precariously on the outskirts of modern society, slowly realising that
they have been cheated, that they were deprived of the forest where
they lived in harmony —and the forest has been deprived of them. The
Ayoreo who still continue to live in the forest are some of the last
hunters and gatherers of the Latin American continent who have not
been contacted and who do not seek contact with modern and
enveloping society.
They are nomads in their ancestral territory: they constantly walk

through the still large extensions of untouched forest. Their walks are
guided by an intimate knowledge of the places and the cycles of the
Chaco’s fruits and resources. The most decisive resource is water,
sometimes abundant in certain places and sometimes extremely scarce
in others and depending on the seasons. Other resources are the flesh
of animals: they know where to find turtles or wild pigs or armadillos or
the flag bear; they know where they can find fruit such as the heart of
palm. They know where to find honey. During the rainy season during
their walks, they cultivate in appropriate areas. The forest provides
everything. Wise self-control of demographic growth, together with
constant migration guarantee the continuity of the world in which they
live, preventing overuse, deterioration and depletion of their resources.
In this way, no signs of environmental deterioration are apparent as

a consequence of their presence. Rather we must acknowledge the
contrary: without them something would be lacking in the forest,
something related with their vitality and the validity of what we call
biodiversity. This suggests that basically, not only them, but all human
beings could have had a function in the world’s ecosystems, just as
every plant and animal has. Perhaps our absence, the fact that we
have separated from this way of living harmoniously with the world, has
made it weaker. We are missing from our ecosystems. Perhaps finally
we humans are not the enemies of nature and the earth, but
necessary…if we were to accomplish our function.
The forest Ayoreo still accomplish it. We know from the explanation
of the groups or families that were removed or who left the forest to join
our modern civilization in our times, in 1986, 1999, 2004, that they
define it as a function of mutual protection: the forest protects us, we
protect the forest. Humankind as protector of the earth.
Their way of cultivating the land during the rainy season is very
expressive of their relationship with the forest and with nature: with the
first rains they sow the seeds they have been storing of pumpkin, corn,
water melon and beans in natural sandy clearings in the middle of the
forest. They barely prepare the soil. Then they continue with their
walking and let nature take over. They come back to harvest. According
to their concept one has to intervene as little as possible in the workings
of nature, just some minimum support, the support to allow it to do
better what it does anyway.
They do not consider themselves to be the owners of the world like

we modern people who have left our forests centuries or millennia ago,
do. According to them, the world is not at the disposal of humans to do
anything they want with. On the contrary, the Ayoreo, instead of placing
themselves above the world, feel themselves to be a part of it, an
integrating and necessary part. This is not only seen from their posture
and attitude in their daily lives. This relationship with the world is also
expressed in their social structure in a profoundly spiritual way: in
parallel with family ties, the Ayoreo on birth and with their surname
belong to one of seven “clans,” each clan including a part of all the
phenomena existing in the world. For instance in this way an Ayoreo
from the Etacore clan becomes a relative for example of the rattlesnake,
of the water falling in a storm, of the rope, of the dry season, of the red
colour of blood, of the moon when it can be seen during the daytime, of
the totitabia bird, etc. All the Ayoreo as a whole are related to everything
that exists in the world, and each one, according to his/her surname,
lives with the mission of looking after his/her world phenomenon
“relatives” in a very special way.
The way they live in harmony with the world is comparable to a couple
living in harmony in the best sense: aware of diversity and its importance,
conscious of mutual interdependency, knowing that one without the other
could not be happy, would have no future, and could not live.
This is part of what the forest Ayoreo, with their cultural, spontaneous
and natural way of being, contribute to the world of today: a different
and diverse way of being, that not only sustains the environmental
integrity of the Chaco forest where they live but also sustains a diverse
conscience and presence that, without them, the world would be lacking
today.
Presumably they are not aware of their importance to us. When we

finally perceive it, we start understanding the significance of their
existence, not only for themselves and their environmental habitat, but
also for us and our future. Because finally, their attitudes and those
communicated by their way of living are those that should inspire our
search for new ways of life and of harmonious living if as humanity we
want to have a future.
Although they may not know of their importance for humanity, they
certainly must feel its weight through their solitude in carrying out their
function of protecting the world. They may feel it concretely and in
daily things, when heavy machinery disturbs the silence of their territory
to fell trees for cattle ranches and to make new entries to take precious
wood, and when they feel how the consistence of the world of which
they are a part is eroded and weakened.
They still have to feel that our strength is added to theirs, that we
have taken up our mission again of protecting their world and ours,
everybody’s world. (By: Benno Glauser, WRM Bulletin Nº 87, October
2004).
Peru: Policy development for indigenous peoples in

voluntary isolation
In 1990, the Peruvian state established the Kugapakori/Nahua Reserve

to protect the lives, rights and territories of indigenous peoples in South
East Peru avoiding, or strictly limiting their contact with national society.
Despite safeguarding these territories on paper, since its creation the
Reserve has been continually threatened by illegal logging and two
years ago it was opened up for extraction of natural gas as part of the
Camisea Gas Project. In the face of these threats, some of its
inhabitants who had established contact with outsiders began to voice
their own opinions about the Reserve and its inability to protect their
territories and rights.
To address these challenges, a group of Peruvian NGOs and

Indigenous Federations formed a committee to defend and strengthen
the Reserve both legally and on the ground. It was clear to the Committee
that in its current form the Reserve was neither working to prevent
exploitation by outsiders nor meeting the needs of its inhabitants. The
challenge was how to take into account the diverse needs and interests
of all its inhabitants, including those avoiding all contact, and translate
these into legal concepts and practical recommendations. The hope
was that the proposals would serve as a model for developing legislation
and policies to protect the rights of indigenous peoples living in isolation
not only within the Kugapakori/Nahua Reserve but throughout Peru.
After 18 months of fieldwork and legal analysis the work of the

Committee is now nearing completion and in November 2004 the
proposals will be presented to senior representatives of the Peruvian
state. This article briefly reviews the challenges faced by the Committee
and the ways by which the project has sought to overcome them. It is
hoped that the processes, methodologies and terms of reference
developed through this process can serve other institutions hoping to
develop policies to support indigenous peoples in isolation in Latin
America and beyond.
Until 1984 the Nahua, a Panoan speaking indigenous people, lived

in the headwaters of the Purus, Manu and Mishagua basins in South
East Peru, avoiding all direct contact with outsiders and attacking
anyone entering their territory. In April 1984, this isolation ended when
four Nahua were captured by loggers and taken to Sepahua, the local
town, before being sent back to their villages. A year later over half the
Nahua had died from colds and other respiratory diseases introduced
by this first contact, and loggers had taken advantage of their weakness
and overrun their territory.
In 1990, the Peruvian state established the Kugapakori/Nahua State

Reserve to protect indigenous peoples in the region still avoiding all
direct contact with outsiders, or those like the Nahua who had only
recently established this contact. However, in practice the Reserve

consistently failed to protect the territories and rights of its inhabitants
and since its establishment has been invaded by loggers, overlapped
with illegal forestry concessions and opened up for the extraction of
natural gas. This has led to a variety of impacts ranging from cases of
forced contact and subsequent epidemics, invasions of indigenous
territories by loggers and the relocation of some of its inhabitants who
felt threatened by the activities of the Camisea gas project.
In 2001 the Nahua, who were campaigning against an invasion of

loggers demanded that their territory be recognised in a communal
land title and excluded from the Reserve feeling that it would offer them
greater legal protection. This presented a major challenge; how to
support the legitimate claim of the Nahua without undermining the legal
status of the Reserve and therefore the territories of its other inhabitants.
In 2002 Shinai Serjali, a Peruvian NGO that was helping the Nahua
in their struggle with the loggers, began to consult a wide range of
state and civil society institutions involved with the Reserve for legal
and practical solutions to address its problems. An initial workshop in
2002 identified various problems: the lack of any clear legislation for
State Reserves in Peru, confusion over its administration and
boundaries, the lack of local awareness of its rules and boundaries
and the absence of any efficient system of control. After the workshop,
a group comprising six NGO’s and indigenous federations continued
to discuss the situation and the result was the formation of the
Committee for the Defense of the Reserve in 2003. Its objective was to
strengthen the Reserve and the territorial security of its inhabitants
and to propose policies and recommendations that were based on the
perspectives and priorities of its inhabitants rather than those of outside
institutions. The Committee was supported by AIDESEP, the national
indigenous peoples organization, and its members include: Shinai
Serjali, Racimos de Ungurahui, COMARU (Machiguenga Council for
the Lower Urubamba), IBC (Institute of the Common Good), CEDIA
(Centre for the Development of Amazonian Indigenous People) and
APRODEH (Association for the Promotion of Human Rights).
The main challenge of this project was how to take into account the
diverse needs and interests of all the indigenous peoples living within
the Reserve. In 2002 there were at least 9 known communities

corresponding to 3 different ethnic groups, each of whom had different
relations with, and attitudes towards, national society. Only some of
these groups like the Nahua were interacting directly with external
individuals or institutions, while others were preferring to avoid such
contact altogether. In addition, many of its inhabitants spoke minimal
or no Spanish and had limited or no understanding of concepts such
as the State, the law, property, let alone the Reserve.
To cope with these difficulties three field teams were formed whose
task was to work for extended periods with only those communities
who already had a sustained contact with outsiders. All field teams
were made up of individuals who had previous field experience with
these communities, spoke their language and had established
relationships of trust with them. During 12 months of fieldwork, the
teams used sketch maps and GPS equipment to help the communities
make geo-referenced maps of their territories illustrating its cultural,
historical and practical importance to them as well as the issues
threatening its integrity The maps also illustrated their knowledge about
the location and movements of peoples living in the Reserve who were
avoiding all contact with outsiders.
In addition, the field teams listened to the major concerns and

priorities of these communities, that ranged from invasions of loggers,
disease transmission, exploitation by school teachers and the impact
of the Camisea gas project. In many cases the teams introduced the
concept of the Reserve, discussed how it was designed to protect
their rights and to what extent it was working. A fourth field team worked
for three months with the titled Machiguenga communities who border
the Reserve helping them to map their resource and territory use within
the Reserve and their attitudes and knowledge towards it and its
inhabitants to ensure that their rights were also respected in the
development of any proposals. The teams worked with the Nahua, the
Nanti of the River Camisea, the Machiguenga of the River Paquiria and
the Machiguenga communities bordering the Reserve.
On the basis of these concerns, a specialist lawyer in indigenous

rights began to develop a legal proposal that would best reflect the
problems of the Reserve and the concerns of its inhabitants. The
proposal is based on the highest standards of human and indigenous
rights at an international level and applies to all five State Reserves in

