• Bangladesh: Sundarban mangrove forests menaced by oil and gas extraction by India
• Indonesia: NGO Coalition resists government push for mining in protected forests
• Malaysia: Sabah indigenous communities' struggle against logging and oil palm plantations
• Thai government targets eviction of Pang Daeng ethnic communities for tourism and tree plantations

LOCAL STRUGGLES AND NEWS

- Bangladesh: Sundarban mangrove forests menaced by oil and gas extraction by India

The Sundarban, covering some 10,000 square kilometres of land and water, is the largest contiguous block of coastal mangrove forests in the world and is part of the world’s largest delta formed from sediments deposited by the three great rivers —the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna— which converge on the Bengal Basin.

The UNESCO had declared a portion of the Bangladesh Sundarban as World Heritage site in 1997, and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) has funded projects to save it from degradation.

The total area of the Bangladesh part of the Sundarban is 5,771 square kilometres (almost 62 per cent of the total), of which 4,071 square kilometres is land and the rest water. The rest lies in India, stretching along the Bay of Bengal.

Both countries had declared that they would apply all effective means to conserve the heritage of the Sundarban. Accordingly, they adopted the 77 million US Dollar India-Bangladesh Sundarban Biodiversity Conservation Project in 2004. However, at that time both countries were planning to extract hydrocarbons from the Sundarban.

News have now widely circulated that India will unilaterally extract oil and gas from its portion of the Sundarban with effect from January next year. The Indian Government has concluded an agreement with the Indian Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). The chairman and managing director of ONGC said in a press conference on 19 August that the ONGC will start drilling near the coast of the Bay of Bengal about 150 km from the Sundarban.

The India-Bangladesh Sundarban Biodiversity Conservation Project has proved useless, since it has not shown any reaction to this unilateral declaration by India.

Indian environmental scientists have warned that Bangladesh will not be the only loser if India extracts hydrocarbons from the Sundarban --India will also suffer environmental disaster. As Ashraf-ul-Alam Tutu, Coordinator of Save Sundarban Campaign said, "the people of the world have proof that whenever hydrocarbon exploration has been conducted in a mangrove forest, environmental disaster has been the result."

Article based on information from: “India to extract hydrocarbons in Sundarban from January”, Shaun Haque in Dainik Prabartan, Khulna, Sunday 12 September 2004, sent by Save Sundarban Campaign, e-mail: cdp@khulna.bangla.net

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- Indonesia: NGO Coalition resists government push for mining in protected forests

Indonesian Law No. 14/1999 bans open-pit mining activities in protected forests and prompts several mining companies to suspend their operations. In July, the Indonesian Parliament endorsed a Presidential decree to amend this law (Perpu No. 1/2004), which stipulates that all mining contracts signed before Law No. 41/1999 on forestry came into effect are valid for the remainder of their terms. The decree provides political justification for 13 mining companies to operate in protected forests. This is the point of entry for a process of destruction in the days to come. Inevitably, the other 145 mining companies which were not named in the presidential decree will demand the same dispensation from the government. This spells disaster for 11.5 million hectares of protected areas claimed as mining concessions.

“Conflict and ecological destruction will be ongoing at the mining sites newly licensed by the government. And this will worsen suffering for local communities whose livelihoods depend on forests," concluded Siti Maimunah, National Coordinator of the Indonesian Mining Advocacy Network, JATAM.

Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Purnomo Yusgiantoro had previously warned of legal repercussions should Indonesia fail to honor its mining contracts. Longgena Ginting, National Executive Director of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment, WALHI, argued: "The threat of international arbitration must not become a spectre instilling fear in parliament over the ban on open-pit mining in protected forests. The Indonesian government should follow the example of the Costa Rican government which had the courage to face off the threat of international arbitration by foreign companies, for the sake of protecting forests and thus defending the interests of the community and environment."

To restore Indonesian legal standards, the NGO Coalition Against Mining in Protected Areas will take legal action relating to the Perpu. This legal action will also extend to the company PT Nusa Halmahera Minerals (owned by Newcrest Mining of Australia) which started open-pit mining in the Toguraci Protected Forest, after the 1999 Forestry Law ban but well before the Perpu decree and presidential decree. PT Nusa Halmahera Minerals clearly broke the law, especially clause 38(4) of Forestry Law No.41/1999 which explicitly prohibits open-pit mining in protected forests.

The NGO Coalition has also called on all levels of the community, both at the mining sites and in the wider public which will experience the impacts of environment disasters resulting from forest destruction, to closely examine the policies which have recently been taken by the Indonesian government and which have the potential for great losses for the community.

Article based on information from: “Press Release - NGO Coalition against mining in protected areas”, sent by WALHI, E-mail: walhi@walhi.or.id , http://lama.walhi.or.id/ ; “Indonesia: Legislators say no to mining in protected forests”, Jakarta Post, Kurniawan Hari, http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=33160

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- Malaysia: Sabah indigenous communities' struggle against logging and oil palm plantations

Representatives of the Murut, the Kadazandusun, and the Rungus, and some 30 more tribes coming from the remote region of Tongod, traversed in July of this year northern Borneo to reach the gleaming office of Sabah’s Deputy Chief Minister of Land, Datuk Lajim Haji Ukin at the capital city of Kota Kinabalu.

