by DGR News Service | May 22, 2014 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Agence France-Presse
The license comes just days after a petition for a referendum on the project was rejected by the country’s election authorities.
The action, signed by Environment Minister Lorena Tapia, gives a state company, Petroamazonas, rights to develop an oil field in part of the forest designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Home to two indigenous tribes that have resisted contact with the outside world, the rainforest park covers an expanse of more than 9,800 square kilometers [3784 square miles] between two rivers.
The field, known as Tiputini, is part of a vast bloc that lies partially within the park with proven reserves of 920 million barrels of crude.
Petroamazonas was also granted a license to develop the Tambococha field, which lies outside the park but within the same oil development bloc.
Yasunimos, an environmentalist group, has fought government plans to open the park to oil development, gathering what it said were nearly 728,000 signatures on a petition to put it to a referendum.
But on May 9, Ecuador’s National Electoral Council invalidated half the signatures and rejected the petition, clearing the way for Thursday’s action.
The decision, however, could be appealed to the country’s constitutional court.
In October, Ecuador’s Congress approved a government plan to develop the Yasuni oil reserves, on the promise that revenues would be used to eradicate poverty.
From Physorg: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-ecuador-oil-amazon-reserve.html
by DGR News Service | Mar 10, 2014 | Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence, Obstruction & Occupation
By Canadian Press
Police say three people will be charged after Mohawk protesters calling for an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women occupied CN Rail tracks in eastern Ontario.
Provincial police say demonstrators moved onto the tracks Saturday morning in Napanee, leading to CN issuing a stop order for all trains.
Police say a man struck the window of an unmarked police cruiser, breaking the glass.
Sgt. Kristine Rae says four people were arrested, and that three of them will face charges that have yet to be determined by investigators.
VIA Rail issued a travel advisory on Saturday saying the blockade affects the movement of VIA Rail trains on the Toronto – Montréal and Toronto – Ottawa routes, in both directions.
The stop order was lifted early in the afternoon, and train service is resuming.
Demonstrators had vowed on Friday to step up their protest in response to a parliamentary report into missing and murdered indigenous women that rejected numerous calls for a full public inquiry.
Spokesman Shawn Brant has said that there will be consequences for a national inquiry not being called.
The activists have been blockading a road east of Belleville since last Sunday night.
The release of the missing women report on Friday set off a firestorm of criticism from opposition critics, First Nation leaders and human rights groups.
Liberal and NDP members who sat on the all-party panel issued their own dissenting reports, accusing the federal Conservatives of sanitizing the final report on an ongoing crisis that has caught the attention of the United Nations.
Among its 16 recommendations, the report calls on the Conservative government to work with the provinces, territories and municipalities to create a public awareness and prevention campaign focusing on violence against aboriginal women and girls.
It’s estimated there are hundreds of cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada dating back to the 1960s – officially as many as 600, and likely hundreds more unreported victims.
Passengers are being told to expect delays. Service recovery measures such as late train travel credits or travel credits for bus substitutions will not be offered for affected trains. Extra charges paid for Business Class tickets will be reimbursed in the case of a bus substitution.
From Global News: http://globalnews.ca/news/1196149/4-in-custody-after-mohawk-protesters-occupy-train-tracks-near-belleville/
by DGR News Service | Feb 17, 2014 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation
By Richard Arghiris / Intercontinental Cry
Having fought tirelessly against the unlawful Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam, the indigenous Ngäbe communities on the banks of Panama’s Tabasará river are today threatened with forced eviction at the hands of Panama’s notoriously brutal security forces.
The 29 MW dam, built by a Honduran-owned energy company, Genisa, received funding from three development banks: the Dutch FMO, the German DEG, and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CBIE). The project was approved by the Panamanian government without the free, prior, and informed consent of the affected indigenous communities, who now stand to lose their homes, their livelihoods, and their cultural heritage.
