ASIA

- Indonesia: The Struggle for Self-Governance

Since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, a vigorous national struggle for recognition of indigenous rights has found voice in Indonesia. Embodied in the Alianzi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN - the Alliance of the Peoples Governed by Custom of the Archipelago), this movement is demanding recognition of the rights of the indigenous peoples to their lands and to self-governance. Based on the constitutional recognition of adat (custom), the movement seeks to restore to the communities the power lost to the State in the centralising reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. As Pak Nazarius, a Kanayatn Dayak from West Kalimantan and Cooordinator for AMAN's central region notes:

"Under colonialism Indonesia was colonised but the communities had their freedom. Under independence the country got its freedom but has colonised the communities. National reform must mean giving freedom to the customary communities if it is not to be a continuation of the dictatorship."

AMAN estimates the numbers of those living in communities still governed by custom at anywhere between 60 and 120 million people, out of a national population of 200 million. These peoples claim rights in all or most of the country's forests but in doing so they face formidable obstacles. Under the country's forestry laws, some 70% of the national territory was classified as State Forests under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. Most of this forest was then leased to logging and plantation companies, which, in name of sustainable forestry, have been denuding the country of its forests at a rate of some 1.2 million hectares per year for the past two decades. That rate has now increased to some 3 million hectares a year according to the national environment organization, WALHI, mainly to feed the voracious appetite of domestic plywood and paper-pulp businesses that can consume 70 million cubic metres of timber a year (more than three times an over-optimistic official estimate of a national sustainable yield of 20 million cubic metres).

Within State Forests all proprietary rights are by definition extinguished, although customary communities may be permitted to harvest some forest products if local companies allow. But outside State forests mechanisms for the recognition of collective rights in land are also effectively denied. AMAN is thus part of a broad civil society movement calling for radical reforms in natural resource management in line with constitutional agreed principles that recognise that the current systems of natural resource jurisdiction and land tenure are major causes of social injustice, conflict and environmental pillage.

National development policies have carved up the indigenous peoples' territories both physically and in terms of overlapping administrative jurisdictions. The peoples, though, want full authority over their lands handed back to them. As Pak Nazarius puts it:

"In my community our understanding is that we have rights to our land and the natural resources both above and below the land. Everything up to sky belongs to us. Several laws and policies have classified our forests as State forests and the minerals as property of the State. We don't see it like that. I have hair on my arm, on my skin. Both are mine. I also own the flesh and bones beneath. They are also mine. No one has the right to take me apart. But the policy has cut these things apart and thus has cut us into pieces. We want the land back whole."

The demands of the indigenous peoples are favoured, to some extent, by the administrative decentralization effected by law in 1999. These reforms have increased the powers of the local political class, on the one hand intensifying pressure on natural resources to generate revenues to pay local administrative costs and line the pockets of officials and local croneys but on the other hand also bringing government nearer to indigenous communities. In South Sulawesi, at indigenous insistence, local laws have been enacted which now recognize the authority of the Toraja people's customary territorial institutions, lembang. In West Java, a district law now recognizes the territorial rights of 52 Baduy villages. These reforms presage a sea-change in relations between the State and indigenous peoples, which are likely to play out in very diverse ways, for good and ill, in the 360 or so self-administering districts that now comprise Indonesia.

By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: marcus@fppwrm.gn.apc.org

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- Laos: The impact of the Nam Theun 2 dam on indigenous peoples

In July 2002, the World Bank released a "decision framework" on its involvement in the proposed Nam Theun 2 dam. The paper explains how the Bank intends to make a decision on whether or not to give a US$100 million loan for a political risk guarantee on the proposed 1,000 MW dam.

The US$1.5 billion dam has been studied for more than a decade. The project developer, the Nam Theun 2 Electricity Company (NTEC), is a consortium of Electricité de France with Harza Engineering, the Electricity Generating Company of Thailand, Ital-Thai and the Lao government. Without the World Bank's guarantee, commercial financiers will not risk getting involved.

