by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 8, 2016 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Alexandre Dereims / Organic the Jarawas
Images copyright by Claire Beilvert
The Jarawa are hunters-gatherers. They have been living on the Indian Andaman Islands for thousands and thousands of years. According to recent studies, they are believed to have taken part in the very first human migrations from Africa to the rest of the world, some 70,000 years ago. And they first encountered Indian citizens only a decade ago. Since then, their situation has severely deteriorated. Women have been abducted and raped by Indians. The Jarawa have lodged several complaints to the Andaman authorities, to no avail.
The Jarawa are also victims of human safaris, organised by local tour operators. These safaris are taking place along the Andaman Truck Road, which was built illegally and cuts through the Jarawa’s territory. Dozens of vehicles, escorted by Indian armed forces, take it every day to photograph the Jarawa. Yet, it is forbidden to enter their territory, subject to prison sentences.
In 2013, Andaman MP Bishnu Pada Ray had even stated in the press that the Jarawa had expressed the desire to join the Indian community. But until now, no one has ever asked them if this was the case.
Alexandre Dereims, a French journalist, and Claire Beilvert, a French press photographer, succeeded in meeting them to ask them that question. They bypassed the ban on entering the reserve. They took every precaution to keep from transmitting diseases to them. The Jarawa allowed them to stay a few days with them to conduct interviews. For the very first time, members of this endangered people are speaking to the outside world.
They told them their story of their foreseeable disappearance, of forceful assimilation. Soon, the starving Jarawa will have no choice but to leave their territory and beg for food along the road. Journalists are sounding the alarm. New Delhi has recently decided to turn Port Blair, the capital city of the Andaman Islands, into the largest port on the Indian Ocean. The nationalist government led by Narendra Modi wants to enhance the tourism potential of these islands, which have become as popular as the Seychelles or the Maldives for the new Indian middle class. It is urgent to ponder about the survival of the most ancient people of Asia. The Indian government is already responsible for the disappearance of the Bo and the Onges, two others afro-asian people of the Andaman islands.
Journalists have launched an online petition to demand that the Indian government enforce the 2013 Supreme Court order to close the Andaman Truck Road. They also demand that the Jarawa’s territory be fully protected and that the AAJVS provide regular communication regarding the situation of the Jarawa people.
Link: http://bit.ly/savethejarawa
Website: http://www.organicthejarawa.com
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 23, 2016 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Survival International
Featured image: Many Baiga have already been evicted from their forest homes, and now face lives of poverty in resettlement camps © Survival International
Several tribal villages in central India face annihilation as they are being forced to leave their ancestral land in Achanakmar tiger reserve, close to the area which inspired Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.
The Baiga tribespeople have been repeatedly harassed and told that they will have to move from their villages to a muddy clearing outside the reserve, even though there is no evidence their presence in the reserve is harming tigers. Such evidence is required if the tribe’s eviction is to be lawful, but in fact the number of tigers in the reserve reportedly rose from 12 to 28 between 2011 and 2015.
One Baiga man from Rajak village said: “We don’t want to go, we can’t go. What should we do?”
A local witness told Survival: “There is nothing around the new site for them, nothing will grow in the land, there is no water and they won’t be able to take anything from the forest. That’s why they are so adamant that they won’t leave, because if they go they will just die out.”
Some have been told that if they don’t leave their ancestral land, guards will release bears and snakes into their villages. Others have been arrested and harassed – in 2009 one man was jailed for three months for eating a squirrel he had found dead on the forest floor.
Those who have already been evicted from Achanakmar now live in inadequate government camps and face lives of poverty on the fringes of mainstream Indian society.
One Baiga person from Chirahatta village, which is facing eviction, said: “They’ve been placing restrictions on us for two or three years. They don’t let us live. They take us to jail and threaten us. They are harsh and strict. They put us in jail for nothing. If we say anything they threaten to put us in jail. They are making it difficult for us to live.”
Elsewhere, Baiga people do back-breaking manual labour in bauxite mines in terrible working conditions.
Across India, tribespeople are being illegally evicted from tiger reserves, despite there being no evidence that their presence harms tigers. They face arrest and, in some places, beatings, torture and even summary execution for trying to re-enter their ancestral land, while large-scale tiger-spotting tourism is encouraged.
Baiga work in terrible conditions in the Bodai-Daldali bauxite mine, Chhattisgarh. Having once lived sustainable lives in the forests, they now endure exploitation and poverty after eviction from their land. © Sayantan Bera/Survival
Last year, Survival learned that tiger numbers had increased at well above the Indian national average in BRT, the one reserve in India where tribes have been formally allowed to stay on their land, demonstrating that tribal villages within wildlife reserves do not pose a substantial threat to tigers or their habitat.
Survival has written to WWF, the world’s largest conservation organization, which equips and trains the forest guards in the region.
Evidence proves that tribal peoples are better at looking after their environment than anyone else. Despite this, they are being illegally evicted from their ancestral homelands in the name of conservation. The big conservation organizations are guilty of supporting this. They never speak out against evictions.