Peru. The proposal establishes intangibility for the Reserves and
prohibits all extractive industries within them as well as any efforts to
contact peoples in voluntary isolation. It establishes definitions of
indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact, contingency
plans in case of unwanted contact or a medical emergency, the means
for creating new Reserves for peoples who currently live outside of
them and severe sanctions for people or institutions who breach the
law. The draft proposal was presented to the National Indigenous
Federation (AIDESEP) and its regional bases (FENEMAD, ORAU, ORAI
and COMARU) who were developing a similar proposal. The two
proposals were merged and modified in consultation with all of
AIDESEP’s regional and local federations.
One of the Committee’s objectives was also the development of

recommendations that could be applied to the specific problems of the
Kugapakori/Nahua Reserve. In order to do this, the key problems and
priorities of the Reserve’s inhabitants were circulated amongst a larger
group of people including local Indigenous representatives, members
of NGOs working in the area or in neighbouring regions and
representatives of state institutions responsible for forestry, indigenous
peoples and human rights. The group worked to develop specific
recommendations to deal with a variety of complex problems ranging
from illegal logging, the activities of the Camisea Gas project, the
transmission of introduced diseases to peoples with minimal or no
natural resistance, the incursion of settlers and the efforts of some
Missionaries to forcibly contact some of the peoples avoiding all
contact.
In November 2004, the results of the fieldwork and the legal proposal
will be presented to senior representatives of the Peruvian Government.
The presentation is the first step in the process of their acceptance
and ratification by the State. It is hoped that key government ministers
and other representatives will accept the proposals as an informed and
thorough initiative and commit to promoting their implementation both
in the law and on the ground. (By: Conrad Feather, WRM Bulletin Nº
87, October 2004).
ASIA
India: Wave of poaching and exploitation hits isolated

tribes
Outsiders are invading the reserve of the isolated Jarawa tribe in the
Andaman Islands, India, and stealing the game on which they depend
for food. There are also increasing reports of Jarawa women being
sexually exploited. Despite a Supreme Court order to the islands’
administration to close the highway which runs though the reserve, it
remains open, bringing disease and dependency.
The Jarawa are one of four ‘Negrito’ tribes who are believed to have
travelled to the Andaman Islands from Africa up to 60,000 years ago.
Two of the tribes, the Great Andamanese and the Onge, were decimated
following the colonisation of their islands —first by the British, and
later by India. The population of the Great Andamanese tribe fell from
5,000 in 1848 to just 41 today. Both the Great Andamanese and the
Onge are now dependent on government handouts. The Jarawa resisted
contact with settlers from the Indian mainland until 1998. The fourth
tribe, the Sentinelese, live on their own island and continue to shun all
contact.
The Jarawa are hunter-gatherers, and number around 270 people.

They use bows and arrows to hunt pigs and monitor lizards, and catch
fish and turtles. Now, hundreds of Indian settlers and Burmese poachers
are hunting and fishing along the road and the coast, depriving the
Jarawa of vital game. The problem has become so acute that in some
areas the once abundant wild pigs and fish are now scarce. The
Sentinelese tribe are also experiencing the theft of their food sources,
particularly of lobster from the rich waters around their island, North
Sentinel, and the Onge tribe say they cannot hunt enough pigs as
these are being stolen by outsiders.
The main highway which runs through the Jarawa reserve, known
as the Andaman Trunk Road, is also bringing exploitation of the Jarawa.
There are numerous reports of poachers and other outsiders sexually
exploiting Jarawa women, and outsiders are introducing alcohol, tobacco
and alien food items on which the Jarawa are starting to depend. Those
entering Jarawa land also bring outside diseases to which the Jarawa
have no immunity. The tribe has already experienced one measles
epidemic - prompt action by the authorities helped prevent a catastrophe.
The Administration of the Andaman Islands is making some attempt

to restrict contact between the Jarawa and users of the road. This is a
step in the right direction, but will not alone be enough to secure the
Jarawa’s future. Participants in a recent Indian government seminar on
the future of the Jarawa concluded that intervention in the Jarawa’s
lives should be minimised, and that their development should be at
their own pace and in the direction they themselves choose. However,
some within the establishment still favour forcible assimilation. The
then-Minister for Tribal Welfare said in 2003 that his ministry planned
to ‘reform the tribals and assimilate them with the mainstream’ because
‘it is not right to leave them as is.’ Until the Jarawa’s rights to their land
and to make decisions about their future are respected, they remain in
serious danger.
Lichu, one of the few surviving Great Andamanese, fears for the
future of the Jarawa. ‘I think what happened to us is going to happen to
the Jarawa too… lots of settlers are hunting in the Jarawa area. There
is not enough game left for the Jarawa. Their fish are also being poached.
Public interaction with the Jarawa should end. The Andaman Trunk
Road must be shut.’ (By: Miriam Ross, WRM Bulletin Nº 87, October
2004).
Indonesia: The Baduy people of western Java, a living

tradition
In the Banten region of western Java, Indonesia, exists a small-scale

indigenous community that has to a large extent been able to avoid
the advancement of globalization, modern technology and other
influences of the outside world, including environmental degradation.
The Baduy people are a reclusive tribal group that has lived a relatively
undisturbed, traditional lifestyle in a closed society for more than 400
years until the recent encroachment of economic and social pressures
from the outside world. Although they live in an isolated area of
mountainous rainforest only 100 kilometres southwest of Jakarta,
Indonesia’s capital city, the Baduy have in the past been able to
effectively seal their community off from the rest of the world.
Inhabiting a special reserve of some 5,200 hectares set aside for

the Baduy people by the Indonesian Government, the population of
about 7,200 people live in two separate clans. The Inner Baduy (Baduy
Dalam), numbering only 350 in three villages (kampung) in the core
area, are the strictest adherents to Baduy spiritual belief, while the
remaining population live in the Outer Baduy (Baduy Luar) area. The
Baduy Dalam is the centre point of culture and religious following and
the focus of rituals and sacred sites within the Baduy territory.
Symbolically, the Baduy Dalam clan members may wear white with
the black traditional clothing, while the Baduy Luar clan members are
characteristically dressed in black or dark blue. The Baduy Luar serves
as a buffer zone between the Baduy Dalam and the outside world with
members of the outer clan acting as intermediaries for the more pure
members of the inner clan.
Baduy houses are uniformly simple, constructed only of natural

materials, such as bamboo and palm thatching, without windows, and
are devoid of any furniture, chairs, tables or other furnishings. They
use no modern utensils, mechanized equipment or manufactured
materials, such as glass or plastic, and no modern device or even
domestic animal is used in their traditional swidden rice farming
techniques. Within the Baduy territory there is no electricity or other
modern conveniences, and no electronic equipment, motor vehicles or
other instruments of the outside world are permitted to enter. Thus, the
Baduy community is perceived by many an anachronism in today’s
rapidly industrializing Indonesia, rejecting all forms of modernization
and still following unique cultural and religious practices as defined by
the Baduy adat law systems handed down by their ancestors more
than four hundred years ago.
A most extraordinary aspect of Baduy society is the origin of this

tribal group, which today still remains shrouded in mystery. According
to one legend, when Muslim forces began to spread the Islamic religion
through western Java and other parts of the archipelago in the early
part of the 16th century, an ascetic group of people said to have originated
within the ancient Hindu Kingdom of Pajajaran refused to embrace the
new religion. Instead, these people fled to the upper regions of a nearby
mountain range (Kendeng Mountains), forming their own religious clan
based on strict adherence to unique religious beliefs; perhaps influenced
in some ways by the Hindu religion of the Kingdom of Pajajaran before
it fell to the Muslim invaders.
Although there has been scholarly literature about the Baduy way
of life since the early days of Dutch colonialism, much of what has
been written is second-hand information, often contradictory, and
perhaps intentionally misleading. The Baduy seem to have long ago
realized that one of the strengths of survival for their culture is to remain
hidden behind a cloak of mystique. They jealously guard the knowledge
of spirituality and ritual within their community, permitting no outsider
to enter the sacred places or view traditional rites within the Inner Baduy
region.
The Baduy believe in one central deity, whom they call Batara
Tunggal, and regard themselves as the descendents of seven minor
deities sent to earth by Batara Tunggal at the beginning of human-kind
on the planet. The Baduy hold as most sacred a remote place near the
centre of Baduy territory, known as Sasaka Domasa, where this event
is said to have occurred and where the spirits of their ancestors are
protected and revered. However, all Baduy territory is regarded as
protected and sacred, particularly the most significant forest areas
which are not permitted to be disturbed or altered. Consequently, these
forests comprise a valuable environmental reserve and a perpetual
resource for sustainable use by the community.
Today, the Baduy people exist as an isolated, small-scale traditional

community surrounded by mainstream Indonesian society, which in
western Java alone is comprised of some 40 million followers of the
Islamic faith. In spite of the external forces of modernization and the
pressure for this small community to assimilate within modern
Indonesian society, the Baduy tribe still controls its mountain stronghold
where religious and cultural practices have remained largely unchanged
until very recent times.
While they have been able to maintain a relatively traditional life-

style until recently, the Baduy people are beginning to be influenced
by developments in the world around them, including the forces of

modernity, industrialization and globalization. Ironically, the Baduy way
of life has until now been culturally and ecologically sustainable and
they have lived in relative harmony with the environment. Embodied
within the Baduy society is great wisdom and knowledge about the
conservation and sustainability of eco-systems and the
interconnectedness of all living things with the earth and the cosmos.
Today, a burgeoning Baduy population and increasing contacts with

the outside world, have led to the development of a more market-based
village economy dependent on cash crops and sale of handicrafts. In
recent years, the Baduy have placed an increasing emphasis on agro-
forestry production, such as the timber plantation Albizia tree, fruit,
palm sugar and other products grown almost exclusively for sale on
local markets, rather than the formerly self-sustaining cultivation of hill
rice (ladang).
These changes have begun to cause some cultural, social and

environmental impacts, which are most evident in the increasing use
of non-traditional, western-style clothing, consumption of packaged
fast-foods and use of other manufactured goods that are purchased
with money obtained through growing cash crops. Although prohibited
by Baduy adat law, some other modern articles imported from outside
the Baduy territory, such as thermos bottles, radios and even the mobile
phone, are becoming increasingly commonplace in Baduy homes.
Another important aspect of these recent developments may be

seen in the impacts of a rapidly growing, local tourist industry catering
to outsiders who are drawn to see and experience the uniquely spiritual
Baduy way of life. Perhaps unwittingly, the Baduy people, who have
generously opened their doors to visitors from outside the Baduy realm,
and the tourists themselves, are participating in a gradual process
which may degrade valuable cultural and environmental assets. In time,
changes brought about by exposure to the steady stream of tourists
may destroy the local resources that are now a prime attraction for
tourists. Under such circumstances it is not necessarily tourism per
se that creates problems for local communities, but rather it is most
often the lack of planning and management of tourist demand, access
and activities. The impacts of unmanaged tourism may indeed pose
the greatest threat of all to Baduy culture and the greatest challenge to
maintaining their sacred traditions for the future. (By: David Langdon,