Aside from providing precious sustenance in the form of fish and shrimp staples, and as well as supplying rich silt loam ideal for plantain cultivation, the Tabasará river symbolizes the spiritual lifeblood of the Ngäbe communities on its banks, including the community of Kiadba.
Earlier this year, Kiadba hosted a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of the Ngäbe writing system. Bestowed in dreams and visions to the followers of the prophetess Besiko – a young woman who sparked a Ngäbe religious movement called Mama Tata – the written language of Ngäbere is today disseminated in only a handful of schools, including the educational facility in Kiadba.
Attended by hundreds of followers, the conference culminated in a solemn ritual at the site of ancient petroglyphs on the river, whose abstract carvings describe myths and history of the river, including the story of a Tabasará King, who ruled the region prior to the Spanish conquest. Neither the petroglyphs nor Kiadba’s language school are cited in Genisa’s impact assessment – a deeply flawed document according to a UN study in 2012, which concluded that both would be lost forever under reservoir waters if construction of the dam was completed.
Facing the threat of inundation, the Ngäbe have now established blockades and camps on the river bank to prevent Genisa’s machinery from encroaching on their land. The company recently crossed the water to an 800m wide strip dividing the communities of Kiadba and Quebrada Caña, and commenced felling lumber in the gallery forests. The government has now issued a formal warning demanding that the Ngäbe vacate their lands – today, 17 February 2014, is their deadline.
Sadly, there have been episodic clashes between the police and Panama’s indigenous minorities throughout the four year tenure of President Ricardo Martinelli, who is set to stand down after elections in May. All of those incidents have resulted in injuries to unarmed protesters, and in several shameful instances, permanent injury or death. Despite the disturbing ease with which Panama’s security forces commit acts of violence, the Ngäbe are standing firm. They ask solidarity and vigilance from the international community at this uncertain time.
From Intercontinental Cry: http://intercontinentalcry.org/panama-indigenous-communities-face-eviction-22239/
by DGR News Service | Feb 4, 2014 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By David Hill / Mongabay
The Peruvian government has approved plans for gas company Pluspetrol to move deeper into a supposedly protected reserve for indigenous peoples and the buffer zone of the Manu National Park in the Amazon rainforest.
The approval follows the government rescinding a highly critical report on the potential impacts of the operations by the Culture Ministry (MINCU), the resignation of the Culture Minister and other Ministry personnel, and repeated criticism from Peruvian and international civil society.
A subsequent report by MINCU requested that Pluspetrol abandon plans to conduct seismic tests in one small part of the reserve because of the “possible presence of [indigenous] people in isolation,” but didn’t object to tests across a much wider area. In addition to the seismic tests, the planned operations include building a 10.5km flow-line and drilling 18 exploratory wells at six locations—all of them in the reserve which lies immediately to the west of the Manu National Park and acts as part of its buffer zone (see map below).
The government approved the plans on January 27th when the Energy Ministry issued a resolution on the operation’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), written by Pluspetrol together with consultancy Environmental Resources Management.
The decision was swiftly condemned by AIDESEP. The national indigenous organization accused the government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which has played a key role in gas operations in that region to date, of violating their commitments.
AIDESEP writes that “many ‘isolated’ indigenous people have already died in the name of supposed ‘progress.’ Enough. If one more brother dies, or is taken ill, or there is conflict, we will hold the state, the gas companies, the IDB and those who irresponsibly promote these policies responsible.”
The Energy Ministry could only approve Pluspetrol’s EIA following favorable opinions from other state institutions such as MINCU, the National Water Authority and, because the buffer zone of a national park is involved, the National Service for Protected Natural Areas (SERNANP).
But MINCU’s initial report, dated July 2013, effectively made it impossible for the operations to go ahead, stating that the impacts on the health of the reserve’s inhabitants could be severe, and warning that the Nahua could be “devastated” and the Kirineri and the Nanti made “extinct.”
Opposition to the operations has included appeals to the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
CERD responded by urging Peru to “immediately suspend” the operations. At the end of a visit in December, the UN Rapporteur recommended that the Peruvian government do an “exhaustive study” and that it shouldn’t proceed unless it ensured indigenous peoples’ rights won’t be violated.