Survival’s director Stephen Corry said: “It’s illegal and immoral to target tribes, who have coexisted with the tiger for centuries, when industrialization and mass-scale colonial-era hunting are the real reason the tiger became endangered. It’s also ineffective, because targeting tribespeople diverts action away from tackling the true poachers – criminal gangs. Big conservation organisations should be partnering with tribal peoples, not propping up the Forest Departments that are guilty of brutalizing them. Targeting tribal people harms conservation.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 23, 2016 | Mining & Drilling, Repression at Home
By Cultural Survival
At least four people were killed after police opened fire at a massive protest of several thousand villagers in Bangladesh Monday, April 4th, reported the Phulbari Solidarity Group.
“This is a terrible tragedy and major news. It is the largest loss of life at an anti-coal protest in Bangladesh since the tragic deaths in the August 26, 2006 killings at Phulbari, Bangladesh, where three people were killed and 200 injured by paramilitaries. It is the worst overall loss of life in anti-coal protests worldwide since the killings of six people in Jharkhand, India, at two protests in April 2011,” noted Ted Nace, the editor of Coal Swarm.
Professor Anu Muhammd, the Member Secretary of the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Port in Bangladesh, noted: “The villagers in Bashkhali have been loud against the destructive plans of S. Alam Group for months because the company wants to build two coal-fired power plants in the area by evicting thousands of villagers and landowners. The coal-businessmen of S. Alam Group, financed by two Chinese firms — SEPCOIII Electric Power and HTG, were fully aware of the strong opposition to the coal-power plant.”
According to the Daily Star, in December 2013, S Alam Group, struck an agreement with SEPCO3 Electric Power Construction Corporation of China to set up a coal-fired power plant in Banshkhali district of Chittagong, Bangladesh. On February 16 this year, the government signed power purchase agreements with two private joint ventures led by S Alam Group to buy electricity at Tk 6.61 per kilowatt-hour from two projects with power generation capacity of 1,224MW. S Alam Group and their Chinese backers plan to initiate the power plant by November 2019 across a 600-acre site. No consultation has taken place with communities members who would be affected. The project will require an investment of $2.4 billion of which $1.75 billion will come from Chinese lenders.
Abu Ahmed was a witness to the police violence, himself being shot in his leg. He said that the villagers had been holding peaceful protests for days after S. Alam, the local conglomerate behind the project, started purchasing land for the plants in the village, which lies on the edge of the Bay of Bengal. But the government did not pay attention to the village protests and the district administration remained silent for months. This led the villagers to stage a mass protest which turned into the worst tragedy in the history of coal in Bangladesh. The government of Bangaldesh announced on April 9 that work at the $2.4 billion power plant would be suspended for 15 days, while it carries out an assessment of the plant’s environmental impact, led by Bangladeshi and foreign scientists.
The plans for coal mine join a laundry list of other planned coal projects being pursued by the government of Bangladesh and foreign investors, despite huge opposition from communities, international coalitions, human rights experts, and environmentalists. Phulbari coal project, in Northeastern Bangladesh, is one infamous case that has lead to massive protests over the 8 years since it was first proposed by GCM resources, a British-based company. Ongoing mobilizations by communities on the ground have been successful in preventing the licensing of the coal mine, and resulted in plummeting financial loss for GCM, who failed to conduct adequate social and environmental impact studies and gain the free, prior, informed consent of the communities at various stages of the project’s life.
As a rapidly developing country, Bangaldesh has a strong demand for electricity, but communities are not willing to accept development at the cost of losing their lands and livelihoods.
In an op-ed in the Dhaka Tribune, Professor Muhammed argued, “Tension and resistance will be certainties if a so-called development projects like this are implemented forcefully and through fraudulent activities and corruption. People will not accept any project that goes against the locals’ interests or may harm the national interests or is taken up without maintaining transparency.”
Bangladesh has made plans to ramp up its coal production, with the goal of setting up 25 coal-fired power plants by 2022. However this lies in conflict with its goals to curb carbon emissions in line with the climate treaty negotiations agreed to in Paris in 2015 known was the COP 21 agreement, to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.
An analysis by the Climate Action Tracker presented at the COP 21 found that attempts to keep global warming to 2 degrees will be wildly off course if existing plans for coal-fire plants are carried out, as coal is the world’s single biggest contributor to global warming. Just by allowing the 2,440 coal-fired power stations that are currently planned would cause emissions rates four times higher than the 2-degree target by 2030. Without a single new coal plant, allowing existing coal plants to continue operating would lead to emissions rates 150 percent higher than what is consistent with a 2-degree target.
Bangladesh was part of a coalition of developing countries who argued for rich countries, who carry more responsibility for climate change, to carry more of the financial burden that developing countries would incur in order to leapfrog past dirty fossil fuels like coal.