3
‘La Fumee du Metal’: The health impacts of contact
The 21,000 Yanomami who live in some 360 widely scattered

settlements in the forested mountains and hills between Venezuela
and Brazil were largely uncontacted by westerners until the middle of
the 20th century. In their myths, the Yanomami recall a far distant time
when they lived alongside a big river, ‘before we were chased up into
the highlands’ but by the time their existence is first recorded, in the
mid-18th century, they were already well established in the Parima hills
between the Rio Branco and the Upper Orinoco.
Contact with the outside world has been driven by a number of

different forces. Once the Yanomami discovered the value of metal
goods, probably towards the end of the 19th century, they began to
trade with (and raid) neighbouring indigenous groups to acquire
machetes and axes, cloth and cooking pots. Metal tools reduced the
labour of cutting down trees for construction and farming by about 10
times and made many other tasks much easier. Their agriculture
intensified, their numbers increased and they began to move out from
the highlands, north, south, east and west, pushed by their own
expanding numbers and drawn downriver by opportunities for trade. At
the same time, explorers, anthropologists and frontier commissions
marched to the headwaters of these rivers to make these areas known
to ‘science’ and mark the boundaries of expanding nation states. The
Yanomami gained a reputation for fiercely defending themselves against
intruders but this did not dissuade the adventurers. In the 1920s, British
3
The title and quote is from Bruce Albert, (1988, La Fumée du metal: histoire et
representation du contact chez les Yanomami (Brazil) L’Homme (106-107): XXVIII
(2-3) :87-119). For detailed information on the current situation of the Brazilian
Yanomami see http://www.proyanomami.org.br
explorer Hamilton-Rice cradled a Thomson sub-machine gun in his

arms, while being paddled to the headwaters of the Uraricoera and
back.
Commencing in the 1950s, Protestant and Catholic priests

established remote mission posts to bring knowledge of Christ to the
Yanomami. Later, projects of nation-building led to roads being carved
through the forests and proposals for the building of large dams. Above
all, discoveries of gold and cassiterite led to massive invasions by
small-scale placer miners (garimpeiros), driven there by their own poverty
and opportunities of wealth.
Of course, like all human groups, the Yanomami were not disease-
free in the past. Medical anthropologists presume they have long
harboured minor viral infections like Herpes, Epstein-Barr,
Cytomegalovirus, and Hepatitis. Tetanus was also prevalent in the soils
and some non-venereal treponeme infections were probably endemic.
Arboviruses, maintained in animal populations in the forests, were also
present. Leishmaniasis, transmitted by sandfly, and yellow fever, which
also infects monkeys, are also thought to have been present as the
indigenous people show considerable resistance to these diseases. In
short, the pre-contact situations were not a medical paradise but what
diseases there were, were prevalent at low levels and rarely fatal.
Contact with the outside world, however, has exacted a terrible

toll from the Yanomami. Already by the early 1900s, the northern
Yanomami began suffering repeated epidemics of introduced diseases
on the Uraricoera. In the 1960s, diamond miners invaded the Yanam
(Eastern Yanomami) areas on the Upper Paragua in Venezuela and
Uraricaa in Brazil, leading to massive mortalities. Late in the 1960s,
workers brought in from the Rio Negro in order to expand the missions
and build airstrips, infected the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco with
measles. The infection swept through the settlements, carried further
upstream by frightened people fleeing outbreaks downriver. Fevers,
aches and weakness prostrated whole villages, leaving the infected
people lying prone in their hammocks, unable to go hunting, too weak
to gather crops from their gardens, eventually too demoralised even
to collect firewood or drinking water from nearby streams. Cold, hungry
and weakened by disease the Yanomami fell easy prey to other
illnesses. Respiratory tract infections brought on pneumonias, fevers,

further weakness and mass deaths. Some villages lost as much as a
third of their numbers in a single epidemic and repeated scourges of
influenzas, polio, whooping cough, rubella, chicken-pox and the longer
term degeneration brought on by tuberculosis, led to some groups
being completely wiped out.
During the road building programme in Brazil, which involved the

construction of a road through the southern edge of Yanomam (Southern
Yanomami) territory, these repeated epidemics reduced local Yanomami
numbers by up to 90%. The shattered survivors adopted a road-side
existence begging from passing vehicles. Lay-by encounters with lorry
drivers and construction crews then brought previously unknown
venereal diseases into the villages, the gonorrhoea, in turn, making
numerous women infertile and so slowing the people’s recovery to the
population losses.
In the 1970s, Sanema (Northern Yanomami) from the Upper Caura

began travelling downriver to work in the diamond mines on the middle
Paragua and returned bearing a deadly haul of diseases. Epidemics
led to massive losses and the abandonment of the once populous
Catholic mission at Kanadakuni. By the 1980s, some 25% of the
Sanema of the Caura were carrying tuberculosis, leading to a
demoralising and constant loss of numbers to the deadly disease.
During the 1980s, the mass invasion of the Brazilian Yanomami’s

territories by as many as 50,000 miners, led to further problems for
even the most isolated groups. The miners not only trekked in across
the forested hills, where rivers were unnavigable, they also flew in to
mission airstrips using light planes. New airstrips were hacked from
the jungles, in previously unpenetrated areas. As well as frequent viral
epidemics and more problems with venereal diseases, the Yanomami
also contracted all three forms of malaria brought in by miners –
Plasmodium vivax, P. ovale and, the most deadly, P. falciparum.
Volunteer medical teams, who came in to help counter this devastation,
estimate that the Brazilian Yanomami, as a whole, lost some 15-20%
of their numbers to the illnesses brought in by the miners.
These tragedies have, obviously, had more than medical impacts

on the Yanomami. The trauma of mass deaths has scarred several
generations and upset age-old concepts about existence, disease,

curing and death. Customarily, Yanomami used to see most illnesses
as the consequences of eating hunted game, while most deaths were
seen as the result of shamans from distant villages sending spells over
long distances or lurking in nearby forests to blow poisonous dusts
over unsuspecting passers by. Mass deaths were previously unknown
but, on several occasions, led isolated villages to assume they were
under spiritual attack from neighbouring communities prompting them
to undertake retaliatory raids to avenge themselves on the presumed
killers.
However, it was not long before the Yanomami realised that the
terrible epidemics they endured were consequences of their contacts
with ‘whites’. Among the Brazilian Yanomam (Southern Yanomami),
the belief grew that diseases were the ‘smoke of steel’, an odour of
death that came from the boxes in which metal goods were stored, an
exhalation in the very breath of their sinister white visitors, an enfeebling
and sickening smoke like the exhausts of their aeroplane engines.
“Once the smoke was amongst us it made us die. We had fever.

Our skins started to peal. It was terrifying. The elders demanded ‘what
have we done to make them kill us?’ and they urged us, younger ones,
who wanted to take revenge, ‘don’t go to avenge yourselves on the
whites… Don’t go’ they insisted ‘don’t go and shoot them with arrows,
for they are gunmen, and they will attack us with their rifles’.”
As the epidemics continued some of the elder Yanomami urged a

retreat to the headwaters to avoid further contact but diseases followed
them even into the highlands brought in to the missions by government
officials and Yanomami patients returning from hospitals, leading to a
belief that the whites were insatiable cannibals feeding on Yanomami
spirits.
If we can look beyond our own scientific explanations of the cause

of sickness and death, we can see that the Yanomami’s diagnoses of
the medical calamity they were enduring were close to the truth. They
identified with acuity the rapacity of the civilization that was engulfing
them heedless of the consequences of the intrusion.
In recent years concerted efforts have been made by missionaries,

anthropologists, NGOs, government agencies and, increasingly, by
the Yanomami themselves to bring medical assistance to the area and
halt uncontrolled access to the region. In the 1990s, some 8.5 million
hectares of the Upper Orinoco in Venezuela, were declared a Biosphere
Reserve and, in Brazil, another 9.9 million hectares were designated
an Indigenous ‘Park’. The Venezuelan government is now considering
recognising a further 3.6 million hectares in the Upper Caura as an
indigenous ‘habitat’. Whereas in Venezuela, medical programmes
remain limited (despite lavish funding of the Biosphere Reserve by the
European Union and World Bank), in Brazil a concerted campaign of
inoculation and primary health care, coupled with measures to expel
miners from the region, has led to improvements.
The Yanomami experience teaches many lessons, one of the most

obvious being that uncontrolled contact can have terrible consequences
for previously isolated groups. In the Yanomami case, contact with the
outside world was being sought by the indigenous people themselves,
but one-sided penetration schemes which gave little consideration for
the medical effects hugely exacerbated what would anyway have been
a demoralising and perilous encounter. In the 19th century and earlier, it
may have been possible to plead ignorance of the likely results of such
contact. We now know, beyond any doubt, that enforced contact with
isolated indigenous groups in Amazonia is bound to lead to massive
loss of life. (By: Marcus Colchester, WRM Bulletin Nº 87, October
2004).
Central Africa: Land loss and cultural degradation for

the Twa of the Great Lakes
The indigenous Twa ‘Pygmy’ people of the Great Lakes region of central
Africa are originally a mountain-dwelling hunter-gatherer people,
inhabiting the high altitude forests around Lakes Kivu, Albert and
Tanganyika —areas that have now become part of Rwanda, Burundi,
Uganda and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The current
Twa population is estimated at between 82,000 and 126,000 people.
The Twa are widely thought to be the prior inhabitants of the forests
in the Great Lakes region. The evidence for this includes historical
accounts and research as well as the Twas’ own accounts of their

origins, which emphasis that the Twa are ‘from here’ whilst the oral
histories of neighbouring ethnic groups tell of their arrival from elsewhere
through wars, migration and conquest. Local rituals also symbolically
affirm the role of the Twa as the first occupants of the land. For example,
Twa did, and still do, play a crucial role in the enthronement ceremonies
of the customary non-indigenous landowners, the Tutsi kings and chiefs
(Mwamis), symbolically ‘licensing’ the land to the incoming ruler. Twa
were also indispensable for the annual royal hunting rituals affirming
the Mwami’s mystical authority over the land and its fertility. Indeed,
the stem–twa is a Bantu term used throughout sub-Saharan Africa for
different groups of people of very low status, referring in almost every
case to hunter-gatherers and former hunter-gatherers who are
recognised as the prior inhabitants of the area, including ‘Pygmy’ people
and ‘Bushmen’.
The Twa, like other African forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers, have

had contacts with neighbouring farming groups for many centuries,
based around reciprocal exchange relationships in which forest products
were bartered for starchy foods, metal tools and other products such
as salt. For many centuries, the Twa were probably able (as many
other African indigenous forest peoples still do) to retreat at will into
the forests, and so could control to a large degree the nature and
extent of their contacts with the outside world. However, as the forests
began to be cleared, the Twa were increasingly forced into contact
with farmers and herders, and became caught up in unfavourable trade
and labour relationships, in which the scope for negotiation became
more and more constrained.
Deforestation in the Great Lakes region started several centuries

ago, with the arrival of farmers and herding peoples who began clearing
forests for agriculture and pasture. Much of the region lay outside the
main slaving routes, and population density increased as other people
sought refuge there. Forested areas receded as agriculture expanded
on the rich volcanic soils. During the early and middle parts of the 20th
century populations increased rapidly, resulting in some of the highest
rural population densities in Africa, for example 800 people/sq km in
the volcanic region of north-west Rwanda. By the 1980s much of all
the available land, apart from areas reserved for wildlife conservation
and environmental protection, was under cultivation, particularly in

