by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 16, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Dominic Brown
The Lower Omo Valley in south-western Ethiopia is a vast and rugged region of mountains and valleys, inhabited largely by nomadic agro-pastoralist tribes numbering some 200,000 people. Many live a simple existence, living in straw thatched huts and have little contact with the outside world. But the Ethiopian government’s new found appetite for large-scale sugar production threatens the very existence of many of these tribes.
Nearly 300,000 hectares of land in the Omo and Mago National Parks, which comprises much of the Lower Omo Valley, has been earmarked for the Kuraz Sugar Development programme. Backed by large-scale investment from Indian companies, the programme aims to help increase overall sugar production in Ethiopia to 2.3 million tonnes by 2015, with the goal of achieving a 2.5 per cent global share by 2017.
Whilst revenues from the sugar plantations will undoubtedly fill the coffers of central government, the forced relocation of tribes from their traditional lands is already having catastrophic consequences. The permanent damage to a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site is also raising alarm amongst environmentalists.
“We stand to lose everything,” one tribal leader explained, tears welling in his eyes, as he stood surrounded by his villagers. “Our traditional hunting grounds, the land we use for grazing our cattle, our homes. Everything will be gone. We will be left with nothing. We need the outside world to help us.”
Early in 2011, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi spoke of the importance of the project to the country’s economy, outlined in the government’s Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP). “In the coming five years there will be a very big irrigation project and related agricultural development in this zone. Even though this area is known as backward in terms of civilisation, it will become an example of rapid development.”
This “rapid development” has come at a price. There have been almost inevitable human rights abuses inflicted upon those resisting relocation since the Kuraz Sugar Development programme began last June. A report [PDF] by the Oakland Institute, a US-based think-tank, details how Ethiopian Defence Forces “arrive at Omo Valley villages (and in particular Bodi, Mursi and Suri villages) questioning villagers about their perspectives on the sugar plantations. Villagers are expected to voice immediate support, otherwise beatings (including the use of tasers), abuse and general intimidation occurs”.
Other allegations of abuse to have leaked out include the rape of male tribesmen, as well as of women and children by Ethiopian soldiers. Dozens of villagers from the region also remain in detention after voicing opposition to the development plans.
Violent clashes between the Ethiopian army and tribes from the region are on the rise. A local human rights worker told me of their fears of an escalation in the crisis to civil war. “Many tribes are saying they will fight back rather than be moved off their traditional lands to make way for these plantations. They are living in fear but feel they have nothing to lose by fighting back.”
Roadblocks are now in place in many parts of the Lower Omo Valley, limiting accessibility and ensuring the relocations remain out of the spotlight. Tribal rights NGO Survival International is leading calls for a freeze on plantation building and for a halt to the evictions. They have been campaigning to draw more attention to the deteriorating situation in the region since the Ethiopian government announced plans for the Gib III Dam [PDF] – Africa’s tallest, and one that is scheduled for completion later this year.
When completed, it threatens to destroy a fragile environment and the livelihoods of the tribes, which are closely linked to the river and its annual flood. Up to 500,000 people – including tribes in neighbouring Kenya – rely on the waters and adjacent lands of the Omo River and Lake Turkana, most of which lies in Kenya. The Karo people, now estimated to number just 1,500 along the eastern banks of the Omo River, face extinction. Already suffering from dwindling fish stocks as a result of the dam, the reduced river levels have also harmed their crop yields.
Read more from Intercontinental Cry: http://intercontinentalcry.org/ethiopias-tribes-cry-for-help/
by deepgreenresistance | Nov 29, 2011 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
by Stephen Corry
What’s “development” for? That may be straightforward to people who don’t have water or food, or sewerage in urban areas (faecal contamination is the biggest, easily preventable, manmade killer). But, although millions still lack such basics, they form only a tiny part of what passes for development these days. The duplicity of politics and business ensures much else – arms, for example – is shoehorned into the same category.
What should development mean for those who are largely self-sufficient, getting their own food and building their dwellings where the water is still clean – like many of the world’s 150 million tribal people? Has development got anything helpful for them, or has it simply got it in for them?
It’s easy to see where it has led. Leaving aside the millions who succumbed to the colonial invasion, in some of the world’s most “developed” countries (Australia, Canada and the US) development has turned most of the survivors into dispossessed paupers. Take any measure of what it ought to mean: high income, longevity, employment, health; low rates of addiction, suicide, imprisonment and domestic violence, and you find that indigenous people in the US, Canada and Australia are by far the worst off on every count – but no one seems to heed the lesson.
These are the consequences of a dispossession more total in North America and Australia than almost anywhere on Earth. The colonists were determined to steal tribal lands, and unquestioning about their own superiority. They espoused politico-economic models in which workers produced for distant markets, and had to pay for the privilege. The natives, using no money, paying no taxes, contributing little to the marketplace until forced to, were “backward”. At best, they were to be integrated to serve colonist society.
Colonialism set out to take away their self-sufficiency, on their own territory, and lead them to glorious productivity, as menials, on someone else’s. There’s little point in calling for retroactive apologies for this because it’s not confined to the past: most development schemes foisted on tribal peoples today point in exactly the same direction.
Two of its main themes are housing and education. Traditional housing has many benefits – not least the fact that it’s free – but development decrees it must be replaced by modern dwellings. In West Papua, the tribespeople put their pigs in the new houses and live in the old. Rwanda recently outlawed thatch altogether; everyone must use metal sheets, by law.
So what about modern education? In Australia, mixed-race children were forced into distant boarding schools to “breed out” their “Aboriginalness” and turn them into an underclass. From frozen Siberia to sunlit Botswana, boarding schools remain a main plank in integrationist policies, which destroy more than educate. It’s no hidden conspiracy: it’s openly designed to be about turning people into workers, scornful of their own tribal heritage.
Many indigenous people have observed that even the modern medical attention they might receive from the wealthiest governments doesn’t begin to solve the illnesses the same government’s policies have inflicted on them. It isn’t “backwardness” that makes many tribal peoples reject development projects, it’s rational anxiety about the future.
As for largescale infrastructure development – dams and mines, even irrigation – its real effect on the ground is invariably to enrich the elites while impoverishing the locals.
So is it possible to offer tribal peoples any truly beneficial development? Yes, if we accept their right to reject what we, with our “advanced” wisdom, can give; we have to stop thinking them childish when they make decisions we wouldn’t. Everyone wants control over their future, and not everyone wants the same things out of life, but such truisms are hardly ever applied.
Development, at least for most tribal peoples, isn’t really about lifting people out of poverty, it’s about masking the takeover of their territories. The deception works because the conviction “we know best” is more deeply ingrained even than it was a generation ago; Victorian-era levels of narrow-mindedness are returning. As a Botswana Bushman told me: “First they make us destitute by taking away our land, our hunting and our way of life. Then they say we are nothing because we are destitute.”
In a 21st century of expensive water, food, housing, education, healthcare and power, self-sufficiency has its attraction. It may not boost GDP figures, but there are many tribal peoples in the world who live longer and healthier lives than millions in nearby slums. Who’s to say they’ve made a bad choice?
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/25/indigenous-peoples-benefit-development-tribal