If built, the dam would result in the forced resettlement of about 5,000 indigenous people. Water from the 450 square kilometre reservoir would be diverted via a powerhouse to the Xe Bang Fai, another Mekong tributary. A recent independent study found that 130,000 people, many of whom are indigenous, derive "important livelihood benefits" from the Xe Bang Fai and its tributaries. In May 2002, Bruce Shoemaker, one of the authors of the study, explained to a US Congressional Hearing that if the dam is built, "The flow of the river will be radically altered, flood cycles changed, and rapids (the best fishing areas) submerged."

In its decision framework paper, the World Bank states that "Project preparation has focused on mitigating these negative impacts by ensuring that the design and implementation of plans pertaining to all of the Bank's safeguard policies are carried out so as to meet or exceed Bank standards."

What the Bank does not mention in its paper is that the project has already had a major impact on indigenous communities living in the proposed reservoir area. For at least ten years, a Lao military-run logging company, Bholisat Pattana Khed Poudoi (BPKP), has been clearcutting the reservoir area on the Nakai Plateau. In 2000, a World Bank survey found that BPKP was also running large-scale logging operations around the reservoir, in forests that were supposed to be protected.
The International Advisory Group (IAG), which was appointed by the World Bank to monitor the project, confirms that logging is affecting indigenous communities. In April 2001, the IAG reported that "the progressive clearance of forest and other vegetation from the plateau in anticipation of inundation has resulted in the diminution of areas for food and other NTFP [non timber forest product] gathering including house building materials." In a letter to the World Bank's vice-president, the IAG wrote, "In villages we visited, the people have if possible sunk to a lower level of poverty than they were experiencing five or more years ago."

The indigenous people living on the Nakai Plateau and the surrounding forests belong to 28 distinct ethnic groups, according to anthropologist James Chamberlain, who was hired by the World Bank in 1996. Chamberlain noted that among these people are "Vietic ethnolinguistic groups [which] have not been well classified, and several, the Atel, the Malang, the Arao, and the Salang-X, were hitherto completely unknown."

However, NTEC hired another consultant, Stephen Sparkes, who worked for Norplan, a Norwegian consulting firm. Sparkes wrote that "After conducting fieldwork in the area, I have referred to the Plateau as a 'melting pot culture' since it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish one group from another."

Sparkes' work found the approval of NTEC and the developers subsequently described the people living on the Nakai Plateau as "'indigenous peoples' as a whole since the distinctions between groups are not significant."

Although the people living on the plateau were not consulted before BPKP clearcut their forests, NTEC claims on its web-site that "there have been more than 242 public consultation and participation briefings and meetings which have already taken place at the local, regional, national and international levels for the Nam Theun 2 project."

More than 200 of these "consultations" took place between February and June 1997 in villages on the Nakai Plateau and along the Xe Bang Fai. BPKP was already logging in the reservoir area at this time.

Barbara Franklin, a consultant hired by the World Bank to monitor consultation on the project was extremely critical of NTEC's consultation process.

After the NTEC consultation team's presentations, Franklin asked randomly selected villagers what changes the dam would bring to their villages. She noted that "many of the villagers painted rosy pictures, saying things like, 'Everything will be better, because these people will come to help us'."

Franklin produced more evidence that the information that NTEC's consultants gave during their presentations was overoptimistic and biased. In villages along the Xe Bang Fai, which would not be resettled under the project, some villagers told her that they hoped they would also be resettled.

In fact, many villagers simply did not understand NTEC's presentations, which were in the Lao language. Franklin pointed out that in some of the villages on the Xe Bang Fai, many of the villagers do not speak Lao fluently. The result, according to Franklin, was that "many participants understood little or nothing of the meeting".

NTEC's consultants faired no better with their visual presentations. During presentations in villages on the Xe Bang Fai, the consulting team showed villagers a cross section of the proposed channel which would take water from the power station to the Xe Bang Fai river. The channel would destroy 60 hectares of villagers' rice paddy land. Based on her conversations with villagers after the meeting, Franklin commented that "Most villagers thought they were looking at a picture of a well."

Franklin concluded that it was "unclear whether or not women and non-Lao speaking ethnic minorities have been consulted in a meaningful way as required by World Bank Operational Directives." The examples from her own report, however, make it crystal clear that villagers have not been consulted in a meaningful way.