Rwanda and Burundi. Pressures on the forests intensified through
production of export crops: half the forests around the volcanoes in the
north of Rwanda were cleared for pyrethrum plantations in the 1960s,
and areas around Rwanda’s Nyungwe forest were cleared for tea estates.
Quinine and coffee production in eastern DRC also reduced forest cover.
During the 20th century Rwanda’s forest area was reduced from 30% of
the land area to the present 7%; Burundi’s natural forest cover decreased
from 6% to 2% of the land area between 1976 and 1997.
As the forests were cleared, the areas left for the Twas’ hunting and
gathering activities decreased, heralding a period during which the Twa
became progressively more and more landless and their traditional
forest-based culture, including their religion and rituals and (according
to some sources) their language, was eroded. In several areas the Twa
sought to maintain control over their lands through armed defence, for
example, the exploits of the renowned Twa Basebya at the end of the
19th century in what is now south-western Uganda. In the Bushivu
highlands of eastern DRC Twa also fought long and bloody wars with
agricultural peoples attempting to clear Twa forest lands for farms —
fighting continued until around 1918. The impact of deforestation on
the culture of the Twa was noted by early missionaries, such as Van
den Biesen who commented on the future of the Twa of Burundi in
1897: ‘When these forests have been destroyed for whatever reason,
our Batwa will not be able to continue their traditional life.’
As forests were cleared, some Twa groups adopted alternative

livelihoods based on crafts (pottery, basketry, metalworking) or attached
themselves to powerful and rich individuals, thus becoming singers,
dancers, messengers, guards, warriors and hunters for kings and
princes; others became clients of local landowners. In some cases
these services were rewarded with gifts of cattle or land, but most Twa
remained without any locally recognised rights to lands.
Other groups of Twa were able to continue using the remaining

forest for subsistence activities and trading of forest products, such as
skins, vines, essential oils, honey, poles and game, with neighbouring
farming communities, and to hunt animals such as elephant, colobus
monkeys, wild pig and leopard, selected portions of which were given
to local chiefs and sub-chiefs as tribute. These offerings might be repaid

in heads of cattle.
The designation of conservation areas, which began in the colonial

period, initially did not have much impact on the hunting and gathering
activities of the Twa —and was probably beneficial to them in protecting
the forests from being cleared by farmers. By the 1960s and 70s
however, regulations based on the prevailing conservation ideology,
prohibiting human habitation and restricting traditional use rights in
protected areas, began to be enforced more vigorously. During the
1970s and 80s Twa were involuntarily resettled out of the Volcano
National Park and Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda and the Kahuzi-Biega
National Park and Virunga National Park in eastern DRC, in some
cases by means of armed force. Twa in the Bwindi and Mgahinga
forests of Uganda were officially evicted in the 1960s but only finally
excluded from using the forests in 1991 when they were gazetted as
national parks. No compensation was provided for the displaced Twa,
either in cash or as alternative lands. In the Kahuzi-Biega eviction
compensation was paid to the local Bantu landholders, but none of
this reached the Twa who were not considered to have rights to the
land.
The case of the Gishwati forest in Rwanda is another notorious

case of expropriation of Twa lands. The last forest-dwelling Twa in
Rwanda, the Impunyu, were cleared from the Gishwati forest in the
1980s and 90s to make way for World Bank-financed forestry plantation
and dairy projects. These projects were intended to protect the natural
forest, but they had the opposite effect: by 1994 two-thirds of the original
forest had been converted to pasture, almost all of which was allocated
to friends and relations of the President. The World Bank itself
concluded that the project had failed, and the treatment of indigenous
peoples had been ‘highly unsatisfactory’. Since then refugees have
been settled in the remaining forest, resulting in its total destruction,
but the Gishwati Twa are still largely landless.
Twa communities throughout the Great Lakes region have been

deprived of lands without due legal process, in violation of constitutional
provisions and international norms that require resettled communities
to be adequately compensated. Some Twa were able to acquire small

plots of land, mostly through gifts from royalty and chiefs in times
gone by. But since colonial times there has been virtually no land
distribution to the Twa: in Rwanda for example, in 1995, 84% of landed
Twa were still living on land originally given to them by the Mwamis. A
few Twa communities have received land through government schemes
in Rwanda and Burundi, and through private purchase by a conservation
trust fund and private benefactors in Uganda. Some communities have
secured use rights from local landowners in DRC by paying the fees
prescribed under Bantu customary law.
However, recent socio-economic surveys show that the land situation

of the Twa remains extremely serious. In both Rwanda and Burundi
lack of farm land is 3.5 times more common among Twa households
than non-Twa. In Rwanda 43% of Twa households lack farm land, in
Burundi it is 53%. Of the Twa who do have agricultural land, the sizes
of fields are much smaller, and usually of poorer quality than the non-
Twa population. In Uganda up to 40% of Batwa households do not even
have land on which to build a hut.
The pressure on land in the Great Lakes region continues to intensify

with population growth, and the return of refugees who need to be
resettled. In DRC, there are still areas of forest (although under the
control of traditional land holders) accessible to some of the Twa
communities, but in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, landless Twa have
no-where left to go. They remain transient squatters constantly looking
for somewhere they can lodge until they are moved on.
“These people who let us stay on their land, they call on us to

cultivate. If we refuse they say ‘Move away, we no longer want
you.’ We are not settled here, because other local people are
pressing the landowners saying ‘What do you need Twa for?’
and at any time we may have to shift and settle elsewhere. If
the owners are sympathetic, they move us to another bit of
land, which we fertilise for them by living on it. The landlords
don’t let us put up toilets because they don’t want anything
permanent on their land, or holes which could be a problem for
cultivation later. But if they catch us defecating in the fields,
they are angry. My daughter was caught and was forced to remove
the faeces with her hands”. (Middle-aged Twa woman,
Nyakabande/Kisoro, Uganda, May 2003).
A large proportion of the Twa are now three or more generations

removed from the forest-based livelihoods that underpinned their
traditional society and culture, and have lost much of their traditional
forest-related knowledge and customary practices. The older generation
regards the hunter-gatherer epoch as a golden era when families could
easily feed themselves and life was easy. These days, most Twa people
eke out a living from marginal subsistence strategies such as casual
wage labour on other peoples’ farms, carrying loads, making pottery
and other crafts, singing and dancing at festivities and begging. In
terms of housing, education, health and incomes, they are one of the
poorest groups in a region that is already very poor. They have received
very little government assistance to help them manage the difficult
adjustment to life outside the forest.
The loss of a forest-based way of life seems to be associated with

social and cultural changes. Originally the Twa enjoyed a certain status
as forest specialists, involved in reciprocal relationships with farmers,
supplying them with useful forest products from an environment that
farmers did not understand, or even feared. This was reinforced by
their role as hunters and trophy-bearers to the kings. As the Twa lost
their forests and became an impoverished group on the fringes of society,
they were increasingly regarded as pariahs, and discrimination and
prejudice against them intensified. This took the form of negative
stereotyping, enforced segregation and denial of their rights; Twa
communities suffered high levels of abuse and physical violence from
neighbouring groups, including cases of rape and murder. Caught
between the vanishing forest world, and settled agrarian society where
it was made clear they did not belong, the Twa came to feel irrelevant,
unvalued and excluded - a ‘forgotten people’ —and acutely aware of
their deprivation. Many Twa communities are highly stressed through
unremitting, severe poverty, prejudice and conflicts from their neighbours
and internal frictions between households, as well as the devastating
impacts of the frequent and ongoing wars in the region, in which Twa
have often been targeted by armed belligerents of all sides.
Traditionally, forest-based “Pygmy” peoples have egalitarian and

fluid social institutions, in which no-one has authority over the others,
and resources are fairly distributed among group members. Women
access forest resources in their own right and not as a consequence
of their relationship with men. Twa societies are still relatively egalitarian,
with women playing a prominent role in community decision-making.
However, as the Twa have settled and taken up farming, they are
absorbing the patriarchal norms of neighbouring farming groups,
including polygamy and tenure systems in which men own the land
and women can only obtain use rights via their husbands.
Women are now the main economic providers in many Twa families,
as well as continuing to be the main carers of children and older people.
They generally can decide how to spend the money they have earned.
However, where men have cleared farm land, their initial high investment
of labour tends to make them feel entitled to control the spending of
money earned by the crop, despite the fact that women did the planting,
weeding and harvesting. The increased reliance on farming among the
Twa may therefore reduce the economic independence of Twa women.
Many Twa women also have to contend with domestic violence and
family neglect as a result of Twa men’s alcohol abuse. Alcoholism
occurs in many indigenous communities that are facing cultural
collapse, and where men are no longer able to carry out their traditional
roles as hunters and respected provider for the family.
Faced with the loss of their ancestral forest lands, and the need to
find a means of survival under changed circumstances, Twa in the
Great Lakes region have expressed a range of different aspirations.
Particularly among communities living near forest areas from which
their forefathers were expelled, the Twa want to have secure access
and use rights to forests, and to maintain their close links with the
forest, but not all wish to resume the hunter-gatherer way of life.
Communities near national parks want a larger share of the revenues
from tourism. Throughout the region, Twa also want to have their own
land for farming as part of their mix of survival strategies.
To press their claims, Twa communities are having to organise

themselves in new ways and develop new forms of representative
institutions, that can advocate and negotiate effectively with government
structures and influential agencies. The new Twa NGOs and community-
based associations, and their support groups in the region, are
campaigning for governments to develop specific policies to address
the particular disadvantages that the Twa face as a result of their ethic
identity. In the absence of laws and policies addressing land rights of
indigenous peoples, Twa organisations are calling for affirmative action
in land allocation for Twa and recognition by governments of the
immense historical injustice through which Twa were deprived of their
forest lands and traditional means of livelihood, forcing them into severe
poverty.
The Twa want to be respected and valued as members of society,

and to freely enjoy their human rights and have equal access to services
like other people. In the process of surviving as a forest people driven
from their forests, and adapting to the harsh social and physical
environment they now find themselves in, some groups and individuals
want to retain their cultural distinctiveness; others want to integrate
with mainstream society. It is their right to freely choose how they
wish to relate to and participate in national society and to make their
own choices about their future. (By: Dorothy Jackson, WRM Bulletin
Nº 87, October 2004).
India: The sedentarisation of the Malapantaram in Kerala
The Malapantaram are a nomadic community numbering about 2000

people who live in the high forests of the Ghat Mountains of south
India. Early writers described them as “wild jungle people” and as
“wandering hillmen of sorts”, and tended to see them as social isolates,
as a survival of some pristine forest culture. But from earliest times
the Malapantaram have a history of contact and intercourse with
surrounding caste communities of the plains and have been a part of
a wider mercantile economy, and are still primarily collectors of
important forest products such as sandalwood, ginger, cardamom,
dammar resin, honey and various medicinal plants. The Malapantaram
thus combine subsistence food gathering, especially of yams, the
hunting of small game — monkey, squirrel, hornbills, chevrotain deer
—by means of muzzle loaders or the help of dogs, and the collection
of what is termed locally as “minor forest produce”. During the main
honey season, March to May, honey collecting becomes their primary

economic activity.
The majority of the Malapantaram are nomadic forest people,

spending most of their life living in forest encampments occupied by
one to four families. These encampments consist of two to four leaf
shelters, made from palm fronds or the leaves of wild plantains. These
camps are temporary; people reside in a particular locality only for
about a week, before moving elsewhere.
The Malapantaram see themselves and are described by outsiders

as kattumanushyar —“forest people”— for they closely identify with
the forest, which is not only a source of livelihood, but also an
environment where they can sustain a degree of cultural autonomy
and social independence. They thus tend to live and constantly move
at the margins of the forest, enabling them to engage easily in market
transactions —usually involving a kind of contractual barter— while at
the same time being able to avoid the control, harassment and
disparagement —even violence— which they generally experience from
government officials, traders and local peasant communities. The forest
for the Malapantaram is thus not only a home: it is a place where they
can always retreat to avoid the imposition of outsiders.
With the establishment of colonial rule and the Travancore state,

