Defying Logic

Two and a half years after the Bushmen’s victory over the government in Botswana’s High Court, ministers still refuse to allow the Bushmen to use their water borehole, which was a vital source of water for many Bushmen in the dry season, nor have they handed out any hunting permits – without these, it is illegal for the Bushmen to hunt.

As if forcing the Bushmen to walk hundreds of kilometres for water was not bad enough, the government has at the same time approved plans by safari companies to drill their own boreholes to create wildlife ‘waterholes’.

So any tourists visiting the Central Kalahari Game Reserve face the very real prospect of watching antelope and eland coming down to the waterhole to drink at sunset, whilst in the shadows hungry and thirsty Bushmen look on. And that will surely put most sensible people off their gin and tonics.

Not since 1742 has there been an Amazon Indian uprising on this scale resulting in so many deaths.

But the recent violent protests have left dozens dead and Alberto Pizango (pictured), the leader of Peru’s Amazon Indians, taking refuge in the Nicaraguan embassy in Peru.

For months, the protests had peacefully marked desperation at the government’s recent laws promoting the continued opening of indigenous land to oil companies and other groups hoping to exploit the rainforest’s many resources.

Of course not every supporter of the cause joined the demonstrations; Peru’s uncontacted tribes, who face the greatest threat from the government’s contested policies, remain far from the turmoil.

But they also make clear their desire to defend their lands, famously aiming arrows at passing planes.

Nevertheless, the movement has found support from across Peruvian society and beyond, as solidarity rallies gathered worldwide.

At this crucial moment many observers, including British newspaper The Guardian, stand with Pizango, noting that:

Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, is determined to parcel up the forest into blocks for commercial use, encouraged by a free trade deal with America signed three years ago.

More than 70% of the forest has been allocated for oil exploration and the consequences for the Amazonian ecosystem, and the people who co-exist with it, have been dire.

The protests turned bloody last Friday when clashes with the army and police, as they tried to clear a roadblock, left at least 30 people dead and perhaps many more.

The Indian spokesman, Alberto Pizango, who heads a human rights organisation that brings together Amazonian Indian interests from across the country and which has long fought peacefully to protect the forests, has been charged with sedition.

Survival’s Director, Stephen Corry, has said that the Amazon is facing its ‘Tiananmen’ unless its government changes course. There are glimmers of hope, with the BBC reporting that two highly controversial land laws have been suspended.

Now’s a good time to write a letter to President Garcia to join the growing global opposition to his government’s tactics.

As expert custodians of their lands, they have kept the forests of northern Palawan in the western Philippines in good order for thousands of years.

Today, this self-sufficient cultivation is imperilled by misguided forest conservation schemes, made worse by outsiders taking disease in and natural resources out.

A Batak man carries out a rice planting ritual. © Dario Novellino

Remember this?

This was the photo that sent the media dizzy last year and appeared on TV screens and in newspapers and magazines all around the world.

They are members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes, living deep in the remote Brazilian Amazon.

According to Google, news of these photos went to 190 countries. That’s to say, every country in the world bar two.

Does that make this the most famous tribe in the world? Could be.

Previously uncontacted members of the Paraguayan Ayoreo-Totobiegosode group the moment they were first contacted, in 2004. © GAT/Survival

To mark the ‘anniversary’ of the publication of this photo, released last year by Survival on May 29, we have written a report called ‘One Year On: Uncontacted tribes face extinction.’

The thrust of the report is simple. Despite all the media coverage last year and the wave of public outrage sparked by it, uncontacted tribes around the world still do not have their rights recognised.

Their lands are still being invaded. And the tribes themselves are still at risk of being wiped out by violence and by diseases against which they have no immunity.

You can read the report here.

And you can get involved – by writing to people in positions of power.

Tribal people do not just die out. They’re killed – and the people killing them have names and addresses.

Survival’s HQ on busy Goswell Road in central London is a great place to get our message across, and dramatic, large-format posters in the shop window are just the ticket.

Our Stamp It Out campaign targets
racist descriptions of tribal peoples
in the media.

“In 1500 there were 10 million tribal people living in Brazil.Today only 460,000 are left.” Disease from outsiders has decimated Brazil’s indigenous population.

“Next drink - 106 hours.” The Bushmen continue to be persecuted by the Botswana government. Despite having lived in the Kalahari for thousands of years, they aren’t allowed even one waterhole.

Somewhat fittingly for a member of one of the least contacted tribes in the world, Google respected the privacy of our Stamp It Out campaign’s Jarawa model by blurring out her face in Google Street View:

In Oct 2006 Kamará, who is now about 50 years old, narrowly survived an attempt to kill him. He recounted the incident to Felipe Milanez who was then editor of FUNAI’s magazine ‘Brasil Indígena’. Felipe is currently assistant editor of ‘National Geographic Brasil’.

The loggers’ road cuts through the forest. © Uirá Garcia

The attempt to kill Kamará was a real assassination attempt; brutal. He was trembling as he told me one night whilst a young Awá man, named Ramokwanaha, translated for me.

He’d gone off fishing with his family when they bumped into a colonist who fired his gun at Kamará. ‘My daughter screamed and when I turned round with my arrows. I saw she was running into the forest’ he said.

What a terrible feeling it was, to see this Indian recoiling from fear in that way - the same thing I felt when I was held up at gunpoint with a revolver pointing in my face here in São Paulo. I was trembling and could hardly speak.

