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RIGHTS-NEPAL: Indigenous People Welcome UN Declaration

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Jul 3 2006 (IPS) - Early last century, Parshuram Tamang’s ancestors hiked Nepal’s jungle trails carrying on their backs disassembled motor cars, the first driven by the elite of this landlocked South Asian nation. Their labour was welcome but their rights few.
     Today the Tamangs, one of the country’s largest indigenous groups, have a poverty rate of 61 percent, double the national average.

Early last century, Parshuram Tamang’s ancestors hiked Nepal’s jungle trails carrying on their backs disassembled motor cars, the first driven by the elite of this landlocked South Asian nation. Their labour was welcome but their rights few. They weren’t allowed to travel outside the country or join the bureaucracy.

Today the Tamangs, one of the country’s largest indigenous groups, have a poverty rate of 61 percent, double the national average, “the legacy of historical discrimination,” according to Tamang. He and his colleagues at the Nepal Tamang Association are working to close that gap by creating Tamsaling, an autonomous region in the new Nepal that is being designed and debated in the aftermath of April’s unseating of King Gyanendra.

Tamang told IPS that Thursday’s decision by the new United Nations Human Rights Council, to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, will provide his people with another argument for full participation in the process that they hope will culminate in a new federal state that includes Tamsaling.

“The whole process will consider indigenous voices and the international law on indigenous peoples,” Tamang said in his office in a busy commercial zone in central Kathmandu. “We’ll use (the Declaration) in the constitution making process,” added the member of the U.N.’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, the body set up in 2002 to advise the U.N. on the status and treatment of the world’s more than 370 million tribal, native or indigenous people.

The Human Rights Council approved the Declaration by a vote of 30-2 with 12 abstentions after more than a decade of debate over a draft that was opposed by various states largely because it recognised the collective rights of indigenous peoples to land and the resources contained within.

Although the Declaration will not itself be enforceable, in time it will be recognised as “international customary law”, just like the U.N.’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights. “I think that in the future all countries will accept it as an international common standard,” suggested Tamang.

The council’s decision will be voted on at the U.N. General Assembly in September, where it is expected to pass, he added.

The Declaration will not have an immediate impact on the ground but the council’s decision “has given a positive signal to states to resolve the issues of indigenous peoples amicably; it is a crucial subject for the nations who are facing ethnic conflict and who are prone to such conflict,” said Shankar Limbu of the Lawyers Association for the Human Rights of Nepal’s Indigenous Peoples, in an email interview.

Until April’s “people’s movement” forced the king to give up direct rule over this nation of 25 million people, one of South Asia’s poorest, a Maoist insurgency had transformed hundreds of thousands of lives here. Villagers were forced to flee threats from both rebels and security forces, who also employed brutal acts of torture and forced disappearances. Roughly 14,000 people were killed, mostly innocent villagers caught in the crossfire.

The Maoists called indigenous people one of the “oppressed” groups for whom they launched their war against the state in 1996. Three years ago, their leaders announced the formation of autonomous ethnic zones that correspond closely to those now proposed by the Tamangs and other indigenous peoples, who make up at least 37 percent of Nepal’s population.

Now that the “outlaw” tag has been lifted from the Maoists, their leaders are travelling around the country on speaking tours where they are welcomed by many indigenous leaders. “The Maoists were able to consolidate all national problems – poverty and ethnic, gender and caste discrimination,” says Tamang. “These are interlinked and inter-dependent.”

On Saturday another indigenous group, the Limbus, also called for a federal system to replace the current centralised state. “Nepal should go for a federal system with the right to self-determination like that of Switzerland,” said Kumar Limbu at a seminar organised by the Limbu Students Forum (LSF), reported ‘The Himalayan Times’ newspaper.

Nepal officially recognises 59 indigenous or ethnic groups but some of them can be further sub-divided into more than a dozen groups that speak unique dialects. About 125 languages are said to be spoken in the country.

In Tamsaling, whose borders will be based on the group’s ancestral territory, the first language will be Tamang, said Parshuram Tamang. Up to two other languages can be recognised as official, depending on what language most people decide to communicate in, he added.

Although Tamangs will account for just 35 percent of the population of the autonomous zone – a space equal to about 15 percent of the area of Nepal – they will hold 51 percent of the seats in the legislature “because this is their ancestral land”, said Tamang. Other ethnic groups will be able to declare smaller autonomous zones within Tamsaling, he added.

Tamang said he and other indigenous leaders proposed a federal state after the first people’s movement in 1990, which forced King Gyanendra’s brother Birendra to grant multi-party democracy. But the drafters of the constitution rejected the proposal. “Now this has become a national issue. We were right then, we are right now and we will be right in the future,” he added.