the forested hills of the Ghats became forest reserves under the
jurisdiction of the forest department. In 1911 rules were drawn up for
the “Treatment and Management of Hillmen” and these stipulated that
tribal people like the Malapantaram were to be under the control of the
forestry department and to be located in permanent settlements. The
Malapantaram were thus seen as essentially “wards” of the forestry
department and denied any land rights —the forests being seen as
essentially belonging to the state. After independence the Malapantaram
came under the jurisdiction of the Harijan Welfare Department, and
efforts have been made to promote the welfare of the community through
the establishment of schools and health centres, and through efforts
to “settle” them and induce them to adopt agriculture. As elsewhere, a
“nomadic” life style and a foraging existence was derogated by the
state officials, and efforts to “uplift” the Malapantaram have centred on
the establishment of “settlements” —it was described as a “colonization
scheme”— and its primary aim was to transform the Malapantaram

economy into one of permanent agriculture. The scheme proved to be
a singular failure, for the land allotted to the Malapantaram was largely
taken over by local traders from a nearby village. It seems that the
Malapantaram were extremely reluctant to take up agriculture, and
thus sever the links that bind them to the forest —the environment with
which they so powerfully identify and know is their only really safe
haven. (By: Brian Morris, WRM Bulletin Nº 87, October 2004).
Papua New Guinea: First contact in a clash of world

views
When Australians took control, at the end of the first world war, of the
German colony of New Guinea, under a mandate from the League of
Nations to protect the native peoples, it was thought that New Guinea
had only a sparse population, mostly along the coast. The mountainous
interior, it was believed, was a virtually empty and impenetrable jumble
of rain-soaked hills. However, it is now clear that the highland valleys of
New Guinea have long been among the most densely settled agricultural
areas in the world.
The highland valleys of Papua New Guinea were first contacted by

Australians in the 1930s and were found to be inhabited by over a
million people, made up of several hundred different ethnic groups,
who had been growing their vegetable staples and raising their pigs in
the fertile upland soils for over nine thousand years. Although these
peoples traded, through many intermediaries, with the coast, the
highlanders were equally unaware of what lay beyond their territories.
As highlander Gerigl Gande recalled in the 1980s: ‘we only knew the
people who lived immediately around us. For example the Naugla,
they were our enemies and we couldn’t go past them. So we knew
nothing of what was beyond. We thought no one existed apart from
ourselves and our enemies.’ The mutual astonishment and
incomprehension of these two cultures, when they first met, was almost
complete.
Australian officials and miners only became aware of these populated

highlands in 1930, when the adventurer, Michael Leahy, first marched
up into the hills from the east coast, in search of gold. The Mandated
Territory was viewed by Australians as a business proposition, the

local men were referred to as ‘boys’ and the isolated groups in the
interior pejoratively called ‘bush kanakas’ in pidgin. The indigenous
peoples were widely considered treacherous, bloodthirsty savages,
remnants of an inferior race doomed to extinction. As one settler noted
‘the natives of this Territory are mean-souled, thieving rotters, and
education only gives them added cunning’.
The miners pushed deep into the interior, travelling light and living
off the land. They demanded food from the native people, paid for with
metal tools and prized sea-shells, to keep their expeditions on the
move. In their haste to get to the goldfield they dreamed of, they sparked
confusion and conflicts. When warriors barred their path with arrows
and threats, rather than return to the coast, the miners used guns to
deadly effect to blast a path through to their goals. Sure that their
technological superiority was, equally, evidence of their moral
supremacy, it never occurred to the miners that what they were doing
was wrong, much less that the local people might have their own reasons
and interests for choosing to develop their interactions differently.
The gulf of incomprehension was wide on both sides. Trying to

make sense of these strangely apparelled, pale skinned visitors, the
highlanders, for the large part, assumed that they were ancestral spirits,
either returning lost relatives coming from the east where the dead
were thought to dwell or else ambiguous, even evil, mythic beings from
the heavens. Recalls Gopu Ataiamelahu of Gama Village near Goroka:
“I asked myself, who are these people? They must be somebody

from the heavens. Have they come to kill us or what? We
wondered if this could be the end of us and it gave us a feeling
of sorrow. We said, ‘we must not touch them’. We were terribly
frightened.”
Remembers another:
“They smelt so differently, these strange people. We thought it

would kill us, so we covered our noses with the leaves from a
special bush that grows near cucumbers. It had a particularly
nice smell and it covered up theirs.”
Once it became widely known that the strange beings carried untold
wealth with them, many communities wanted their visitors to stay with
them and not carry on through to the lands of their rivals and enemies.
Misunderstandings were almost inevitable. A typical conflict occurred in
1933, as the miners accompanied by a colonial officer, tried to push
through to Mount Hagen. Ndika Nikints recalls the situation.
“The Yamka and Kuklika and all the people around us were
making a lot of noise, shouting and calling out war cries. They
were saying they wanted to take everything from the white men.
Some people snatched things from the carriers, like tins and
trade goods. Then Kiap Taylor [the colonial officer] broke this
thing he was carrying and before we knew anything we heard it
crack. Everything happened at once. Everyone was pissing and
shitting themselves in terror. Mother! Father! I was horrified. I
wanted to run away… the muskets got the people —their
stomachs came out, their heads came off. Three men were
killed and one was wounded… I said ‘Oh, Mother!’ but that
didn’t help. I breathed deeply, but that didn’t help. I was really
desperate. Why did I come here? I should never have come.
We thought it was lightning that was eating people up. What
was this strange thing, something that had come down from
the sky to eat us up? What’s happening? What’s happening?”
This pattern of mutual incomprehension leading to violence and

terror was to be repeated over and over again whenever the colonial
officers and miners felt obliged to push through previously uncontacted
areas to reach their self-ordained objectives. Another well-documented
case comes from later in the 1930s when a colonial patrol, aimed at
making a reconnaissance up the Strickland River and through the
highlands north of Lake Kutubu, pushed through the lands of six different
and previously uncontacted peoples. Carrying only enough supplies
for one month’s travel, for a journey that in the end took them more
than five, they were soon obliged to trade with the local communities,
who sought to avoid all contact with the strangers.
Coming first into the lands of the Etoro people, the patrol emerged
suddenly from the forests into full view of one community. ‘We jumped
with surprise’ recounts one elder ‘No one had seen anything like this
before or knew what it was. When we saw the clothes of the strangers,
we thought they were like people you see in a dream: “these must be
spirit people coming openly, in plain sight” ’. When these spirits
approached them, the Etoro were even more dismayed and the more
insistent the spirits were in offering gifts the more alarmed the Etoro
became. The Etoro were convinced that if they accepted any gifts they
would then be obligated to the unknown world of the spirits, thus bringing
together two realms that should remain separate, lest the world become
unmade and everybody die. Shortly after, in a confused encounter, one
of the Etoro was shot and killed, confirming the Etoro in their view
about who these beings were.
Further along the trail that they followed, the patrol came upon
taboo signs, clear indications that the local people did not want the
strangers to pass. The patrol pushed on regardless and, coming upon
an old woman, pressed her with gifts of beads. When she returned to
her own people, who were hiding in the forest, and showed them the
gifts they were thrown into even greater dismay, imagining that the
whole world would collapse to its origin point if the world of humans
and spirits was not kept apart. Their consternation was even greater
when they returned to their huts and found gifts of cloth, axes and
machetes hanging from the rafters. Unsure what might happen if they
touched them they were left hanging there. ‘What are these things?
Why don’t you take them down?’ asked a visitor from a nearly village.
‘We are afraid. Who knows where these things are from. Perhaps they
are from the Origin Time’.
The further on the patrol went the more often it had to resort to
violence to secure food. In one encounter with the Wola, the patrol
found itself in a narrow defile and fighting broke out after further
miscommunication and cultural incomprehension. The devastating rifle
fire and close quarter shooting with service revolvers killed and wounded
over fourteen Wola. Recalls Leda:
“They shot my cross-cousin Huruwumb, and I went to see him.

You could see his liver exposed. They kept sending me to fetch
water for him to drink because he was thirsty. Back and forth,
I kept going to fetch water for him. He lived in agony for three
days. On the fourth day he died.”
One of the Wola women, Tensgay, remembers other gruesome

wounds:
“Kal Aenknais had his thighs and lower torso smashed.

Completely pulverised here and here. He kept groaning ‘Oh!
Ah!’. I saw him. He died later. Wounded in the guts he was. His
intestines were punctured. When he was given water to drink,
to cool him off, it came spurting out of the holes in his body.
Then there was Obil. His eyes were blown clean out of his
head. When they landed on the path they wriggled around and
around for ages. He died too. And then there was that poor
blighter —aah— whose entrails were shot out. His intestines
and stomach were blasted right out of his body…”
After the massacre, the white officers sent the coastal police men
to get food from the village. Coming on the village hut they found the
women and children cowering inside. Tengsay recalls the scene:
“We were terrified… They tore open the door of our house and
demanded everything. Puliym’s mother released the pigs one at
a time and drove them out of the door to them waiting outside…
They tore off the front of the house, attacked it with axes and
bushknives… They took the pigs one at a time and shot them
outside. After they killed them they singed off the bristles over a
fire made from the wood torn from our house. Then they butchered
them ready to carry off… After they had killed and prepared the
pigs they turned on us. We didn’t see well what was going on.
We were cowering inside. They returned and stood there [about
three metres away] and fired their guns into the house. They
shot Hiyt Ibiziym, Bat Maemuw, my sister, Ndin, Maeniy and me.
That’s six of us… We were so frightened that we were all dizzy
and faint… We slumped in a sort of stupefied state. Who was
there to bandage our wounds with moss and levaes?… we just
slumped indoors. We didn’t think anything. All we felt was terror
and dizziness. I was sort of senseless… Well, they didn’t rape
any women. That was done by later patrols, when they not only
stole our pigs but our women too, and broke into our houses and
smashed up our possessions, like our bows and things. They
even excreted in our fireplaces”.
The task of the colonial authorities in the Mandated Territory of New

Guinea, as commanded by the League of Nations, was to protect the
native peoples. Accordingly, the highlands were declared a ‘controlled
area’ into which access was only allowed to those with permits. There
were strict regulations, on paper, about what those with permits could
do if they entered the controlled area. They must not enter native villages;
not allow their carriers (coastal porters) to trade with the local people
without supervision; and ensure that all campsites were provided with
pit latrines to avoid contamination of local waters. Arms were only to
be used as a last resort, in self defense. However, not only did the
colonial power lack the resources and manpower to control access
effectively, they also wanted to encourage economic development in
the interior. Permits to enter the ‘controlled areas’ were thus issued to
miners, and the local officials were themselves in two minds about the
appropriateness of the regulations.
Many of the colonials were, however, clear in their minds that, if

there was to be ‘development’, the way of life of the native people
would have to change. As one editorial in the “Rabaul Times” on 25
September 1936 noted:
“One of the greatest contributing factors to the unsatisfactory

services rendered by native labourers in this country is their
economic independence. For it must not be forgotten that every
native is a landed proprietor, and nature has endowed New Guinea
with a prolific soil, which provides adequate sustenance for a
minimum of labour. Dismissal from employment, if he fails to
carry out his duties, holds no terrors for the New Guinean native.
It is the shadow of the sack, hovering over the white employee,
which urges him to render service. Unless and until our natives
reach such a stage of development that they must work to
obtain sustenance or a livelihood, they will never make suitable
indentured labour for the average white resident”.
From this point of view, the enforced contacts and integration of the
highlanders into the modern world, were necessary steps to achieve a
kind of ‘development’. A certain amount of bloodshed could then be
justified as an inevitable part of the process of social change. Perhaps,

if those in the outside world hadn’t been in such a hurry and could
better appreciate that people in other worlds have different priorities
and beliefs, things might have been different. (By: Marcus Colchester,