The planned operations constitute an expansion of what is known as the Camisea gas project, Peru’s biggest energy development. There are already several well platforms in the indigenous reserve, which have been producing gas for years.
Almost three-quarters of Pluspetrol’s concession overlaps the reserve—officially called the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti and Others’ Territorial Reserve—which was created in 1990 and given greater legal protection in 2003.
The reserve’s inhabitants live in what Peruvian law calls “voluntary isolation” or “initial contact,” having sporadic, little or no contact with outsiders and therefore lacking immunological defenses.
Pluspetrol admitted in its EIA that contact with the reserve’s inhabitants is “probable” during the course of its operations, and that such peoples in general are vulnerable to “massive deaths” from transmitted diseases.
From Mongabay: “Gas company to drill in Manu National Park buffer zone, imperiling indigenous people“
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 26, 2014 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By New Internationalist
Kenyan security forces have been burning hundreds of homes – belonging to some of the country’s oldest hunter-gatherers – in the last fortnight, in the name of ‘conserving forest biodiversity’ and safeguarding the area’s water catchment area for urban access.
The Kenya Forest Service Guard, along with riot troops armed with AK-47 machine guns, began razing the thatched homes of the Sengwer community, estimated at 15,000, after a government deadline for eviction of the Embobut Forest community expired two weeks ago.
The Sengwer people, also known as the Cherangany people, are being forcefully evicted as ‘squatters’ by the government.
‘The Sengwer people, who have cared for the region for centuries, have been labelled squatters, and the Kenyan government seems willing to breach the country’s own constitution and court rulings. It pledged not to use force, but now it seems that as many 1,000 homes have been torched, together with blankets, cooking utensils and schoolbooks. For how much longer will old-fashioned ideas of “conservation” be used to justify the violation of tribal peoples’ rights?’ says Freddie Weyman, Africa campaigner at Survival International.
Hundreds of Sengwer families have fled into high-altitude montane forest after having their homes and possessions destroyed.
‘I was in the house with my four children. All their uniforms, our cooking pans, water containers, cups were burnt. There was no consultation. The children are very upset because we have lost everything. The children and elderly people will end up getting pneumonia because we don’t have anything to cover ourselves at night,’ said one 25-year-old Sengwer widow.
Brazen defiance
The World Bank is currently being investigated by its own inspection panel after the Sengwer community complained last year that a World Bank-funded project, the Natural Resource Management Project (NRMP), was responsible for redrawing the boundaries of the Cherangany forest reserves, thus displacing and marginalizing hundreds of members of the forest community. The project currently stands accused of legitimizing and funding the Kenyan government’s illegal evictions of the Sengwer people without consultation, consent or compensation, through arson and intimidation in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013.
The Kenyan Constitution of 2010 decrees that the government must protect and preserve the practices of those indigenous communities that have sustained their ancestral forest habitat for centuries. However, the Kenyan government is acting in brazen defiance of its own constitution by forcefully relocating indigenous communities without their free, prior and informed consent. Article 63 (d) of the Kenyan Constitution recognizes the rights of communities, such as the Sengwer, to own ancestral lands traditionally occupied by hunter-gatherers.
No consultation was undertaken and no consent was given by the forest community for their homes to be burnt or for their ancestral land to be captured by the state. As well as undermining the Sengwers’ constitutional rights, the government is also rejecting international agreements such as international human rights laws and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, to which Kenya is a party.
Burning Sengwer homes is a perversion of the country’s constitutional commitment to ‘respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use’ of biodiversity, as stipulated under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Forced removal of the Sengwer group is also in contempt of an injunction secured at the High Court in Eldoret forbidding any such evictions until the matter of community rights to their land is resolved.
