Category: Tribal Solidarity

March 11, 2012

Quebec provincial police went on the march last Friday to dismantle a blockade that a group of Innu citizens erected to protest the construction of hydro transmission lines through their traditional territory.

According to available reports, no one was arrested during the court-backed offensive, which the Innu passively tried to resist. However, a total of thirteen people were arrested, including ten women.

The blockade/checkpoint went up went up on March 5 after Innu representatives walked away from negotiations with Hydro-Québec over the proposed La Romaine Hydroelectric Complex.

The $6.5 billion project includes four new hydro dams that would ultimately provide electricity for various industrial projects including mines and aluminum refineries as part of the Plan Nord, "the Quebéc government's plan to ravage northern Québec, with many ecologically devastating projects slated for development on Innu territory, or Nitassinan, without the consent of the Innu people," comments Collectif solidaire anti-colonial / Anti-Colonial Solidarity Collective.

The project was approved by Quebec's environmental assessment board more than two years ago. However, the Innu communities of Uashat and Maliotenam have continuously challenged that decision because, the Innu say that the board failed to consider how the transmission lines for the project would affect their lands.

Speaking from the blockade, Michael MacKenzie, vice-Chef at Innu Takuaikan Uashat mak Mani-Utenam commented, Everything is peaceful. There’s no aggression from our side. What we’re doing today is legitimate and this is what it’s come to. Our rights have been trampled.”

“We had the Arab Spring, I think we’re now seeing an Innu Spring,” added Christopher Scott, a spokesperson from the Alliance Romaine, who has been supporting the Innu.

Clearly, Hydro-Québec didn't think much of that. Soon after the blockade settled in, the Crown corporation ran to the Superior Court complaining of losses amounting to more than $1/2 million for every day that the blockade remained in place. It also spiced things up by alleging that it would have to shut down any ongoing work on Friday, unless the blockade was dismantled.

On Friday afternoon, the Superior Court granted Hydro-Québec a temporary injunction. The Sureté du Québec made their move later that night.

Video

The injunction will be in effect until March 19, 2012, at which time the matter will be discussed in court.

For those in the Montreal Area, the Anti-Colonial Solidarity Collective is organizing a protest for Monday March 12 to "Demonstrate our solidarity in the face of legal harassment by Hydro-Québec and the arrogance of the Québec state.

18.2.12

As she stands among villagers in the highlands of western Panama, their chosen leader, Silvia Carrera, is an image of bucolic harmony. Then Carrera, elected chief or general cacique of the Ngäbe-Buglé community, gestures to a woman who hands her a bag of spent US riot-control equipment – rubber bullet casings, shotgun shells, sting-ball grenades, teargas canisters.

Panama national police, she explains, used these against her people only days earlier to break up a protest against government plans for a vast copper mine and hydroelectric schemes on their territory. Three young Ngäbe-Buglé men were killed, dozens were wounded and more than 100 detained.

What began with villagers at Ojo de Agua in Chiriquí province using trees and rocks to block the Pan-American highway earlier this month – trapping hundreds of lorries and busloads of tourists coming over the border from Costa Rica for six days – has now placed Panama at the forefront of the enduring and often violent clash between indigenous peoples and global demand for land, minerals and energy. Carrera is emerging as a pivotal figure in the conflict.

“Look how they treat us. What do we have to defend ourselves? We don’t have anything; we have only words,” Carrera protests. “We are defenceless. We don’t have weapons. We were attacked and it wasn’t just by land but by air too. Everything they do to us, to our land, to our companions who will not come back to life, hurts us.”

At the height of the protests, thousands of Ngäbe-Buglé came down from the hills to block the highway; in El Volcán and San Félix they briefly routed police and set fire to a police station. In Panama City, students and unions joined with indigenous protesters marching almost daily on the residence of President Ricardo Martinelli. Some daubed walls near the presidential palace with the words “Martinelli assassin”.

Carrera pulls from her satchel a hastily drawn-up agreement brokered by the Catholic church that obliges the Panamanian national assembly to discuss the issue. It did not guarantee that the projects would be halted. Neither she nor the Ngäbe-Buglé people expressed optimism that the government would keep its word on the mining issue.

“The village doesn’t believe it,” she says, “and it wouldn’t be the first time that the government threw around lies. They do not listen to the village. There was a similar massacre in 2010 and 2011, when there were deaths and injuries. Some were blinded, some of our companions lost limbs.” A cry goes up: “No to the miners! No to the hydroelectric!”

The Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, or territory, sits atop the huge Cerro Colorado copper deposit, the richest mineral deposit in Panama, possibly in all of central America. Pro-business Martinelli, a self-made supermarket tycoon, signed a deal with Canada’s Inmet Mining with a 20% Korean investment to extract as much as 270,000 tons of copper a year, along with gold and silver, over the 30-year lifespan of the proposed mine. Panama’s tribes form 10% of the population but, through a system of autonomous comarcas, they control 30% of the land, giving them greater leverage.

Martinelli could hardly have found a prouder adversary than Carrera who, at 42 and elected only in September, is the first woman to lead Panama’s largest indigenous tribe. “The land is our mother. It is because of her that we live,” she says simply. “The people will defend our mother.” Carrera holds Martinelli in scant regard. She accuses him of “mocking” indigenous people and considers his administration a government of businessmen who “use us to entertain themselves, saying one thing today and another tomorrow”.

Two days before the police cleared the roadblocks, the president invited her to the Palacio de las Garzas in Panamá City for a “good meal and a drink”. The Ngäbe-Buglé chief, who received education to secondary level, was unimpressed. The offer, she said, revealed “a lack of respect”.

In past mining disputes, the government blamed “foreign actors” and journalists for stirring up trouble. Last week it accused the Ngäbe-Buglé of “kidnapping” and “hostage-taking” when referring to the travellers delayed on the highway. By the time the smoke cleared, Panama’s foreign minister, Roberto Henríquez, conceded that his government was “only producing deeper wounds”.

Carrera gestures to women in the group she says have been injured. Over the previous 24 hours she had travelled between towns to ensure that all the protesters had been released, but some reports suggest that dozens are still missing. One woman holds up a bandaged hand, a wound that she says came from an army bullet.

With the dead – including Jerónimo Rodríguez Tugri, who had his jaw blown off, and Mauricio Méndez, a learning-disabled 16-year-old – still lying in the mortuary, Carrera’s anger is plain. “This is the struggle of the indigenous people. We are trying to make contact, asking our international brothers to join us in solidarity. We call for justice from the UN. The government doesn’t want other countries to know about this. That’s why they cut off our cellphone service. We couldn’t find each other. Nobody knew anything. They were trying to convince us to give up.”

Fearful of the environmental and political fallout, governments throughout central America are tightening mining controls. But Martinelli, who came to power with the campaign slogan “walking in the shoes of the people”, seems determined to find a way around legislation that protects indigenous mineral, water and environmental resources from exploitation.

The Martinelli government faces accusations of systematic cronyism in the allocation of more than $12bn in new construction projects, funded in part by increased revenue anticipated from a $5.25bn Panama canal expansion programme. Among the disputed projects is a $775m highway that will encircle Panama City’s old quarter of Casco Viejo, cutting it off from the sea and isolating a new Frank Gehry-designed museum celebrating Panama’s influence as a three-million-year-old land bridge between the Americas. Critics say the road is pointless and Unesco is threatening to withdraw its world heritage site designation if it proceeds.

Despite the region’s history of conflict and shady banking practices, Panama is aggressively positioning itself both as an economic haven (GDP growth is running at close to 7.5%) and a tourist and eco-tourist destination. New skyscrapers thrust up into the humidity like a mini-Dubai; chic restaurants and hotels are opening up .

Officials express concern that the Ngäbe-Buglé and other indigenous disputes may undo Panama’s carefully orchestrated PR push, spotlighting the disparity of wealth in a country where 40% of the population live in poverty. “The government says Good, Panama is growing its economy. Yet the economy is for a few bellaco [macho men],” Carrera says. “But progress should be for the majority and for this we will go into the street, and from frontier to frontier, to protest.”

The tourism Panama seeks is threatening their way of life, she says. Along the coast, private developments are beginning to restrict access to the sea. “We work and we own property, but the tourists take the land and the best property. Then we can’t go there.”

At the bottom of the hill the general cacique waits for a bus to take her and several dozen women to Panama City, 200km to the west, for another anti-government rally, where they will be joined by the Kuna and representatives of the Emberá and Wounaan peoples, who are opposing encroachment of farmers on their land in the eastern provinces. Carrera vows that the Ngäbe-Buglé campaign will continue. “We are not violent. We just want to reclaim our rights and justice. Above all, we want to live in peace and tranquility.”

29.1.12

Eight Temiar indigenous people (also known as Orang Asli) in Malaysia were arrested by the police for attempting to set up a blockade and prevent loggers from entering their village in Gua Musang, Kelantan.

The villagers are against the agricultural project of the local government which would require the cutting down of forest trees in their ancestral land. The blockade, their second attempt at doing so, was made after attempts to negotiate with the state government have failed.

The police also refused to negotiate who removed the barricades and arrested the community residents and their lawyer, Siti Kasim. They were released later that night.

