ENVIRONMENT: Park Managers Don’t Protect Indigenous People, Study Says

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

MONTREAL, Oct 24 1996 (IPS) - Death squads murder Arhuaco indigenous leaders in the coastal mountain forests of Colombia.

Boats laden with illegally cut timber set sail from the island of Siberut to Sumatra in Indonesia.

Tourists steal 10,000-year-old stone paintings from the high plateaus of Tassili N’Ajjer in Algeria.

These events are linked by the fact that none should have happened because the areas in which they occurred are recognised as natural areas of global importance under the Man and Biosphere (MAB) programme — a special project of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

And one researcher argues that they may have occurred because the managers of these “biosphere” reserves treat indigenous peoples as relics of the past rather than as “living cultures,” leaving them inadequately protected.

The MAB programme was set up 20 years ago in an attempt to bring international attention to as many of the diverse of ecosystems around the world as possible. Of the 108 such reserves set up to date, 34 have been home to indigenous inhabitants for centuries, including the three parks in Algeria, Colombia and Indonesia.

Stephen Doempke, a director of Berlin-based Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU or German Federation for the Protection of Nature) in Berlin, says that one possible reason for the problems in these three parks is the fact that park managers have failed to involve or protect local indigenous peoples.

“With few exceptions these sites are exclusively regarded as witnesses of past cultures and not the living cultures of indigenous peoples today,” says Doempke, who has just published a study about the impact of biosphere reserves on indigenous peoples.

The original inhabitants of these reserves, according to Doempke, are being harassed by newer residents and visitors, who have a variety of interests that range from drug-running in Colombia to meeting the demand for plywood in Indonesia to smuggling antiques in Algeria.

“The problem is that the directors of these parks live in Bogota (the capital of Colombia) and for them the parks exist only on paper,” added Guillermo Rodriguez, who works with the Arhuaco peoples for a group called Fundacion Pro-Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.

“They talk about the species and the plants in these parks, but they do not take into account that they have people in them,” he said. “In fact, they can learn from the Indians because they know how to manage the delicate ecosystem.”

Although Colombia’s Constitution recognises the land rights of indigenous peoples, these rights are not respected by poor landless peasants and drug smugglers who want access to the forests.

In fact, army officials have joined death squads run by the drug smugglers in harassing the Arhuaco peoples. Army officials argue that the indigenous peoples are helping guerrillas intent on toppling the government. As recently as last month an Arhuaco leader was found tortured to death.

Halfway across the world, on the distant island of Siberut, which lies between the island of Sumatra in Indonesia and peninsular Malaysia, the appointed peacekeepers have also been accused of supporting outside interests against those of local people.

Doempke says a 5-year-old government decree banning logging has been a failure because the local police protect the loggers against the local Mentawai people, who want to preserve the forests.

The loggers work for a timber company called Carya Pharmin Pulau Siberut, which routinely ships timber to the port town of Padang in Sumatra, some 130 kilometres to the east. There it is processed by a company called Rimba Sunkyong Plywood, which in turn exports the finished product directly to Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Hong Kong.

In frusturation, local people recently asked German tourists to help them in their fight against the loggers, a German environmental activist Hermann Edelmann, drew up a letter for international activists to sign.

“If tourism is being handled in balance and responsibility to the environmental and cultural protection, it will not only bring enjoyment but will also increase the income of the state as an alternative to the destructive commercial or illegal logging,” he wrote.

Meanwhile in North Africa, tourists have been blamed for the destruction of ancient painting on high plateaus of Tassili N’Ajjer national park in southern Algeria, where the Tuareg nomads live.

Doempke says park managers there refuse to employ people who cannot pass tests, which immediately exclude the local Tuareg, who are, in fact, the best experts on the park.

As a result the Office du Parc National Tassili (OPNT) is unable to monitor the 200-plus tourists that visit the high plateaus of Tassili N’Ajjer everyday without official permission, some of whom steal rock paintings that are believed to have been made at a time when the surrounding Sahara desert was still fertile.

Bashir Kadik, the director-general of the government run National Association for the Conservation of Nature in Algeria, says that he has done his best to recruit “competent” Tuareg without any success.

“We do employ the Tuareg as guides. But to run a park, you need to be at least an engineer. The problem is the Tuareg have no access to education and many of them refuse to study because they say it is below them,” he told IPS.

“Those that live in Tassili are happy to continue living as camel herders. We have dug wells for them and we are trying to convince them to settle down,” he added.

But environmental activists from Algeria say that the problem is that a small minority of urban peoples control the parks and they do not understand the nomadic way of life.