Friday 29 Mar 2024
By
main news image

This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on June 27 - July 3, 2016.

 

A showdown is in progress between industries that are feeding the global demand for products like timber, minerals and palm oil and the local communities that are standing in their way — and the brutal clash is showing signs of escalating.

A report last week by the UK-based anti-corruption watchdog Global Witness signals that 2015 was the worst year for the killing of land and environmental defenders. The report, entitled On Dangerous Ground, documents 185 known deaths worldwide last year — by far the highest annual death toll on record and a 59% increase over 2014.

Further, it points out that the true death toll is likely to be higher, since many of the murders that are known about occurred in remote villages or deep within rainforests.

For every killing the group is able to document, others cannot be verified, or go unreported. 

The deadliest countries for land and environmental defenders in 2015 were Brazil, where there were 50 deaths, and the Philippines, which saw 33 killings. These are record numbers in both countries. They are followed by Colombia, with 26 deaths.

A particularly vulnerable group is the indigenous people, whose weak land rights and geographic isolation make them frequent targets of land and resource grabbing, the report notes. In 2015, almost 40% of victims were from indigenous groups.

 The cases highlighted in the report are emblematic of the global situation of indigenous peoples, including native communities on our own soil. The harrowing experience of Filipino activist Michelle Campos, for example, provides clues about the ground reality for indigenous communities elsewhere.

Michelle’s father and grandfather were publicly executed for defending their ancestral land against mining in an attack that drove 3,000 indigenous Lumad people from their homes. Rich in coal, nickel and gold, their region of Mindanao is one of the most dangerous in the world for land and environmental activists, with 25 deaths in 2015 alone, the report notes.

 “We get threatened, vilified and killed for standing up to the mining companies on our land and the paramilitaries that protect them,” said Michelle. “My father, grandfather and school teacher were just three of countless victims. We know the murderers — they are still walking free in our community. We are dying and our government does nothing to help us.”

The day after On Dangerous Ground was released, a land rights activist in Sarawak, Bill Kayong, was shot to death in his car. In an immediate reaction, a group of 12 local human rights groups have expressed concern over the threat to defenders of land rights, saying that there have been a disturbing number of attacks on activists in recent years.

Since the slaying is still being investigated, it would be premature to make any connections about the murder, although it has been noted that Kayong was also a political leader and had stood as the PKR candidate in the Benuku seat in the state election in April.

On the global front, another assassination of an indigenous land rights campaigner had shocked the world just over three months prior to Kayong’s killing.

“At around midnight on March 2, 2016, gunmen broke down the door of the house where Berta Cáceres was staying in La Esperanza, Honduras, and shot and killed her,” the Global Witness report says in dedicating On Dangerous Ground to Berta and the many brave activists who, like her, stand up to power despite the dangers to their lives.

“Berta was a high-profile environmental campaigner and activist on indigenous land rights. Last year, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, a prestigious award recognising grassroots environmental activism from around the world,” the citation read.

A troubling aspect of this violence is the role of state actors in the prevalence of the situation. As the report pointedly states:

“Across the world, collusion between state and corporate interests shields many of those responsible for the killings. In cases that are well documented, we found 16 were related to paramilitary groups, 13 to the army, 11 to the police and 11 to private security — strongly implying state or company links to the killings. There was little evidence that the authorities either fully investigated the crimes or took actions to bring the perpetrators to account.”

Associated with this impunity is another alarming trend: the criminalisation of activists is becoming more commonplace, particularly in African countries. Highlighting four cases in Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2015, it shows how rights defenders faced legal harassment by authorities, including being arrested on trumped-up charges.

The specific sectors that were driving conflicts over control of land and natural resources were mining and extractive industries, which accounted for 42 of the killings noted in the report; agribusiness, 20 cases; logging, 15; dams and water, 15; and poaching, which involved 13 killings.

At the root of this conflict is a fundamental clash between the dominant economic system that is based on the commercial exploitation of natural resources on the one hand, and the older way of life of indigenous peoples that is much more in harmony with nature.

In many places, the rights of native societies to maintain their livelihoods and cultural identities are simply ignored by the authorities, despite legal safeguards that ostensibly protect their interests.

“Even where countries have passed laws to formalise land rights for indigenous peoples, enforcement is often stalled by convoluted processes and priority on land reform is given to extractive industries,” the report states.

In the words of the chief governor of a resource-rich indigenous territory in Colombia: “We have serious conflicts with the state about their mining vision. They say that the subsoil is theirs; we say that the land is one with the subsoil; you cannot separate it from a spiritual point of view. This is the war we are waging ... to have the air, the land, the subsoil, together.”

As a result of this conflict, the report bluntly notes, indigenous peoples’ cultural survival is under threat. The defence of their ancestral territories is paramount not just as a source of livelihood but also to maintain their traditional identity and way of life.

For our resource-hungry industries and their powerful backers, the increasingly precarious existence of the indigenous peoples ought to sound an alarm about the folly of pursuing an economic model based on limitless growth.

It brings to mind the basic logic of the statement, ascribed to a native North American, that “when the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realise, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money”.


R B Bhattacharjee is associate editor at The Edge Malaysia

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's AppStore and Androids' Google Play.

      Print
      Text Size
      Share