ENVIRONMENT: Indigenous Peoples Say Mining Destroys Land And Lives

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

LONDON, May 18 1996 (IPS) - Mining minerals from coal to uranium has transformed mountains into craters and turned rivers the colour of blood, said representatives of indigenous peoples from some 50 communities around the world, gathered in London this week.

From Namibia in southern Africa to Siberia near the Arctic circle, from French Guyana on the north-eastern shoulder of South America to Fiji in the South Pacific, speakers are in London for the 6-16 May Consultation on Indigenous People and Mining, organised by the World Council of Churches here.

Some spoke of verdant green tropical forest hunting grounds that have been transformed into wasteland on the island of New Guinea in the South Pacific, others spoke of millions of fish that have been killed along entire stretches of rivers and the ocean floor from Guyana to the Philippines in the pursuit of copper.

Yet others spoke of mining companies who brought bulldozers to raze the homes of indigenous peoples in Bihar, India, in January in the search for uranium. Others spoke of air strikes in Suriname against indigenous peoples living on gold fields last June and landowners who hire ‘Indian killers’ in Venezuela to hunt down indigenous peoples who oppose the mining of coal.

For many indigenous peoples the destruction caused by mining and the violence that accompanies it, is both horrifying as well as contrary to the values of their ancient cultures.

“‘Mai bula ki lagi’ — from the core of the earth to heaven — is what we say in my country to explain our respect for the spiritual sanctity of nature as well as its material value as sources of subsistence,” says Rabici Ganilau of Fiji, who joined other representatives of indigenous peoples at a day long public forum at King’s College in central London over the weekend. “Mining concepts and development are foreign to us.”

Not that mining is completely alien to all indigenous people. Five hundred years ago Spanish conquerors reported seeing the indigenous mountain people of the Cordillera on the island of Luzon in the Philippines chiseling away at little “pocket” mines while the B’laan people of Mindanao, another island in the Philippines, have always panned for gold in their rivers in times of drought.

Today, according to Minewatch, a London-based environmental group, some three million of the estimated 300 to 400 million indigenous peoples living on the planet, prospect for minerals on a small scale with picks, shovels and kitchen buckets and pans.

But in recent years remote deserts and forests still inhabited by indigenous peoples have become the target of multinational mining corporations who have exhausted other sources of minerals. These companies bring machines that can grind up mountains and sink shafts hundreds of metres below the surface of the earth.

Since 1940 Minewatch estimates that well over half of the world’s uranium has come from indigenous peoples’ lands while by the year 2010 about half of the world’s copper and gold will come from such areas.

Not that many indigenous peoples benefit from the industry. In Fiji and Papua New Guinea, for example, even though indigenous peoples have rights to the land, the state owns and sells the minerals that lie below the crust.

In Indonesian-controlled Irian Jaya, for example, a mere 10 percent of the work force on the world’s largest gold mine, operated by Freeport McMoRan of New Orleans, is indigenous. And of the 1,800 indigenous workers a mere 600 people come from the Amungme, the peoples on whose land the gold is being mined.

Even worse off are the Komoro peoples, the community which receives the bulk of the 120,000 tonnes of mining waste dumped by the mining operation into the river every day. Only two Komoro people have jobs at the mine.

This a major grievance for indigenous communities. Gold mines dump an average of one tonne of toxic waste into local ponds, rivers and valleys for every gramme of gold extracted, which can kill the fish and small game on which the indigenous peoples subsist.

Minewatch activists point out that in western Europe, some 46 percent of all waste generated or five billion tonnes, were produced by mining activity, according to a recent estimate made by Integrated Solid Waste Management.

“Imagine how much more waste must be produced in Africa, Asia and Latin America where waste-dumping regulations are much more lax and rarely enforced,” says Andy Whitmore, Minewatch coordinator.

For these reasons many indigenous peoples have decided to oppose the mining altogether. “We have decided that we will die before they come through our land because an Indian without land is an Indian without soul, without anything,” say elders of the Bari and Yupka tribes who are facing coal and oil activities in Venezuela.

Until recently the indigenous peoples fought against the mining companies on their own territory. Today, however, this is changing, because the indigenous peoples are discovering that the companies in one community are often part of a larger multinational company that work in dozens of countries around the world.

In fact the biggest mining company in the world is based in London — Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ), recently merged with Conzinc Riotinto of Australia to create a company that generated 2.85 billion dollars in pre-tax profits in 1995 from 9.3 billion dollars in sales.

Other mining giants include Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) of Australia, Anglo-American and De Beers of South Africa, Noranda and Placer Dome of Canada, Phelps Dodge and Cyprus in the United States.

The indigenous peoples are working on plans to challenge these companies around the world by working with environmental and religious groups in the home countries of the multinationals.

One tactic that is expected to be used against the multinationals is lawsuits in the companies home countries. Already courts in Melbourne have allowed Papua New Guinean communities to sue BHP for environmental destruction as a result of a gold mining operations.

Meanwhile courts in New York have allowed indigenous communities in Ecuador to sue Texaco for oil drilling on their lands. Most recently a British court allowed a former RTZ employee to sue RTZ for its uranium mining operations in Namibia.

Others hope to bring shareholder resolutions to force the companies to adhere to best environmental practices while yet others hope to appeal to international bodies like UNESCO to protect the most fragile environments from mining.

In addition most of the people gathered here say that the only way to prevent further destruction is not just better environmental management or protection of the most endangered areas but to convince society at large to return to the ways of the past.

“Our old religions respected both man, (woman) and nature. The question today is how we can learn from indigenous peoples about how to live in a manner based on lessons from our grandfathers and grandmothers,” says Ursula Vissera, an indigenous Arawak from French Guiana.