By Marty Logan
MONTREAL, Feb 26 2004 (IPS)

The world’s indigenous children face greater threats to survival than other youngsters, but that can only be changed by recognising that their well-being is tied to the survival of aboriginal cultures, including rights to land and resources, says a United Nations report released Wednesday.

The study, by the Innocenti Research Centre of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), found that indigenous children rank lower than the world average in most categories of well-being, including infant mortality, school enrollment and protection by justice systems, in rich and poor nations alike.

The results did not surprise Ole Henrik Magga, head of the U.N. body that represents the world’s approximately 300 million indigenous people.

“This report makes it absolutely clear that with every indicator, with every statistic – on education, livelihood, economy, you name it – the indigenous groups are the lowest; in every country they are far below the average,” Magga told IPS from Madrid, Spain, where the report was released.

Similar ceremonies were held in Australia and in various countries in Asia and Latin America.

Magga’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the only full-time U.N. body studying such questions, made children the focus of its two-week meeting in 2003. It came to its own conclusions about the priorities for indigenous youngsters.

Lack of land rights leads to other vulnerabilities, the forum found, of the Pygmy people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example.

“They do not have any recognised rights to land,” said Magga. “Some of the Pygmy groups are moving from place to place and there is no land where they can settle. They can live in one place for a couple of days and then maybe the landowner will ask them to leave”.

The UNICEF report found, “in cases where land rights are denied through, for example, dispossession and forced removal, economic marginalisation and loss of cultural reference points can have a devastating impact on indigenous communities, and children are among the first to feel the effects”.

“In Northern Quebec (in Canada), for example, most of the marine mammals consumed by the Inuit have been found to be contaminated by industrial toxins … prenatal exposure to lead, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, a persistent and potentially hazardous industrial chemical) and mercury is much higher than in southern Canada.”

Innocenti’s director, Marta Santos Pais, says that as researchers began speaking with indigenous peoples, “it became absolutely clear … we could not look into the reality of children in a distinct manner without taking into account the fundamental reference for them, which is belonging to a group that enjoys the same culture, that has the same heritage and that can be a resource and an enrichment for those children”.

“In terms of any positive and successful solution; in terms of access to health or in terms of education systems or even in terms of legislation for children who are indigenous, if we had ignored that link we would in fact be imposing solutions that they would not accept as being meaningful,” she told IPS from Madrid.

The report highlights projects that succeeded because they incorporated indigenous communities and cultures.

“Since 1993 in Peru, local committees, including mayors, health, education and justice officials, representatives of public institutions, local NGOs, agrarian workers’, community and women’s organisations have produced and implemented annual action plans for children.”

“These have served as a model for the government-sponsored Integrated Committees to Fight Poverty (Mesas de Concertaci?n de Lucha contra la Pobreza),” the report adds.

The plans were put in place under UNICEF’s PROANDES programme, which has operated since 1989 in the most deprived and remote indigenous areas of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

“The important thing is that indigenous communities cannot work only with children or only with old people,” Magga says. “You have to see the community as a whole, and it’s expressed very well in the report that you have to respect the dignity of the communities”.

The Permanent Forum’s chief says the UNICEF report achieved two other important goals – collecting and publishing essential data about indigenous people, and setting an example for other U.N. agencies.

“With this in hand we can go to all the other agencies and say, ‘look what UNICEF did. We want you to come up with a description and, especially, an action plan’.”

“I would have liked to see more on concrete action: what is UNICEF intending to do about these things,” adds Magga. “But I see that as a process. The next step will be to sit down with UNICEF and discuss with them.”

Santos Pais says if she were forced to choose one area in which to focus efforts to assist indigenous children, it would be education.

“Through education you recognise the value of indigenous children; you give an opportunity for the richness of the culture … not to be lost, not to be destroyed but to be preserved … and at the same time (for) indigenous children to be given an opportunity not only to have free choices in their own lives but also to influence their communities.”

She says the study provides a global picture, which is not comprehensive but a starting point.

“At least we have an indication that in Amazonia and Brazil, for example, 50 percent of the children are not registered at birth so they … will be ignored if their rights are violated, if they are trafficked, if they are sexually abused, if they are forced to enter into exploitative forms of child labour.”

“We have an indication that at least gives a very clear urgent call for action,” adds Santos Pais. “For us this is a way of reminding governments of the (policies) made in the past and the need to translate them into very tangible action”.

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