The Mumbai - Porto Alegre Forest Initiative (2005)
Background
A number of participants at the World Social Forum 2004 met in

Mumbai and believing that forest issues are in essence social and
political and that forest communities are increasingly affected by
globalization —and new forms of trade and economic liberalization
that comes in its way— agreed on the need to create a global movement
to ensure forest conservation and peoples’ rights over forests. The
principles on which the movement would be based were agreed upon
and circulated by the groups as the Mumbai Forest Initiative - Statement
of Principles.
A year later the group and some other participants of the World
Social Forum 2005 met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, reviewed and revised
the Mumbai Forest Initiative. The result is the Mumbai - Porto Alegre
Forest Initiative, with the following principles:
1. Indigenous peoples and other forest dependent communities living

in and using forests for their survival needs are the true protectors and
governors of these forests and enjoy inalienable rights over forests.
2.. The protection and conservation of forests demand that their

rights be ensured.
3. The institutional mechanisms for the social control by forest

peoples —including indigenous peoples and other forest dependent
communities— over forests will evolve according to the socio-ecological
and economic needs of the communities and will take separate shapes
according to the varied cultural profiles of the communities in various
parts of the world.
4. The historical role and positive contribution of women in the

governance and nurturing of forests must be recognised and their full
participation in decision making must be ensured.
5. Governments must ensure an enabling environment for the

community governance of forests.
6. Governments must ensure that legislation and policies comply

with the above principles.
7. Society at large benefiting from the broad range of products and

services provided by forests must support communities in their efforts
to govern and conserve forests.
8. NGOs and other civil society organizations at national and

international level committed to the conservation of forests and to the
protection of forest peoples’ rights should have a supportive role to
peoples’ initiatives to govern the forest and to be accountable to them.
9. We oppose NGOs and other civil society organizations involved

in activities affecting or undermining forest peoples rights and interests.
10. Industrial logging and plantations, and so-called development

and conservation projects which lead to deforestation and forest
degradation and to the displacement of forest communities and
livelihoods, cannot be allowed.
11 . We oppose any involvement of the World Bank, IMF, WTO and

other International Financial Institutions in policies and projects than
can affect forests and forest peoples.
12. The commodification of nature and forests by corporations,

governments, international institutions and some NGOs is not
acceptable.
This statement of principles is intended to contribute towards

initiating a global process of solidarity building among movements,
groups and individuals working on forest issues, at local, national and
international levels. We appeal to all of you join this process.
Porto Alegre, 30 January 2005.

World Rainforest Movement, Delhi Forum, National Forum of Forest

People and Forest Workers of India, Jharkhand/Save the Forest
Movement (India), New Trade Union Initiative (India), WALHI/Friends of
the Earth (Indonesia), Tebtebba Foundation (Phillipines), Coecoceiba /
Friends of the Earth (Costa Rica), Censat Agua-Viva (Colombia), Red
Alerta Contra o Deserto Verde (Brasil), FASE (Brasil), Sobrevivencia
(Paraguay), International Forum on Globalization (USA), Acción
Ecológica/Oilwatch (Ecuador).
Closing Statement of the International Indigenous

Forum on Biodiversity
I thank you Mr. President for the opportunity to address the Parties of
the Convention and other delegates present. In the name of the
International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, we want the reiterate
our will to continue working together with Parties to achieve the objectives
of the Convention. Considering that most of the world’s biological
diversity is in our lands and waters, the need for a just implementation
of this Convention is urgent, and requires greater participation of the
actors directly involved in the conservation and sustainable use of
biodiversity. As rights holders, we hope we will continue building just
frameworks for collaboration and working together.
Mr. President, the work of the International Indigenous Forum on

Biodiversity within the CBD process has a clear spirit of cooperation.
However, to make this collaboration effective the full recognition of our
rights as Indigenous Peoples is essential. We believe that recognition
is an essential prerequisite to working together, reducing biodiversity
loss and fostering sustainable development to achieve the millennium
development goals.
States, in the responsible exercise of their national sovereignty,

must fully recognize and respect the inherent right of Indigenous
peoples. Recognition and respect for our rights must be included in all
the programs of work of the Convention. We followed with great concern
the attempt by New Zealand to delete text that specifically recognizes
the land and water rights of Indigenous Peoples —particularly in light
of the obligations of the Treaty of Waitangi. This attempt was not
acceptable in a United Nations forum that should protect the human

and political rights of Indigenous Peoples. On the other hand we want
to express our gratitude to the Parties who have shown respect for
their obligations and commitments to Indigenous Peoples.
Indigenous Peoples remain deeply concerned about the proposed

international regime on access and benefit sharing. Indigenous peoples
are rights holders with inherent, proprietary, and inalienable rights to
our Indigenous knowledge and biological resources. Genetic resources
and traditional knowledge are inextricably linked. We have consistently
stated that —and we are not participating in these discussions to
facilitate access to our traditional knowledge nor the genetic resources
in our territories. Rather, we participate to ensure our rights are
recognized and respected by the Parties in the development of the
proposed regime. Further, the international regime must be considered
consistent with international human rights laws and standards.
We reaffirm that current intellectual property rights regimes are

inadequate and inappropriate to protect our collective knowledge and
resources because such regimes are monopolistic and favour the
privatization of our biocultural resources by transnational companies
and only protect indivual intellectual property rights. During the last
few years we have witnessed the expropriation of our collective
resources, and the loss of locally sustainable opportunities due to the
increase of biopiracy. Our demand that our rights over our knowledge,
practices and resources be upheld is based on our desire to use this
knowledge in favour of autonomous development of our communities.
Therefore, indigenous customary law must be the fundamental element
of any sui generis regime for the protection of traditional knowledge.
Mr President, we request that the parties ensure the continuation

of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Article 8(j) and related
provisions. The continuity of this working group is fundamental not
only to guarantee the full and effective participation of indigenous
peoples in the work of this convention, but also to resolve the issues
that directly affect our peoples, such as the CBD Guidelines on
Biodiversity and Tourism Development, amongst others. In relation to
the guidelines, we especially request that these be reviewed by the
Working Group on Article 8(j) in its next meeting, taking into account
the recommendations of the International Indigenous Leadership
Gathering on Sustainable Tourism, which will be held in September
2005 in British Columbia, Canada.
Indigenous peoples territories have been traditionally managed

according to the principles of conservation and the sustainable use of
biodiversity. The establishment of regional, sub-regional and national
protected areas systems and ecological networks should not result in
forced resettlement, extinguishment or breach of our rights to our
territories. Protected areas must be established in accordance with
the principle of free prior informed consent.
We would also like to note that marine and coastal protected

areas have damaged the lives and territories of indigenous peoples.
Most coastal areas are, or have been in the past, managed under
indigenous peoples’ traditional marine tenure regimes, with
management systems based on indigenous peoples’ knowledge and
authorities.
All of the CBD work programmes must guarantee the full and effective
participation of indigenous peoples, especially indigenous women, with
due attention to the recognition, protection and strengthening of our
rights and customary use relating to resource management in dry and
arid lands, marine and coastal waters, inland waters, forests, mountains
and islands.
To conclude, Mr President, we reaffirm our fundamental rights of

self-determination and will carry out ourpeoples’ historical mandate to
care for, conserve and preserve our Mother Earth. Parties must uphold
our land rights and the right to control access to, and use of, our
resources and knowledge. All of us, Parties, Indigenous Peoples and
future generations will only survive if we are able to halt the excessive
exploitation of the world´s biodiversity resources.
Thank you very much. (Closing Statement, Seventh Conference of

the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, 20 February, 2004).
4
Tiohtiá: ke* Declaration
“We the representatives of Indigenous Peoples have traveled from

the four directions of our sacred Mother Earth to participate in the 11th
Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 11) and 1st Session of
the Meetings of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (MOP 1) of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
We would like to recognize the work and support given to us by the

late and distinguished Ms. Joke Weller-Hunter, who helped advance
our participation as Indigenous Peoples in this important process.
We are here to present our voices to the Parties of the Conference

on matters that concern our special knowledge and relationship with
Mother Earth, as well as the survival of our communities and of the
world. Our knowledge and relationship are sacred and must be honoured
and protected. It is essential that the contributions of our age-old
Indigenous Knowledge Systems to the greater body of climate sciences
are respected and given equal recognition.
We reaffirm our inherent rights over our territories, lands and

resouces. Our cosmovision strongly binds biological diversity, cultural
and spiritual identity and unites our peoples with our ancestral territories.
This is the fundamental basis for our existence, health and livelihoods
which are being disproportionately threatened and destroyed by climate
change and its consequences. Indigneous Peoples require a human
rights based approach in addressing climate change.
It is imperative that formal and permanent mechanisms are

established to ensure the meaningful participation of Indigenous
Peoples. We have consistently emphasized the need to be given a
space for full, direct and active participation within the official discussions
of the UNFCCC meetings.
The modalities and procedures for activities under the Clean

Development Mechanisms (CDM) do not respect and guarantee our
4
Tiohtiá:ke is the Mohawk word for the area called Montreal
right to lands, territories, and self-determination. CDM and Sinks

projects do not contribute to climate change mitigation and sustainable
development.
The burning of oil, gas, and coal, as fossil fuels, is the primary
source of human-induced climate change. Indigenous Peoples have
experienced systematic and repeated violations by oil, gas, mining
and energy industries infringing on our inherent right to protect our
traditional lands.
We reaffirm previous Indigenous climate declarations. We also

reaffirm the international provisions already acknowledged in other
international instruments and mechanisms that ensure our participation
and contribution within the discussions.
During the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

