Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights

CHALLENGES 2004-2005: Ten Years a Heartbeat for Indigenous Peoples

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Dec 23 2004 (IPS) - After a decade of negotiating, Andrea Carmen stopped eating.

Actually the struggle to get the world’s governments to recognise the human rights of indigenous peoples began long before the United Nations dedicated the decade 1995-2004 to their concerns.

But finalising a human rights document was the main aim of those 10 years, which U.N officials labelled a “partnership” between states and the world’s roughly 350 million human beings known as tribal, native, aboriginal and indigenous peoples.

That decade ends next week – with just two of 45 articles of the U.N. ‘Draft Declaration on the Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples’ finalised.

Which is why Carmen, executive director of the U.S.-based International Indian Treaty Council, and five of her peers launched a hunger strike while attending a final meeting in Geneva this month to negotiate the text of the declaration. It was not a “desperate” move, she explained in an interview.

“We felt that we wanted to do more than the usual, which is making speeches … we needed to find a way to open the door for the voices of the other indigenous peoples worldwide” who were not present.

It worked, Carmen said, with the activists receiving hundreds of letters of support from indigenous people around the world, which they fixed to a bulletin board in the U.N. building.

Another result: officials from the world body assured them that the draft declaration, approved in 1994 by the U.N. Human Rights Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, would be the starting point for any further negotiations at the 2005 session of the Commission on Human Rights, not a working text that “waters down” the original document, itself the product of a decade of discussions between indigenous peoples, U.N. experts and governments.

On Monday the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, beginning Jan. 1. It urges the 191 U.N. member states to complete a final draft of the declaration “as soon as possible.”

“It’s frustrating how long it takes, but it shouldn’t be a shock that turning around this much legacy of colonisation is going to take some time and some doing, and a lot of political will on behalf of states,” said Carmen. “Some of them, amazingly, seem very ready to do that, and some, maybe not so amazing, are adamantly refusing to do that.”

While the draft declaration recognises the collective rights of indigenous peoples to such things as land and natural resources,” some governments, particularly the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, insist on recognising only the individual rights of indigenous people.

At April’s Human Rights Commission meeting, U.S. delegate Luis Zuniga said Washington is prepared to grant indigenous peoples “internal self-determination”, or the right to make decisions on a range of issues that include taxation, education, managing land resources and deciding membership.

“In this sense, the draft declaration is not a human rights instrument,” he added. “Instead, it is a blueprint for how states ought to conduct relations with indigenous peoples … we will not support continued negotiations on a draft declaration that pretends to re-order internal relationships within a sovereign democratic state.”

But despite the impasse over the declaration, Carmen says the U.N. decade has had a positive impact. “It’s had a huge effect in terms of a few different things. I could mention the recognition of other international bodies for indigenous rights – the right to natural resources and land and self-determination – so I think the discussions themselves had a huge impact on the international arena.”

“Even in terms of forcing countries, which would not otherwise have done it, to make indigenous rights a priority. Sometimes it seems that their priority is fighting indigenous rights, but at least it’s not such a back-burner issue, or (a belief that) ‘these people have died out long ago, we don’t really need to think about them’.”

Carmen is echoed by Suhas Chakma, coordinator of the Asian Indigenous & Tribal Peoples Network, a continent-wide alliance of groups and activists. “I’m definitely optimistic because the issues are moving at the international level,” he told IPS earlier this year.

“The decade has forced some of the U.N. agencies to pay more attention to indigenous peoples,” he added, predicting that the results of that increased focus will “percolate down to the local level.”

But there are about as many opinions on the decade’s usefulness as there are days in those 10 years. Arthur Manuel, former chief of the Neskonlith First Nation in Canada’s British Columbia province, says native people’s efforts were thwarted by governments.

“I think countries like Canada played a real role in trying to minimise what indigenous people wanted to achieve. That was pretty obvious in some of the things I’ve done over the course of the past four or five years,” he told IPS.

Manuel was an outspoken figure at U.N. meetings on a variety of topics, including sustainable development and the Convention on Biodiversity, and in 2003 he invited a U.N. official to his community to look into real estate development on land claimed by the Neskonlith.

“Canada would send a lot of the people to these different meetings. We’d basically have to bum a ride somehow to get to them … we never really had consistent ongoing (financial) support,” added Manuel.

In its 2004 report, the U.N. Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Populations noted it had received 547 requests for funding from groups and individuals that wanted to travel to meetings of the three bodies that focus on indigenous issues: the working group on the draft declaration, a working group on indigenous populations and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

The fund had only enough money to support 110 travel grants.

In a survey of indigenous organisations conducted by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, 68 per cent of respondents indicated that, at the international level, the decade had brought positive changes, including better access to international activities, and exchange of experience and contacts with other indigenous organisations and representatives.

But only 36 percent saw positive changes at the community level, such as better access to development projects, improved information on indigenous rights, the strengthening of local indigenous organisations, and an increase in indigenous participation in local authorities. Forty-four per cent of respondents said that there had been no improvements locally.

One oft-repeated accomplishment of the decade was the creation of the post of U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people.

In his first report to the General Assembly Aug. 12, 2004, special rapporteur Rodolfo Stavenhagen wrote that during the decade, “considerable progress has been made at the national and international levels with respect to the recognition and promotion of the human rights of indigenous people.”

But “although many countries have introduced legislation favourable to indigenous peoples, these advances at the national level are eclipsed by continuing human rights violations and problems faced by millions of indigenous peoples in many countries,” he added.

“Special attention should be paid at the national and international levels to violations of the rights of women, and especially of indigenous adolescents and girls; in many countries they are subjected to various forms of violence, exploitation and discrimination.”

Now out of office, Manuel travelled to the neighbouring United States last week to learn how to set up a low-power radio station, so he can educate people in his community about how the Canadian government influences their lives, and how to counter that impact.

“You can’t really find long-term solutions using the programmes and services of the federal government’s Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) because they’re really dependent-oriented type projects; they don’t provide independence.”

“Basically the only way indigenous people are going to gain any level of independence is through building upon their rights as indigenous people, not on DIA handouts,” he added.