More info and here

26th Jan 2012

In Tibetan culture, where people live in intimate relationship with the natural world around them, reality and mythology have a way of blending together. So it was perhaps no surprise to local villagers when, after a Chinese mining company and local authorities repeatedly repelled efforts stop a gold mining project on the slopes of holy Mount Kawagebo, the mountain appeared to strike back.

Mount Kawagebo, so sacred that climbing is banned, sits on the border between Tibet and China’s Yunnan Province; its eastern side is part of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area UNESCO World Heritage site. In February 2011, a small gold-mining operation started near the village of Abin, which is on the western side of Kawagebo, along the path of an 800-year-old pilgrimage route that circles the mountain, attracting tens of thousands of Tibetans annually.

To the local people, who believe strongly in the sacredness of Mount Kawagebo, direct destruction of the mountain body, through activities like mining, is unthinkable. Further, villagers said the project was started without permission or prior consent. Thus began a community effort to halt the project.

Villagers said their attempts to deal directly with the mining company resulted in threats and violence from agents hired by the company, and harassment and arrests by local police. On two occasions, men armed with wooden sticks with nails attacked villagers, injuring more than a dozen.

After efforts to negotiate with the local government failed, villagers pushed $300,000 worth of mining equipment into the Nu River. A leader of the group was arrested, but later released when 100 villagers surrounded the local police station where he was being held. A few months later, however, mining resumed and tensions grew. Harassment, death threats and attacks on villagers increased, and some women and children fled to other villages to escape the violence.

On January 20, 2012, a village leader who had tried to confront the mining company was ambushed by local police, tased and arrested. Some 200 community members surrounded the police station, and an ensuing riot resulted in violence and injuries on both sides, with at least one villager sent to the hospital with serious injuries. The leader was released, but protests continued as villagers demanded closure of the mine, and hundreds more villagers from the surrounding area joined in.

This time, the local government held negotiations with the community, including the just-released leader, on behalf of the mining company, whose boss had reportedly fled the area. Villagers involved in negotiations said they were offered money in exchange for allowing the mining to continue, but they refused. On January 23, with tensions mounting, a vice-official from the prefecture government ordered the mine closed and the equipment trucked out of the village.

While the persistence of the community to protect its holy mountain ultimately paid off, some villagers suggested the mountain itself had a role to play. During the negotiations, many reported hearing the sound of a trumpet shell—used in Tibetan religious rituals—coming from the mountain, while others reported unusually windy weather, which stopped once the conflict was resolved.

A Tibetan hired to provide catering to the mine workers described being struck by a physical pressure that forced him to drop what he was carrying; only after he prayed did the sensation disappear. Several months earlier, according to another account, a village leader who had accepted bribes from the mining company died suddenly, and a member of his family was seriously injured in an accident.

He Ran Gao, a researcher who works for the Chinese NGO Green Earth Volunteers and has been closely involved with the communities of the area, described the context of these supernatural accounts. “In a place like Tibet, people have an unusual sense of divinity in nature, based on a whole system of worship and interaction, which sometime seems superstitious to modern citizens,” she said. “But it is not necessarily irrational or unreasonable.”

This sense of nature worship, Gao said, with its attendant conservation values, is “barely left due to past communism and later economic development.” But in the Himalayas and other mountain areas, where non-Han ethnicities reside and remain somewhat protected, those traditional values can still be found. She described Kawagebo as a success story showing “how sacred nature can be” and how it can “still be respected, protected and continue to make an impact in people’s lives.”

Unfortunately, Abin is but one of many villages threatened by mining activities—in most other cases, marble quarrying—and a greater overarching threat to the region: hydroelectric dam development.

Along the Nu (Salween) River, the longest free-flowing river in mainland Southeast Asia, a proposed 13-dam cascade—including several dams in or very close to the World Heritage site—would wipe out portions of the pilgrimage route around Mount Kawagebo and displace the communities of the river valley, likely dealing a blow to their traditional culture as well. Although the project was put on hold in 2004 in the wake of widespread protest, it is certainly not dead.

Last year, the World Heritage Committee issued a statement expressing concern over reports of unapproved construction under way at one dam site on the Nu River, and surveying work—including road-building and drilling—at three others. It warned that “the many proposed dams could cumulatively constitute a potential danger to the property’s Outstanding Universal Value.”

The committee asked China to submit by February 1 of this year a detailed list of all proposed dams, as well as mines, that could affect the World Heritage property, along with the environmental impact assessments of any proposed projects, prior to their approval. The committee also requested, by the same deadline, a report on the state of conservation of the property and on the progress made in completing a strategic environmental impact assessment on all of the proposed dams and related development that could impact the site’s World Heritage value.

Many thanks to He Ran Gao, who provided reporting and other source material for this report. He Ran wishes to thank villagers who provided her with information, but whose names have been witheld.