NTEC states on its web-site that it is "committed to assisting affected households to make an informed choice about resettlement and compensation". In other words the informed choice offered by NTEC is not about whether indigenous peoples want their lands flooded, their rivers destroyed, their forests logged or placed out-of-bounds in the name of conservation, or even whether they want an enormous hydropower project on their land.

Instead, NTEC is presenting the indigenous peoples of the Nakai Plateau with a simple choice: either move or drown.

By: Chris Lang, e-mail: http://chrislang.org

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- Philippines: Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on Biological Diversity

The Philippine archipelago is extremely rich in both biological and cultural diversity. It is one of the world's 12 biologically mega-diverse countries and hosts about 127 main cultural groups.
Biodiversity, however, has been decreasing dramatically and the country is considered one of the most important hotspots (where conservation measures are urgently needed) on the planet. As such, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is quite relevant to the country and vice-versa. Indigenous organisations have been asserting that the history of biodiversity erosion in indigenous peoples' lands is linked to the conversion of lands into mining and logging concessions offered through political patronage, and inappropriate large-scale "development" projects like dams, plantations, etc. The CBD's provisions most relevant to Philippine Indigenous Peoples are those being discussed and advanced under the Ad-Hoc Open-Ended Inter-Sessional Working Group on the Implementation of Art. 8(j) and related provisions. At the last two CBD's Conferences of the Parties (COP5 in 2000 and COP6 in 2002) much of the work developed by the 8(j) Working Group has been adopted as official CBD resolutions. One aspect of this work that is particularly important for the theme being discussed here is the call for effective participation of local and indigenous communities in biodiversity management and policy-making at the local, national, regional and international level.

The CBD, however, might not be completely open to giving full recognition of indigenous peoples' rights although there is increasing realisation that environment and human rights should be dealt in an integrated rather than sectoral manner. As Vicky Tauli Corpuz --Executive Director of the Baguio-based Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Centre for policy Research and Education)-- put it "While it has established the rights of the nation-state over genetic resources, the CBD only acknowledged the need to respect, preserve, and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles. The right of indigenous peoples and local communities to have control over their genetic resources is not even included. With the sustained lobbying of indigenous peoples, however, together with NGOs and sympathetic governments, the elaboration of Article 8j has opened the space for the contracting parties to consider the links between respect of knowledge, innovations and practices and the rights of indigenous peoples over their territories and genetic resources".

The Philippines has been regarded as one of the most active and progressive countries in Asia (and possibly in the world) in terms of recognising the rights of indigenous peoples and developing legislation to implement some of the recommendations stemming from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in relation to bioprospecting. These were developed prior to the setting up of the Art. 8(j) Working Group in the CBD. In May l995, President Ramos signed Executive Order 247 (EO247), Prescribing Guidelines and Establishing a Regulatory Framework for the Prospecting of Biological and Genetic Resources Their By-products and Derivatives, for Scientific and Commercial Purposes and for Other Purposes. Among the provisions referring to indigenous cultural communities (ICCs), EO247 states that the Inter-Agency Committee on Biological and Genetic Resources (IACBGR) --which it set up-- is mandated --under Section 7 (e)-- to "Ensure that the rights of indigenous and local communities wherein the collection or researches being conducted are protected, ...The Inter-Agency Committee, after consultations with affected sectors, shall formulate and issue guidelines implementing the provisions on prior informed consent." In recent months, a new Wildlife Act that will have an impact on the scope and implementation of EO 247 has been adopted. The implementing rules and regulations (IRR) have yet to be finalized and the Act itself has not been put into action, but it is expected that these will impact on the definition and process of bioprospecting.

On October 29, l997, the President signed Republic Act 8371, An Act to Recognize, Protect, and Promote the Rights of Indigenous Cultural Communities/Indigenous Peoples, Creating a National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Establishing Implementing Mechanisms, Appropriating Funds Therefore and For Other Purposes. This is commonly known as the "Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997". Since 1997, many of the IPRA's strong points as well as weaknesses have been highlighted, to the point that while many indigenous groups still think that it can be used in a beneficial way, some others have called for the repeal of the law. Apart from the theoretical and practical ambiguities of the law --especially related to the confusing presence of ancestral domains and ancestral lands, the latter being individual claim, which opened the door to manipulation and commercialisation of indigenous lands-- one main criticism was that the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) does not represent the Indigenous Peoples as the Commissioners were mostly appointed by the President without proper consultation and --especially under the Estrada administration-- were either corrupt or inefficient, or both. The NCIP underwent radical restructuring during 2001 and a new set of Commissioners elected through a more participatory process at the provincial, regional and national levels, was instituted in mid-2001. There seems now to be more trust that the NCIP will truly work in the interest of indigenous peoples.