‘Crucially, the constitution also states that ancestral land and the land occupied by traditionally hunter-gatherer groups such as the Sengwer is “community land”, owned by that community. None of these legal provisions is being respected by the government of Kenya in the recent evictions of the Sengwer from Embobut Forest,’ says Tom Lomax, legal expert at the Forest People’s Programme.
A misinformation campaign has been launched by the government. In order to justify its human rights violations against the Sengwer people and its broken international agreements, it has labelled the indigenous group ‘squatters’, despite the forest community having lived for hundreds of years in the Embobut Forest in Western Kenya, where they practise traditional modes of sustainable living.
Where else is home?
By conflating a large population of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), including landslide victims and victims of electoral violence who have settled in the Embobut Forest area, with the Sengwer community, the government is conveniently able to refer to all forest inhabitants as ‘squatters’ or ‘evictees’.
By doing so, the government is highlighting its own wilful refusal to recognize the rights of Kenya’s indigenous communities, or their conservation of ancestral land and resources. The Kenyan government has also insisted that the Embobut Forest inhabitants were ‘voluntarily evicted’ and that they have been adequately compensated for loss of livelihood and habitat.
In November 2013, the government indeed promised 400,000 Kenyan shillings ($4,600) per evicted family, enough to buy an acre of land or four cows. On 12 December, the local government announced that ‘the evictees were given the cash and have no reason to continue staying in the forest’ and that ‘by 3 January 2014, we expect all squatters out of that forest’.
However, the only people who had signed up for compensation were the IDPs, not the 15,000 Sengwer community members who claim the Embobut Forest as their ancestral territory.
‘Those who did not sign were Sengwer, who hold the forest as the last vestige of their greater territories, and also can’t for the life of themselves think where they would move to. Where else is home?’ says Liz Alden Wily, research fellow at the Rights and Resources Institute.
Wily says it is spurious for the government to declare ‘conservation’ as a reason for the Sengwer people to be evicted when they have protected and preserved the forest biodiversity of their ancestral habitat for hundreds of years.
‘The government is being congratulated on being hard line on the necessity to keep forests free of people, given their essential water-tower role. But this is not necessarily the way to protect forests, when you have to [evict] a committed indigenous forest dweller population which depends upon the trees remaining and who, given the chance, would protect these with their life,’ says Wily.
Livelihood desolation and eviction has loomed heavy over the Sengwer community since they were first dispossessed of land by the British colonial administration in the early 20th century. During the post-colonial administration in 1964, their remaining ancestral territory was gazetted and designated as a protected area, making their traditional hunter- gatherer lifestyle untenable. Since the 1980s, the Sengwer community have faced 20 evictions. This month’s eviction has been the most violent and systematic.
However, international rights organizations remain incredulous about the Kenyan government’s declarations that these evictions are in the pure interests of ‘conservation’.
‘Forests are profoundly fertile areas, and perfect for intensive tea cultivation and other commercial agricultural use. We need to look ahead, to keep an eye as to who in fact ends up using these areas. We have seen this repeatedly ever since the administration of President Moi [1978-2002]; a flurry of evictions, followed not by lasting conservation measures but by piecemeal excisions, turning these public properties into private enterprise areas,’ says Wily.
From New Internationalist: http://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2014/01/23/sengwer-forest-evictions/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 21, 2014 | Indigenous Autonomy, Indirect Action, Mining & Drilling
By Claire Stewart-Kanigan / The Dominion
“Eco-consciousness” and “green living” are centrepieces of product branding for the Toyota Prius. But that feel-good packaging has rapidly worn thin for members of the Algonquin Nation and residents of Kipawa, Quebec, who are now fighting to protect traditional Algonquin territory from devastation in the name of hybrid car battery production.
In 2011, after nearly two years of negotiations, Matamec Explorations, a Quebec-based junior mining exploration company, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Toyotsu Rare Earth Canada (TRECan), a Canadian subsidiary of Japan-based Toyota Tsusho Corporation. The memorandum confirmed Matamec’s intention to become “one of the first heavy rare earths producers outside of China.” In pursuit of this role, the company plans to build an open-pit Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) mine directly next to Kipawa Lake, the geographical, ecological, and cultural centre of Kipawa.