Read more: After the COP21: How Bangladesh Can Move Past Coal and Why Rich Countries Must Help
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 1, 2016 | Repression at Home
By Cultural Survival
We are the Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN), a group of Kuy ethnic volunteers who join together to protect the Prey Lang Forest, which has been part of our lives for many generations. We come from the four provinces surrounding Prey Lang, Kampong Thom, Preah Vihea, Kratie and Stung Trung and have volunteered, working together to protect Prey Lang for 16 years.
As part of our patrol routine, from March 23 to 27, 2016 activists from all four provinces traveled through Prey Lang patrol to monitor and suppress the illegal logging that is destroying Prey Lang forest. During these five days of patrol we confiscated many cubic meters of wood, 35 chainsaws, and other materials involved in logging activities. Over the past two months of 2016 we have confiscated 85 chainsaws and many more cubic of wood from illegal loggers in Prey Lang.
On the evening of March 26 we camped overnight near Ta Chuel stream, in the Bueng Char region. On March 27, between 1:30 and 1:40 in the morning, local time, a group of people slipped through our camp and attempted to kill one of our youth activists, Phan Sopheak, who was asleep in her hammock. We did not see their faces and do not know how many they were, but our activist was badly injured on her left leg. If she were sleeping the other way, they would have cut her throat. The criminal soon escaped after Sopheak yelled for help. This was clearly an act of attempted murder, with malice toward her and the rest of the activists. Sopheak is one of the young Prey Lang activists who was nominated to represent PLCN to receive an Equator Prize from UNDP in December 2015 in Paris.
Sopheak was sent to a local clinic for quick treatment on the same day and is now safe, but her left leg is seriously injured.
Sopheak is the third indigenous environmental activist to be attacked this month, the other two were indigenous activists murdered in Honduras on March 3 and 16, 2016.
We, PLCN, are in shock and are very concerned for our safety amid increased intimidation and threats on our lives like this attempted murder by illegal loggers and those supporting them. Meanwhile the level of deforestation in Prey Lang had increased dramatically since early 2016. Without support from the Cambodia government, Prey Lang will cease to exist and our livelihood will disappear. Therefore, we request the following to the Cambodia government:
- Fully investigate the attempted murder on Sopheak and bring those criminals to justice.
- Permanently criminalized all forms of timber trading, both legal and illegal, in the Prey Lang region.
- Stop all logging activities in the Prey Lang region.
- Conduct Investigations to determine who is involved in the logging business.
- Help to intervene and cooperate with PLCN to protect Prey Lang.
For more information, please contact our PLCN members from all four provinces below:
- Mr. Pay Bunlieng member of PLCN from Kratie at 097 611 3807
- Mr. Houen Sopheap member of PLCN from Kampong Thom at 012 373 441
- Mr. Chie Sokhouen member of PLCN from Stung Trung at 096 316 2866
- Mrs. Phok Hong member of PLCN Preah Vihea at 012 948 682
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 1, 2016 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
Featured image: The Dongria unanimously rejected the mining project and have vowed to protect the Niyamgiri hills © Bikash Khemka/Survival International
By Survival International
A tribe in eastern India are facing a new threat from mining on their ancestral land, despite having won a major “David & Goliath” legal battle in 2014.
The Dongria Kondh were originally threatened by international mining corporation Vedanta Resources, who tried to open a bauxite mine in their sacred Niyamgiri hills, but were prevented by the Indian Supreme Court, which ruled that the Dongria should decide whether to allow the mine to go ahead.
The tribe unanimously rejected Vedanta’s plans to mine their hills during a historic referendum in which all twelve villages that were consulted voted against the mine.
Now, however, the Odisha state is trying to re-open the issue, petitioning for the right to hold another referendum for the Dongria to pave the way for a large-scale mining operation, this time by state-run Odisha Mining Corporation.
British-owned Vedanta opened a bauxite refinery close to the Dongria’s hills without having secured permission to mine in the area. Even though the mine itself was quashed, the refinery has continued to operate at a loss.
Survival campaigned against Vedanta’s plans and will continue to advocate for the Dongria’s right to protect their sacred hills.
© M. Cowan/Survival International
Despite strong resistance to the project from the Dongria, who have lived in the Niyamgiri hills for generations, the state authorities are keen to keep the refinery open and expand mining operations in the region.
Last year Mukuna Sikaka, a Dongria tribesperson, said: “We are not going to allow mining over Niyamgiri at any cost – not for all the developmental efforts of the government.”
Survival International led a successful global campaign against Vedanta’s plans, and is now calling for the Odisha state authorities to respect the Dongria’s decision to reject the mine.
Survival Director Stephen Corry said: “It is bitterly disappointing to see that the Odisha state authorities have still not learned to respect the wishes of the Dongria Kondh. Tribal peoples have a right under Indian and international law to determine what happens on their lands, yet still governments and corporations insist on putting profits before people’s wishes. Attempts to resume this project after international outcry and stern resistance from the Dongria themselves are not only un-democratic and illegal, but also deeply immoral.”