(1995-2004), the United Nations has clearly recognized our rights to
participate in the UN processes through the establishment of the UN
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII). We remind the
Parties to the Conference that the “the vital role of Indigenous Peoples
in sustainable development” was affirmed by the political declaration of
the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, 2002
in paragraph 25.
We call upon the members of the 11th Session of the Conference

of the Parties (COP 11) and the 1st Session of the Meetings of the
Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (MOP 1) of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change the following:
• Provide the necessary support to Indigenous Peoples from

developing and developed countries for our full and effective
participation in all levels of discussion, decision-making and
implementation, and ensure that the necessary funding be
provided to guarantee such participation and strengthen our
capacities.
• Include ‘Indigenous Peoples and climate change’ as a permanent

item in the agenda of the COP/MOP, and of the Subsidiary Bodies
meetings with specific reference to issues including disparities
and vulnerability of impact, mitigation, adaptation, poverty, social

and cultural impact, and other climate change related issues.
• Establish in-session workshops, including Indigenous experts

meetings, in the five years action program of the SBSTA that
facilitates the discussion of the effects of climate change on
Indigenous Peoples. This workshop will discuss themes such
as: specific impacts on fragile and vulnerable ecosystems, the
interconnection between climate change and poverty, short and
long term effects of the CDM, knowledge and traditional practices
such as: weather forecasting capacity, participation in the
evaluations of the impacts, adaptation mechanisms, mutual
learning about climate change and sustainable development.
• Include Indigenous Peoples as a permanent item in the agenda

of the Meetings of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (MOP) with
specific reference to disparities, successes and impact in the
implementation of modalities, procedures and mechanisms for
evaluation and assessment of the Kyoto Protocol and its Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI)
initiatives. Indigenous experts should be consistently involved in
the monitoring, evaluation, and impact assessment of all
interventions in or affecting Indigenous territories.
• All development projects within Indigenous ancestral territories

must respect our fundamental rights to lands, waters, territories,
self-determination and ensure our right to our free, prior and
informed consent.
• Establish a process that works towards the full phase-out of

fossil fuels, with a just transition to sustainable jobs, energy
and environment. We are against the expansion of and new
exploration for the extraction of oil, natural gas and coal within
and near Indigenous lands, especially in pristine and sensitive
areas, as well as environmentally, socially, culturally, historically
and spiritually significant areas. We demand that extractive
industries adhere to the Akwe:kon voluntary guidelines adopted
by the Convention on Biological Diversity.
• Support the creation and adequate financing of the Adaptation

Fund to be accessed by Indigenous Peoples to address the
potential and actual impacts of climate change in a manner
compatible with our Traditional Knowledge Systems, customs,
culture, lifestyles and aspirations.
• Include Indigenous Peoples in UNFCCC capacity building

initiatives and propose that special capacity building be
undertaken for Indigenous Peoples. Such capacity building
should strengthen our participation in climate change
negotiations.
• Implement Climate Impact Assessments which take into

account Indigenous Knowledge Systems, culture, social values,
spirituality and ecosystems; as well as the full and equal
participation of Indigenous Peoples in all aspects and stages of
the assessment.
Recognizing all of the above, we call upon the Parties to the

UNFCCC to recognize that through the protection and promotion of
Indigenous Peoples rights and through recognizing and integrating our
dynamic and holistic visions, we are securing not only our future, but
the future of humanity and social and environmental justice for all.
We once again remind you that one is only as healthy as the air we
breathe, the water that we quench our thirst with each day, and the
earth in which we plant our seeds to have the various products of
sustenance for the duration of our journey here on Mother Earth.”
Signatories:
Mr. Parshuram Tamang, International Alliance Indigenous and Tribal

Peoples of the Tropical Forest
Mr. Marcial Arias, Fundacion para la Promocion del Conocimiento
Indigena - Panama
Mr. Ian Aujare,Zazao Environmental Righs Organizations - Solomon
Island
Mr. Johnson Cerda, Asociacion Indigena de Limoncocha - Ecuador
Mr. Crescencio Resendiz Hernandez, International Alliance

Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forest
Mr. Tom Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network
Mr. Serge Ashini Goupil, Sustainable Development Institute
Assembly of First Nations Quebec and Labrador
Mr. Clayton Thomas-Muller, Native Energy Campaign, Indigenous
Environmental Network
Ms Jihan Gearon, Indigenous Youth of the Climate Justice Corps
Ms. Heather Milton-Lightning, Youth Network, Indigenous
Environmental Network
Ms. Anna Pinto, Centre for Organisation Research and Education
Ms. Konwaiatanonwes Lynn Jacobs, Kahnawake Environment
Protection Office
(International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change

Statement to the State Parties of the COP 11/MOP 1 of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - UNFCCC;
Tiohtiá:ke, Kanien’’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Traditional Territory, Canada, 28
November – December 09, 2005)
For those who would like to sign on, please send your full name
and organization to [email protected]
The Vth World Parks Congress: Parks for people or

parks for business?
Just prior to the Vth World Parks Congress, a consortium of mining,

oil and gas companies announced that they would accept that all World
Heritage Sites were off limits to further exploitation. However, during
the Congress, representatives of the extractive industries could not be
persuaded to accept the Amman Recommendation passed by the World
Conservation Congress in Amman in 2000, which called for an end to
oil, mining and gas extraction from all protected areas in IUCN categories
I, II, III and IV (‘strict nature reserves’, ‘wilderness areas’, ‘national
parks’, ‘natural monuments’ and ‘habitat management areas’).
Controversy over the relationship between extractive industries and

protected areas has rumbled on since that date. The IUCN Secretariat
announced in the context of the World Summit on Sustainable
Development that it was developing a new ‘partnership’ with the extractive

industries. The language had to be toned down and the IUCN now
speaks of being engaged in a ‘dialogue’ with the industries. Critics
have condemned the ‘dialogue’ as a betrayal of conservation standards,
which just serves the companies to rehabilitate their dirty image,
tarnished by a trail of oil leaks, tanker wrecks, tailings dam bursts,
cyanide and mercury spills, ruined landscapes, despoiled river
systems, toxic waste dumps, polluted ecosystems, violated human
rights and shattered livelihoods.
Among the most outspoken critics of industry at the Congress were

indigenous peoples. About 150 representatives of indigenous peoples
from over 60 countries attended the Congress to press for a recognition
of their rights. Their strong presence was notably effective and influenced
all the main outcomes from the Congress. The ‘Durban Accord’, the
consensus document of the whole Congress, announces that the World
Parks Congress has accepted a ‘new paradigm’ for protected areas
‘integrating them equitably with the interests of all affected people.’
The Accord celebrates the conservation successes of indigenous

peoples. It expresses concern at the lack of recognition, protection
and respect given to these efforts. It notes that the costs of protected
areas are often borne by local communities. It urges commitment to
involve indigenous peoples in establishing and managing protected
areas and participate in decision-making on a fair and equitable basis
in full respect of their human and social rights. The Accord calls on all
countries to ‘strictly eliminate resettlement of indigenous peoples and
local communities and the involuntary sedentarisation of mobile
indigenous peoples without prior, informed consent.’ The Accord also
calls for the creation of ‘trans-boundary protected areas for communities
separated by national borders, including corridors of connectivity for
mobile indigenous peoples who have traditionally migrated across
borders.’ National authorities are encouraged to carry out ‘reviews of
conservation initiatives including innovative and traditional/customary
governance types…’ Likewise protected area authorities are encouraged
to ‘promote the conditions and ensure the means for the effective
engagement of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and other local
stakeholders in conservation. The focus of attention should be on
building the capacity of communities to engage effectively.’
Notwithstanding these important and progressive gains, it was

money that remained a dominating sub-theme during the Congress.
The Congress reiterated the perennial call, echoing statements at

the Rio Summit and WSSD, for industrialized countries to provide
‘substantial new and additional financial resources’ to developing
countries to help cover the costs of conservation. But, as if knowing
that this approach was unlikely to leverage more than a minimal amount
of extra funds, the Congress also advocated the development of market
mechanisms to pay for the recurrent costs of protected area
management. For example, a study presented by the WWF and IUCN
demonstrated that protected areas contribute water to a very large
number of the world’s cities and hydropower stations and proposed
that a portion of fees paid for this water and electricity should be used
to cover the parks’ costs. To institutionalise this approach, the Congress
proposed that the World Bank’s ‘Global Environment Facility’ and
governments should develop ‘collaborative partnerships with the private
sector’ as an alternative way of securing funding for parks. For many,
eco-tourism remains the great white hope for achieving the holy grail of
financial sustainability.
One side-event at the Congress, held in the luxurious surroundings

of the Durban Hilton —doubtfully a model of sustainable development—
examined ways of promoting responsible tourism and certifying its
sustainability. Yet sceptics were left wondering if making future
conservation dependent on the disposable income of the world’s globe-
trotting consumerist elite was not self-defeating —like sawing off the
branch on which you are sitting.
Indigenous peoples also expressed misgivings about this approach.

In the final plenary, Jannie Lasimbang of the Asia Indigenous Peoples
Pact, told the Congress that: ‘Much of this Congress has been focused
on the challenge of financing the costs of establishing and managing
protected areas. Protected areas have been made into big business
and the danger is that this business is both unsustainable and may
further marginalize us, indigenous peoples. Moreover, our experience
on the ground is that much of this money is wasted. Funds would be
better spent protecting our rights and involving us directly rather than
relying on outside agencies often from overseas.’ She also criticised
the way tourism increasingly relies on exotic images of indigenous

peoples as lures to draw in the curious. ‘The use of the image of our
cultures as folklore, or as merchandising, hurts and degrades us.
Sometimes our ancestors’ culture is undermined while the living
indigenous peoples are marginalized and impoverished. These attitudes
do not help to revalidate our millennial cultures.’ (By: Marcus Colchester,
The GEF and Indigenous Peoples: some findings of a

recent critical study
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is the main intergovernmental

mechanism for addressing “global” environmental problems, including
the loss of biodiversity. It is the main vehicle for funding the United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Since its formation
in 1991, forest-related projects have accounted for between 30 and
50% of the GEF’s annual spending on conservation. By June 2003,
the GEF had allocated $778 million USD in grants for 150 forest
conservation projects. Most of these projects have been implemented
by the World Bank and most have supported the establishment or
expansion of protected areas, which remain the “cornerstone” of GEF
support to biodiversity conservation. Many of these GEF-assisted
projects have affected lands traditionally occupied and used by
indigenous peoples. Yet indigenous peoples have repeatedly claimed
that these conservation schemes often fail to respect the rights of
indigenous peoples and undermine their traditional livelihoods.
Drawing on a series of past, recent and ongoing case studies of

GEF full-size conservation and sustainable use projects (in Peru,
Guyana, Mexico, Panama, Cameroon, Uganda, India, Philippines, and
Bangladesh) a recent study completed by the Forest Peoples
Programme has sought to examine these problems. The study finds
that though progress has been made in some quarters, especially
through the GEF’s Small Grants Programme, some GEF conservation
projects and programmes continue to struggle to respect the rights
and livelihoods of indigenous communities.
Key findings are that GEF projects still tend to treat indigenous
peoples as “beneficiaries” rather than rights holders. GEF biodiversity
projects also finance the legal establishment of protected areas without

first ensuring mechanisms are in place to secure the free, prior informed
consent of affected indigenous communities. Some GEF projects have
resulted in the curtailment of livelihoods, forced relocation and increased
enforcement of anti-people laws and exclusionary conservation policies,
particularly in GEF projects in Africa and Asia. Other disturbing findings
are that GEF projects fail to properly involve affected communities in
project design and do not pinpoint critical legal, rights and cultural
issues in social assessments. The study has also found that:
• Flawed “alternative” livelihood interventions sometimes leave

affected families and communities worse off, less secure and
more dependent on the market and wage labour
• Full-size and medium-sized grants are still often considered to
be top down interventions by government agencies or big
international conservation NGOs
• Indigenous peoples do not enjoy effective participation in decision-
making in GEF projects, even in some projects targeting
indigenous peoples
• Indigenous communities are not always aware of GEF
involvement in projects that affect them
• Some projects targeting indigenous peoples do not implement
progressive components set out in grant agreements or project
plans e.g., protection of land rights, protection of and respect for
traditional knowledge
• Projects often introduce new project-level institutions that fail to
build on or may even undermine local traditional institutions and
decision-making structures.
An analysis of GEF governance, accountability and policies argues