Rare earths are a group of 17 elements found in the earth’s crust. They are used to produce electronics for cell phones, wind turbines, and car batteries. Rare earths are notorious for their environmentally costly extraction process, with over 90 per cent of the mined raw materials classified as waste.
Toyota has guaranteed purchase of 100 per cent of rare earths extracted from the proposed Kipawa mine, for use in their hybrid car batteries, replacing a portion of Toyota’s supply currently sourced out of China.
Over the last seven years, China has reduced the scale of its rare earths exports via a series of annual tonnage export caps and taxes, allegedly out of concern for high cancer rates, contaminated water supply, and significant environmental degradation. Despite China’s stated intention to encourage manufacturers to reduce their rare earths consumption, the US, the EU and Japan have challenged China’s export caps through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and are seeking new deposits elsewhere for exploitation. Toyota and Matamec are seeking to make Kipawa part of this shift.
Kipawa is a municipality located on traditional Algonquin territory approximately 80 kilometres northeast of North Bay, Ontario, in what is now known as western Quebec. The primarily Indigenous municipality is home to approximately 500 people, including members of Eagle Village First Nation and Wolf Lake First Nation, of the Anishinaabeg Algonquin Nation. The town of Kipawa lies within the large Ottawa River Watershed, a wide-branching network of lakes, rivers and wetlands. Lake Kipawa is at the heart of the Kipawa region.
Lifelong Kipawa resident and Eagle Village First Nation member Jamie Lee McKenzie told The Dominion that the lake is of “huge” importance to the people of Kipawa. “We drink it, for one….Everyone has camps on the lake [and] we use it on basically a daily basis.” This water network nourishes the richly forested surroundings that make up the traditional hunting and trapping grounds of the local Algonquin peoples.
“Where the proposed mine site is, it’s my husband’s [ancestral] trapping grounds,” said Eagle Village organizer Mary McKenzie, in a phone interview with The Dominion. “This is where we hunt, we fish, I pick berries….We just want to keep our water.” Jamie Lee and Mary McKenzie also emphasized the role of lake-based tourism in Kipawa’s economy.
The Kipawa HREE project would blast out an open-pit mine 1.5 kilometres wide and 110 meters deep, from the summit of a large lakeside hill. It would also establish a nearby waste dump with a 13.3 megatonne capacity. Rock containing the heavy rare earth elements dysprosium and terbium would be extracted from the pit via drilling and explosives, processed at an on-site grinding and magnetic separation plant, and then transported by truck to a hydrometallurgical facility 50 kilometers away for refining.
Matamec confirmed in its Preliminary Economic Assessment Study that some effluence caused by evaporation and precipitation is inevitable, especially during the snowmelt period. A community-led presentation argued that this could create acid mine drainage, acidifying the lake and poisoning the fish.
“There’s going to be five [truckloads of sulfuric acid transported from pit to refinery] a day….[I]n a 15-year span, that’s 27,300 truckloads of sulfuric acid,” said Mary McKenzie. “We’re worried about spills and the environment….They’re talking about neutralizing [the acid], when a spill does occur, with lime. I have [sources that say] lime is also a danger to the environment.”
In a 2013 presentation in Kipawa, Matamec stated that while “some radioactivity [due to the presence of uranium and thorium in waste rock] will be present in the rare earth processing chain,” its effects will be negligible. Yet these reassurances ring hollow for some, who point to cancer spikes observed in communities near rare earths projects in China. In the project’s economic assessment, Matamec itself indicated that waste rock is too dangerous for use in concrete and dikes.
“Whatever goes up in the air [from blasting and evaporation] comes down….A lot of those particles are radioactive,” said Mary McKenzie. “Our animals eat this [plant matter potentially affected by the mine]….We depend on our moose, we depend on our fish, so that’s a scary situation.” The refining process also uses strong acids and bases.
