Campaign for Indigenous Rights Runs into U.S. Opposition
MichaelP
Campaign for Indigenous Rights Runs into U.S. Opposition
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- In 1985, leaders of more than 300 million
indigenous peoples in over 70 countries started campaigning for a U.N.
declaration recognizing their right to self determination and land.
But indigenous leaders say their campaign has run into strong opposition
on those two key demands from the United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand.
Representatives of native peoples from around the globe gathered Monday at
the United Nations to mark the International Day of the World's Indigenous
People, but there was no celebration -- just a sobering assessment of the
struggles ahead.
"Indigenous people have been basically ignored in many cases, are some of
the poorest of the poor, and are also some of the most excluded in the
development process," said Alfredo Sfeir-Younis, the World Bank
representative at the United Nations.
"They are facing serious discrimination in terms of human rights,
property, and also culture and citizenship," he told a news conference.
Indigenous leaders have been campaigning for a U.N. Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous People to take the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights a step further and affirm that indigenous peoples are equal
in dignity and rights to all other peoples -- but also have a right to be
different.
A draft declaration, adopted in 1994 and currently being considered by a
working group of the Geneva-based U.N. Commission on Human Rights, would
protect religious practices and ceremonies of indigenous peoples, their
languages and oral traditions.
It would also give indigenous peoples -- including native Americans and
Canadians, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maoris, and South American
Quechua and Mapuche -- the right to self-determination and the right to
own, develop, control and use their traditional lands, waters and other
resources.
"This declaration is making very slow progress," said Bacre Waly Ndiaye,
director of the New York office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human
Rights.
"For many governments it's very important to allow prospecting for gold
and for oil anywhere -- and they're clashing with people for whom the land
where they want to prospect is sacred," he said.
Tonya Gonnella Frichner, president of the American-Indian Law Alliance,
said Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand fear that
self-determination could lead to secession.
"That certainly is not what indigenous peoples are talking about," she
said. "When you secede, you go somewhere, and this is our indigenous
territory. Where are we going?"
Despite objections from the four nations, indigenous leaders are hopeful
that they will get the United Nations to adopt the declaration by the end
of the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People in 2004.
While a declaration won't be legally binding, Frichner said, it will be an
important guide to nations around the world on the rights of many of their
forgotten peoples.
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