that many of the ongoing problems with GEF projects can be partly
traced to an out-of-date and incomplete framework for GEF policy
standards and to faults in implementation and monitoring mechanisms.
In this regard, it is stressed that implementing agencies such as the
World Bank continue to suffer from systemic failures in the
implementation of their own mandatory social and environmental
policies -an ongoing problem that has been found by recent official
reviews of the Bank’s implementation of its Indigenous Peoples Policy
(OD4.20).
It is noted that there are signs that the GEF is seeking to respond
to some of the above criticisms. For example, it has launched a review
of local benefits in GEF projects (due to be published in 2005) and now
plans to develop social and participation indicators. In Latin America,
the GEF is starting to support community conservation areas and a
few medium-sized projects are beginning to be prepared and
implemented by indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, such progressive
projects still tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Crucially,
the study shows that even GEF-World Bank projects that are intended
to “do good” can end up doing harm where project governance,
implementation and participation mechanisms fail on the ground [e.g.,
Indigenous Management of Protected Areas in the Amazon Project -
PIMA (Peru)].
Indigenous organisations and support NGOs stress that a piecemeal

approach to indigenous peoples in GEF projects is not sufficient: what
is needed is a root and branch overhaul of GEF policies and oversight
procedures. As one indigenous spokesperson told a meeting with the
GEF on the margins of CBD COP VII:
“We welcome the GEF’s growing support for indigenous conservation

areas in some parts of Latin America. But the questions remain: how
will the GEF ensure that all its conservation projects recognise and
respect our rights in across all continents where it works? For example,
we want to know how GEF policies and projects will respect the right
of indigenous peoples to free prior and informed consent?” [Esther
Camac, February 2004]
The final part of the study calls on the GEF to adopt a rights-based
approach, strengthen its own implementation and accountability
mechanisms, and adopt a specific mandatory policy on Indigenous
Peoples. At the same time, it is recommended that the GEF update all
its biodiversity policies to ensure they are fully consistent with
international standards on indigenous peoples and conservation
including standards established under the CBD and best practice agreed
in the 2003 IUCN Durban Action Plan and Recommendations. (By:
Tom Griffiths, WRM Bulletin Nº 93, April 2005).
REFERENCES
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
GENERAL ARTICLES
Capturing Carbon: Dilemmas for forest peoples

- By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme, 12 July 2001,
Stopping human rights abuses is key to solving forest crisis

- The report can be downloaded shortly from Fern’s website:
www.fern.org Hard copies can be ordered from: [email protected]
Wilderness parks or Community conservation?

- By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail:
[email protected] . For extensive case studies and
other documentation on this subject see www.forestpeoples.org.
See also www.danadeclaration.org
Indigenous peoples and Climate negotiations

- By: D. Roy Laifungbam, CORE, Manipur, India Member,
Committee on Indigenous Issues, 23 June 2003, edited and sent
by Jutta Kill, SinksWatch, e-mail: [email protected]
Community view from UNFF: Interview with Freddy Molina,

ACICAFOC
- By: Jessica Dempsey. For more information on ACICAFOC, see
http://www.acicafoc.net/
AFRICA
Cameroon: Bagyeli struggling to be heard

- By: John Nelson, Forest Peoples Programme,
Kenyan Indigenous group faces October 1 Court date

- By: Bobson Wong, Digital Freedom Network,
Rwanda: Dispossessed Twa people press for recognition

- By: Dorothy Jackson, Forest Peoples Programme,
Uganda: The Batwa organize to reassert their rights

- By: Penninah Zaninka, e-mail: [email protected] and
Justin Kenrick, e-mail: [email protected]
AMERICAS
Guyana: Empowerment of indigenous peoples through

participatory mapping
- By: Tom Griffiths, Forest Peoples Programme,
Peru: Camisea gas project undermines the rights of

indigenous peoples
- By: Conrad Feather, Shinai Serjali, e-mail: [email protected] .
For more information on the Nahua/Kugapakori reserve and its
indigenous peoples please visit: http://www.serjali.org and
http://www.onr.com/cabeceras/
Suriname: Chinese logging companies and tribal rights

- By: Fergus MacKay, Coordinator, Legal and Human Rights
Programme, Forest Peoples Programme,
Venezuela: Mapping a way forward

- By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme,
ASIA
Indonesia: The struggle for self-governance

Laos: The impact of the Nam Theun 2 dam on indigenous

peoples
- By: Chris Lang, e-mail: [email protected]
Philippines: Indigenous peoples and the Convention on

Biological Diversity
- By: Maurizio Farhan Ferrari, Forest Peoples Programme,
Russia: Mapping Evenki lands in Central Siberia

- By: David G. Anderson, Forest Peoples Programme,
II) INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN VOLUNTARY ISOLATION
The Indigenous peoples’ right to live in voluntary isolation

- By: Ricardo Carrere, WRM, e-mail: [email protected]
AFRICA
Cameroon: Does isolation still protect forest communities?

- By: John Nelson, Forest Peoples Programme,
E-mail: [email protected],
http://www.forestpeoples.org See detailed TRIDOM article at
http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Cameroon/still.html
Congo: The Northern Mbendjele Yaka use avoidance to

maintain autonomy
- By: Jerome Lewis, Escuela de Economía y Ciencia Política de
Londres, United Kingdom, e-mail: [email protected]
AMERICA
After the rubber boom

- Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme,
Argentina: The silent genocide of the Mbya Guarani

- By: Raul Montenegro, FUNAM, UN Global 500 Prize, taken from
“El silencioso genocidio de los Mbya Guaraní en Argentina. (O la
lucha de la cadenas alimentarias cortas contra las cadenas
alimentarias largas)”, e-mail: [email protected],
www.funam.org.ar . The complete article, resulting from the joint
work of ENDEPA and FUNAM can be accessed —in Spanish—

at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Argentina/Mbya.html
Brazil: Indigenous peoples in isolation and policies to defend

and protect them
- By: Gilberto Azanha, Centro de Trabalho Indigenista, e-mail:
[email protected] , and Sydney
Possuelo, Coordenação de Índios Isolados of the Fundação
Nacional do Índio (FUNAI).
Colombia: The Nukak, the last contacted nomadic people

- By: Dany Mahecha Rubio, e-mail: [email protected]
Ecuador: The Huaorani people of the Amazonia, self-isolation

and forced contact
- By: Laura Rival, University of Oxford,
Paraguay: The last Ayoreo in voluntary isolation

- By: Benno Glauser, “Iniciativa Amotocodie”,
Peru: Policy development for indigenous peoples in voluntary

isolation
- By: Conrad Feather, Shinai Serjali, e-mail: [email protected].
For more information on the work to defend the Nahua/Kugapakori
Reserve and its indigenous peoples please visit
http://www.serjali.org or email [email protected]. For AIDESEP’s
denunciation of the forced relocation of Machiguenga living in
Shiateni, see, http://www.ecoportal.net/content/view/full/31947
ASIA
India: Wave of poaching and exploitation hits isolated tribes

- By: Miriam Ross, Survival International, e-mail: mr@survival-
international.org If you wish to support the Jarawa of the Andaman
Islands, please join Survival International’s action at
http://www.survival-international.org/jarawa_action.htm
Indonesia: The Baduy people of western Java, a living

tradition
- By: David Langdon, e-mail: [email protected] or
[email protected]
‘La Fumee du Metal’: The health impacts of contact *

Central Africa: Land loss and cultural degradation for the Twa
of the Great Lakes
- By: Dorothy Jackson, Forest Peoples Programme,
India: The sedentarisation of the Malapantaram in Kerala

- By: Brian Morris, Goldsmith College,
E-mail: [email protected]
If you wish to support the Jarawa of the Andaman Islands, please
join Survival International’s action at
http://www.survival-international.org/jarawa_action.htm
By: Miriam Ross, Survival International,
Papua New Guinea: First contact in a clash of world views

Tiohtiá:ke Declaration
- International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change
Statement to the State Parties of the COP 11/MOP 1 of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - UNFCCC;
Tiohtiá:ke, Kanien’’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Traditional Territory, Canada,
28 November – December 09, 2005. For those who would like to
sign on, please send your full name and organization to

[email protected]
See: http://www.international-alliance.org/unfccc.htm
The Vth World Parks Congress: Parks for people or parks for
business?
- By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail:
[email protected] . Excerpted from an article that will
appear in the November 2003 Multinational Monitor,
www.multinationalmonitor.org
The GEF and Indigenous peoples: some findings of a recent

critical study
- By Tom Griffiths of the Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail:
[email protected], http://www.forestpeoples.org The full
study, titled “Indigenous Peoples and the Global Environment
Facility (GEF)”, is available in hard copy from:
[email protected] and is also on-line at:
http://www.forestpeoples.org/Briefings/gef/gef_study_base.htm

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INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

their forests, struggles and rights

© World Rainforest Movement

This publication is also available in Spanish and French

The contents of this publication can be reproduced totally or partially without

Published in December 2005

World Rainforest Movement

ABOUT THIS BOOK ......................................................................

I) INDIGENOUS PEOPLES ............................................................

GENERAL ARTICLES ....................................................................

- Those who protect the forest ..................................................

- Cameroon: Bagyeli struggling to be heard ..............................

- Guyana: Empowerment of indigenous peoples through

- Indonesia: The struggle for self-governance

II) INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN VOLUNTARY ISOLATION

- The Indigenous peoples’ right to live in voluntary isolation .......

- Cameroon: Does isolation still protect forest communities? ....

- After the rubber boom .............................................................

- India: Wave of poaching and exploitation hits isolated tribes...

- ‘La Fumée du Metal’: The health impacts of contact ...............

III) RELATED ARTICLES

- The Mumbai – Porto Alegre Forest Initiative, 2005 ..................

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Most of these articles have been written in close collaboration with

Independently from the authorship of the articles, these reflect the

We have included in the References the numerous sources of

The responsibility for this publication is shared between the editor

“In my community our understanding is that we have rights to our

The community, whose lands had been taken over by a plantation

Facilitated by international communications, networks and supportive

Considering the continuing wave of expropriations and denial of rights

The international mobilization to counter this myth can be dated to

This outstanding mobilisation of indigenous peoples has not only

In Asia too, the same process is underway. The Philippines

These gains have echoed, and been consolidated in, a series of

The UN and OAS draft declarations have yet to be approved and

Norms established by these human rights standard-setting bodies

Environmentalists’ campaigns and alliances with indigenous peoples

Recently too, indigenous peoples have made similar gains in their

The success of indigenous peoples’ mobilisation and international

Getting the gains made at the international level —in terms of

Indigenous peoples’ recourse to the language of international human

Major challenges also face indigenous communities that manage

Yet, ironically, one of the most acute difficulties facing indigenous

Rationale for this book

The present material has been produced in close collaboration with

Those who protect the forest

Tropical forests are disappearing at an alarming rate and the world is

Three main actors dominate the forest scenario: local peoples,

This type of “development” includes industrial logging, oil exploitation,

At present, most tropical country governments seem to see their

On their part, TNCs obviously feel unaccountable to anyone except

Within such scenario, local peoples struggling to protect their forests

Additionally, local peoples are working out and implementing

Capturing Carbon: Dilemmas for forest peoples

Global debates about the role of forests and plantations in climate