While Matamec stated in the Assessment that “most” of the water used in processing will be recycled, a portion of the post-processing solution will be directed into the lake or tailings ponds. The mine is intended to be operational for 13 years, but tailings ponds would require maintenance for generations, and leaching is always possible. Adding to this risk, Matamec has “assumed that [certain] tailings will not be acid generating or leachable” and will therefore only use watertight geomembrane for a portion of the tailings ponds.
With the approval process being accelerated by both public and private factors, production could begin as early as 2015. Quebec’s regulations call for provincial environmental impact assessments only when projects have a daily metal ore production capacity that is considerably higher than the national standard—7,000 metric tons per day versus 3,000 in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. What’s more, by categorizing HREE in the same regulatory group as other metals, these tonnage minimums fail to reflect the higher toxicity and environmental costs of heavy rare earths extraction.
Because of this, the Kipawa project does not trigger a provincial-level assessment. It only requires clearance from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and a certificate of authorization granted by the provincial Minister of Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks.
On the private side, the assessment process has been fast-tracked by a series of multimillion-dollar payments from TRECan to Matamec ($16M as of April 2013). According to Matamec president André Gauthier in a July 2012 press release, this makes Matamec “the only rare earth exploration company to have received funds to accelerate and complete a feasibility study and an environmental and social impact assessment study of a HREE deposit.”
The chiefs of Eagle Village and Wolf Lake First Nations have been demanding a consent-based consultation and review process since the project was quietly made public in 2011—one that exceeds “stakeholder” consultation standards and acknowledges the traditional relationship of the Algonquin people to the land. Residents only became widely aware of Matamec’s plans following the company’s community consultation session in April 2013.
Jamie Lee McKenzie has not been impressed by Matamec’s consultations. “They come in and they have a meeting…and they tell us all the good things about the mine,” McKenzie told The Dominion. “[They say,] ‘It will give you jobs. We need this to make batteries for green living,’ but that’s it.”
Local organizers told The Dominion that a Matamec-chaired community focus group had been cancelled during the early summer after one local participant asked that her critical questions be included in the group’s minutes. Following what many residents see as the failure of Matamec and provincial assessment agencies to meaningfully engage with Kipawa residents, the community has taken matters into their own hands.
In the summer of 2013, Kipawa residents began to organize, with the leadership of Eagle Village and Wolf Lake members. Petitions containing over 2,500 signatures were sent to provincial ministers, demanding a provincial environmental assessment as well as “public hearings to review the Mining Act…to strengthen rare earth environmental monitoring.” As of late November, there had been no official responses to the petitions, and no positive response to letter-writing campaigns directed at the office of the federal Minister of Environment. (Quebec adopted a new Mining Act in early December, as this article went to print.)
But demands have grown beyond calls for review. “We’re not okay with the BAPE [provincial assessment]; we’re not okay with the mine,” said Mary McKenzie. “We’re against the [project] 100 per cent.” In September, McKenzie helped organize a 100-person anti-mine protest on the shores of Kipawa Lake. In November, the resistance network formalized their association as the Lake Kipawa Protection Society, committed to stopping the mine through regional education, local solidarity, and creative resistance strategies like a “Tarnish Toyota” day of action.
The Kipawa HREE project, if approved, would open doors for the numerous other companies exploring the watershed—such as Globex, Fieldex, Aurizon, and Hinterland Metals—as well as for heavy rare earths mining in the rest of Canada.
“We have mining companies all over in our area here,” said Mary McKenzie. “Matamec is the most advanced, but it’s not just Matamec: we want all the mining out of our region.”
The mine is not the only project on the fast-track: Algonquin and local resistance efforts are picking up momentum, and backing down on protecting the water and land is not on the agenda.
“This is ancestral ground,” McKenzie stressed. “We can fight this.”
Claire Stewart-Kanigan is a student, Settler, and visitor on Haudenosaunee territory.
From The Dominion: http://dominion.mediacoop.ca/story/toyota-prius-not-so-green-after-all/20373