The Philippines can be considered an interesting testing ground for participatory and rights-based approaches to biodiversity management. This is illustrated by the National Integrated Protected Areas System (NIPAS) Act 1992, and by the use of the IPRA law. The NIPAS Act was introduced with the objective of developing a comprehensive protected areas system and integrate the participation of local communities in protected areas management and decision-making. The participatory approach is supposed to happen mostly through the Protected Area Management Board (PAMB), which is composed of government officers, NGOs, and local community representatives. Several NGOs and Comunity-Based Organisations, however, point out that in many cases the PAMB has not been functioning effectively due to a number of limitations varying from lack of documents in local languages and resources for meetings and workshops, to the fact that the PAMB's chairperson is a government officer and that local people are usually shy to voice their concerns in the presence of government officials. So, at the end, the decision-making power still remains firmly in the government's hands.

Due to the fear of losing control over their resources and destiny, some indigenous groups therefore opt to use the IPRA law to guarantee their rights over land, resources, culture and life rather than rely on externally-proposed participatory mechanisms. An illustrative case is that of the Calamian Tagbanwa of Coron Island, Calamianes Islands, North Palawan. The Tagbanwa of Coron Island have been living on a stunningly beautiful limestone island surrounded by water once rich in marine resources, their main source of livelihood. By the mid-1980s, not having secure legal tenure over these environments, the increasing encroachment by migrant fishers, tourism entrepreneurs, politicians seeking land deals, and government agencies interested in controlling various resources of the island, meant that they were fast losing control over their terrestrial and marine resources to the point that they were facing food shortages. They reacted by setting up the Tagbanwa Foundation of Coron Island (TFCI) in 1985 and applying for a Community Forest Stewardship Agreement (CFSA). They were awarded a CFSA covering the whole island and neighbouring, small, Delian Island, (for a total of 7,748 hectares) in 1990. Soon after they realised that their main source of livelihood, the marine waters surrounding the island were being degraded at an alarming rate by dynamite, cyanide and other illegal and destructive fishing. Through the use of an Executive Order passed in 1993 that allowed the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to issue Certificates of Ancestral Domain Claims (CADC), and the help of a national NGO (PAFID), in 1998 they managed to obtain the first CADC in the country that included both land and marine waters, for a total of 22,284 hectares. They produced high quality mapping of their territories, an Ancestral Domain Sustainable Management Plan, and followed up the development of the IPRA law, successfully using it to obtain a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) in early 2001. The title implies that the Tagbanwa are now in control of decision-making concerning the use and sustainable management of the island's resources. As TFCI Chairman Aguilar puts it "we are a living example of how IPRA can be used successfully by indigenous peoples". The CADC and CADT were put to prompt use when Coron Island was selected as one of the 8 sites under a DENR (EU-funded) national programme called the National Integrated Protected Areas Programme (NIPAP), 1996-2001. The ultimate intention of the DENR was (and still is) to gazette the whole island as a Protected Area, but this has so far not materialised because the Tagbanwa fear that they would once more lose control over the island, although they were promised majority participation in the PAMB. Having gained a CADT over the island they prefer to stick to their right-based approach to resource management rather than accepting an uncertain participatory approach through the PAMB. Several other indigenous communities in other parts of the country are looking at CADT over land and water as a tool to secure their rights.

The cases above suggest that the CBD can become a useful convention to the Philippine Indigenous Peoples only if it contributes to the development of participatory processes that genuinely confer a certain degree of Indigenous Peoples' control over decision-making, and --even more importantly-- openly recognizes and supports a stronger link between biodiversity, indigenous culture and knowledge and rights over territories and resources, thereby accepting right-based approaches to biodiversity sustainable management and conservation.