Kamará himself had survived a massacre when he was uncontacted. ‘My mother and my father died from the karai (or whites’) firearms. This happened when we lived in the forest. I was with them and I saw everything. One shot hit me here’, he explained pointing at his armpit. ‘My brother is still out there in the forest, uncontacted and I am really worried that they will kill him’.

Awá explore the road built by loggers.
© Uirá Garcia

I felt that the settlers around Juruti couldn’t bear seeing the Indians. They got really angry. There are lots of cannabis plantations in the area; the Awá don’t have the slightest idea about these things in our society.

There are attempts to steal their land, and there is always someone crossing the river to cut down trees and take the wood. I remember seeing three trucks along a small stretch of road laden with trunks.

And there’s a myth going round that if anyone bumps in to an Awá in the forest, the Indians will kill. Outsiders imagine they are violent. Travelling along that river is frightening. The FUNAI official is armed with a gun. Round any bend could be an ambush. It’s horrible. I was scared witless.

I spoke with some people living along the river, people who are not blood thirsty but who behaved in a shocking way towards the Indians, and felt that they could just go into their lands to hunt. The Awá are in a really terrible situation.

Find out more and help the Awá here on our website.

UK firm Vedanta Resources is pushing ahead with the construction of a bauxite mine on the tribe’s land as I write this. We are asking all our supporters to help keep this issue in public focus, to put pressure on Vedanta and to defend the Dongria now.

Watch the film, send it to your friends and contacts, and help us make as much noise about this as possible.

Write a letter bringing attention to the Dongria’s plight.

Top government figures denied the claims, while numerous Malaysian and international organisations called for an official investigation and better protection for the Penan.

The two logging companies – Samling and Interhill – whose workers the Penan accused are operating on the tribe’s land without their consent.

A logger’s truck shifts its plunder. © Andy Rain/Nick Rain/Survival

Penan communities have spent more than 20 years trying to keep loggers off their land and to prevent the destruction of the forests they rely on for food and shelter.

The Penan’s resistance has had some success, and their peaceful blockades of logging roads have sometimes forced the companies to turn back. But many blockades have been dismantled and the Penan have suffered arrest and police violence.

Their land is being deforested at an alarming rate, rivers are silting up, animals are disappearing and fish are dying.

The Penan are on the defensive, forced to coexist with more powerful outsiders who are destroying their land, but on whom they must also rely for services such as transport of children to school.

It is hardly surprising that women and girls are vulnerable to sexual abuse by the workers of the invading logging companies.

‘Development’ and disease

As Survival reports in the publication ‘Progress can kill’, tribes worldwide report similar problems when their land is taken from them and when outsiders impose dramatic changes on their lives.

Deaths from AIDS among the Bushmen rocketed after the Botswana government evicted them from their Kalahari home and forced them to live in resettlement camps where they came into regular contact with outsiders and alcohol.

The disease was virtually unheard of in the Bushmen’s communities prior to the evictions, but Botswana as a whole has one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world.

Penan woman and child. © Andy Rain/Nick Rain/Survival

Yanomami Indians in Brazil reported that soldiers were sexually exploiting Yanomami women after an army barracks was built close to their communities.

The Malaysian government sent officials to Penan communities to investigate the allegations, but their findings have been kept secret. Meanwhile, Penan women and girls are still at risk.

Survival hopes that the women’s claims will be investigated thoroughly and sensitively, and that the culprits are brought to justice.

But to prevent further abuse Malaysia must respect the Penan’s rights and let them decide – freely and fairly – whether or not to allow logging, or any other development, on their land.

Join our actions for any of these peoples by writing a letter on behalf of the Penan, a letter for the Bushmen and a letter for the Yanomami.

These letters keep pressure on those making the decisions that lead to this kind of abuse. It’s down to Survival and our supporters to create that pressure so please get on board.

But the real stars are, of course, the Dongria Kondh. They are one of India’s most remote and self-sufficient tribes. Their forests, in the Niyamgiri Hills, are spectacular. And they worship Niyam Raja, the God of their sacred mountain.

But if mining giant Vedanta Resources gets its way, they will be sacrificed at the altar of the Gods of ‘progress’. Among Niyamgiri’s riches is bauxite, the raw material for aluminium. Ironically, the very rocks beneath their forests and villages, the lands which have sustained them since the beginning, may be their destruction.

What will the Dongria Kondh do to defend their forests, their way of life and their mountain God? Watch the film. Let the Dongria take you into their lives and their lands. And, please, help them save their mountain.

This, of course, is the same Anil Agarwal who’s head of Vedanta Resources. Vedanta plans to mine India’s Niyamgiri hills, and thereby destroy the remote Dongria Kondh tribe who live on Niyamgiri’s slopes.

To Forbes, from Survival’s Director, Stephen Corry:

Since when did being a ‘hero of philanthropy’ (Forbes, March 4) involve invading a tribe’s sacred hills, destroying the forests they live in and devastating their lives?

That’s what Anil Agarwal, majority owner and chairman of Vedanta Resources, is doing in Orissa, India. His motive is simply profit, but Mr Agarwal’s plans will destroy one of India’s most remote, and self-sufficient, tribes – the Dongria Kondh. If Mr Agarwal were a true philanthropist, he would talk to the people most affected by his company’s massive industrial projects and respect what they want, rather than blithely assume that what is good for his bank balance is also good for the Dongria Kondh – it isn’t.

Stephen Corry
Director, Survival International