RIGHTS: Indigenous People Hopeful as New U.N. Body Set to Open

By Marty Logan Reprint | | Print |

Marty Logan

UNITED NATIONS, May 9 2002 (IPS) - The planet’s indigenous people will take one step closer to a place as full partners on the world’s political stage Monday, but they have no illusions about the distance remaining in their journey toward equal treatment.

More than 600 indigenous people from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific are expected at the first session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Billed as the only full-time United Nations body devoted to the affairs of the planet’s more than 300 million indigenous people, the session is scheduled to run May 13-24.

The Forum was conceived as the eyes, ears and conscience of the U.N. on the lives of aboriginal people throughout the world. Much has been made of the fact that the new body roosts at the same level in the U.N. hierarchy as the well-known human rights commission.

But the Forum has no budget of its own, no dedicated bureaucracy, and its name is a slight to aboriginal leaders, who wanted ‘Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples’ but were defeated by U.N. member states fearful that the label ‘Peoples’ would confer legal rights that governments refuse to grant in their own countries.

That same debate has bogged down the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for a decade.

“We again are put in a corner,” says Aqqaluk Lynge, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC). He says aboriginal people conceded the name to the states but if governments do not provide money for its operation, the Forum will be meaningless.

Lynge, whose group represents 152,000 Inuit people in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia, has asked Denmark to create a voluntary fund to finance the Forum, which is composed of eight Indigenous experts nominated by their peers and eight state-chosen members.

Despite the Forum’s birthing problems, other spokespersons say the body represents the progress that indigenous people have made at the international level.

“Aboriginal people have been knocking on the doors of the U.N. for the past 30 years. We finally have something permanent,” says Ghislain Picard, vice-president of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations, the largest aboriginal body in the country.

Over those years, Picard has seen more countries strive to ensure that aboriginal issues were not ignored. “We’ve been able to raise the consciousness of states regarding indigenous people’s human rights. The whole issue of rights is not so much of a myth now,” he says.

Alberto Saldamando agrees that the world community now takes indigenous peoples’ human rights more seriously, and says it is time that it also recognised their rights to the land they live on. “Most of the world’s indigenous people are still subject to domestic legislation – it’s all geared to the taking of land, the taking of resources,” says Saldamando, general counsel for the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC).

He says the Forum has the potential to help change that because it extends the reach of indigenous people beyond the human rights commission, where aboriginal groups have become active players at annual meetings, to the U.N. economic and social council (ECOSOC).

That group, in turn, can influence global bodies such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Saldamando says.

“One thing (the IITC) would like to do is press for a human rights perspective on trade and development,” he adds. The IITC represents Indigenous people in North, South and Central America and the Pacific at international arenas such as the United Nations.

“The World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the WTO have a duty, a legal obligation, to observe human rights in everything they do,” Saldamando says. “The major problem is that the member states of the U.N. have no political will at this point to address the fundamental issues of trade and human rights.”

Indigenous leaders say the only way to change this is to talk to the states, starting with the two-week-long Forum, which will be opened by U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette and High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson. “The most important thing is that it’s going to create dialogue,” says Goodluck Diigbo, president of the New York-based Partnership for Indigenous Peoples’ Environment (PIPE).

Diigbo’s group hosted an international meeting on indigenous issues in February at which more than 400 aboriginal delegates listed their development priorities. These included: reducing poverty; having self-determination, including control over development; protecting the environment; gaining the right to autonomy and to resist subjugation; and having states recognise their traditional laws and customs concerning land.

How the Forum will tackle those issues is unknown, according to Diigbo.

“As of now, there is no clear, direct strategy because Indigenous people have different dreams, aspirations, goals and expectations,” he says, adding: “We have to use the Forum to set priorities. That is a responsibility that Indigenous people have. If they are selfish with their demands, that will be terrible.”

Lynge says aboriginal people have been very patient with states. “We are low-key and peaceful people. That’s why it took so long to get the Permanent Forum,” he says.

Saldamando thinks more patience may be needed. The Forum “is just another way of trying to get some action,” he says. “We just keep telling them the same thing and hope they do the right thing. If they don’t, we’ll keep coming back.”