Despite these positive and interesting developments in participatory and rights-based approaches in the country, in the wider framework of development and environment policy, it should be noted that the economic growth paradigm of the Philippine government and its commitment to the globalisation agenda of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, is pushing for the further conversion of land into industrial uses (the Mining Act of 1995 being a notorious case), which will inevitably lead to more biodiversity and cultural diversity loss. How these tensions will play out and which priorities will prevail will deeply influence the future of biodiversity and indigenous peoples in the country.

By: Maurizio Farhan Ferrari, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: mfferrari@pd.jaring.my

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- Russia: Mapping Evenki Lands in Central Siberia

The uplands between the Yenisei and the Lena rivers are one of the last regions of unbroken boreal forest --"taiga"-- in Eurasia. This region is the homeland to Evenki, Ket, Sel'kup, Sakha, and Dolgan aboriginal hunters and herders. Although Cossack frontiersmen used the Yenisei, Lena, and Lower Tunguska rivers as their main route to subdue and integrate Eastern Siberia into the Russian Empire in the 17th Century, the central Siberian plateau escaped most of the dislocations of Russian and Soviet industrialism in the 19th and 20th Century. The central Siberian taiga remains sparsely populated and one of the main ecological niches for waterfowl, migratory and domestic reindeer, and a host of fur-bearing species ranging from the Arctic fox to the coveted Yenisei sable. Although Russians form the majority in the few cities and urbanised villages of the region, aboriginal hunters and reindeer herders remain the masters of the vast rural spaces today as they were in the 17th Century.

This relatively stable situation has been recently disrupted with the shift to monopoly market capitalism in the former Soviet Union. The Central Siberian plateau is today seen as a vast 'reserve' for oil, gas, coal, heavy metals and forest products. Foreign and domestic Russian oil companies are vying both for access to the subsurface resources of the region, as well as to rights to build all-weather roads and pipelines to ship fuels and wood to foreign markets. The aboriginal people of the region, once hailed as vanguard socialist herders and hunters, are now searching for a new legal avenue to regain a say in the changing political and economic climate around them.

The Forest Peoples Programme in collaboration with the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) has started training local Evenki hunters and herdsmen on how to create their own maps of their traditional lands using portable Global Positioning Systems devices and Geographical Information System software. It is hoped that armed with these tools, the local aboriginal rights association can make better use of existing Russian legislation that controls the access that companies have to the taiga.

Land use mapping is a politically-charged issue in the Russian Federation. Existing Soviet and new Russian legislation regulates access to topographical maps and GPS technology at certain scales. Nevertheless, recently passed federal legislation charges aboriginal and non-aboriginal rural hunters with the responsibility of filing maps and descriptions of their traditional lands with the federal government if they want them to be protected from industrial exploitation. The Federal law protecting 'Territories of Traditional Land Use' allows local communities of aboriginal and non-aboriginal people to remove their lands from the federal land reserve register and thus set them aside for traditional, non-industrial use. The challenge of this collaborative project has been to find a way to use modern mapping tools in a way that respects current laws but which also provides as accurate as possible data on the location of traditional sites so that they may be protected. At present, the main oil consortia in the region are open to listening to reasoned proposals for the protection of certain places for traditional activity and there is great optimism in the region for reaching a negotiated settlement.

The joint FPP/RAIPON project has started work in the most northerly county of the Evenki Autonomous District in the taiga spaces drained by the Lower Tunguska and the Vilui rivers. The region, however, is vast and faces many challenges. In the northern Ilimpei county there are no immediate threats to hunters and reindeer herders from industrial development. However the destruction of traditional settlements and hunting spaces has already started in the most southerly county of the District around the village of Osharavo. Beyond the borders of the Evenki Autonomous District, in Turukhansk County, Irkutsk Province, and in the Taimyr Autonomous District industrial exploitation has proceeded several leaps ahead with aboriginal lands already occupied by pipelines, open-pit mining and clear-cut forestry blocks. There is a lot of work remaining to be done in Siberia and FPP would welcome collaboration from other human-rights organisations who would also like to share this experience with land use mapping.

By: David G. Anderson, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: david.anderson@abdn.ac.uk