The group was there to demand the government to abide by its own laws, recognize native rights to protect and manage their natural resources, and halt reallocation of lands to logging and plantation corporations.

In Tongod and across Sabah, entire villages have been resettled against their will. Vast areas of rainforests and farms have been clearcut, and burial sites and fruit orchards have been destroyed. Replanting in oil palm monocultures is causing massive erosion, landslides, river siltation, and contamination from pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. The loss of wild foods, shelter, building materials, and medicinal plants causes economic hardship unlike anything the indigenous people have faced before. Peaceful protests have resulted in both government silence and police repression.

Village headman Wilster L. made a passionate speech but it fell on unsympathetic ears. “We need this kind of development,” the Deputy Minister said, “so that infrastructure such as roads in the area will be more practical.”

Frustration and despair are running high in Tongod. As Naomi, a woman from Wilster’s village reflected, the loss of the forests is also a loss of her home and identity. “How can they come here and take our land and cut the trees my father’s father planted? This must be illegal. They cannot treat us this way.”

With the assistance of community support organizations, Wilster and others from Tongod are now trying a new strategy --they’ve filed a court case against the State and two plantation companies: Hup Seng Consolidated Berhad and Asiatic Development Berhad. The case is the first deliberate test of Sabah’s land tenure laws with regards to indigenous peoples.

Residents of Tongod were encouraged by a landmark case in neighboring Sarawak, in which the Malaysian Judge Ian Chan expanded the definition of native customary lands from just farmlands actively cultivated by villagers to include streams, forests, and traditional hunting grounds used by the community, and thus ruled that indigenous people from the village of Rumah Nor held customary rights that trumped government concession-granting. This decision stopped Borneo Pulp and Paper company bulldozers in their tracks.

Since the legal victory at Rumah Nor, dozens of indigenous communities in Sarawak have flooded the courts with similar cases against encroaching plantation developers. However, they face difficulties: legal proceedings in other Malaysian states are painfully slow, and also there is a risk of losing rights in hostile court decisions.

Once again, the mainstream kind of development is at odds with the welfare of the people and the environment.

Article adapted and excerpted from: “Sabah Tribes Rally Against Corporate Takeover of Land”, Earth Island Journal,
http://www.earthisland.org/eijournal/new_articles.cfm?articleID=908&journalID=80

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- Thai government targets eviction of Pang Daeng ethnic communities for tourism and tree plantations

Ms. Mai of the Palaung ethnic community and mother of three children in Pang Daeng village of north Thailand has been camped in front of Chiang Mai City Hall for the past few weeks. Along with about hundred members of her community, she came to petition the Chiang Mai governor for the release of her husband Mr. Tan Bortuk and others.

Thailand’s Royal Forestry Department (RFD) arrested and jailed Tan Bortuk along with 47 other ethnic peoples including elderly people and pregnant women from the Pang Daeng village on 23 August 2004 on charges of illegal encroachment into Chiang Dao National Forest Reserve. On September 9, the Chiang Mai Provincial Court released the 48 ethnic people on bail and will take up preliminary hearings on the case next month.

Over the years, the RFD’s harassment and repression of local communities especially ethnic minorities settled inside national forest reserves is not uncommon as the state attempts to classify forest lands into national parks or retake village lands for industrial tree plantations and tourism development.

But for the small Pang Daeng community of Lahu, Lisu and Palaung ethnic minorities, located in Chiang Dao forest of Chiang Mai province, the arrests are a recurring nightmare.

The first arrests started in 1988, with the RFD putting 19 Palaung ethnic peoples from Pang Daeng in jail. In 1998, the arrests went up to 56 including Lahu, Lisu and Palaung ethnic peoples; the charges were subsequently dropped and they were released under the agreement that the community would leave their lands. Now in August 2004, 48 people from Pang Daeng are in jail some for the second time.

Mai explains that, “The methods are usually the same. In the late evening or early dawn, hundreds of fully armed military and border police forces along with forestry officials enter the village. They break into houses and lead villagers into the waiting trucks. The officials often assure the villagers that they are being taken for a ‘meeting’ or that ‘the government is providing free blankets’.”

The arrests are random and no one is spared in the dragnet: in 1998, a 14 year old boy from a nearby village of Pang Tong was detained on his way home although he had just been visiting the Pang Daeng community for a day to mortgage his family’s motorcycle; this year, a pregnant Palaung woman was arrested.

Tan Bortuk, 45, was jailed in 1998 and released after almost a year. He is now back in jail. Mai could not afford even the 40 baht (US$ 1) to visit him in Chiang Mai; the bail amount set at 200,000 baht (US$ 5,000) is beyond her reach.

Continued state harassment has forced severe food shortages on the Pang Daeng people, as they are unable to resume daily activities working as hired labour in the orchards and rice fields or tourism in Chiang Dao. Fear has driven many people to sleep in small groups in the forest rather than in the village.

There are a number of reasons for the state to repeatedly target the Pang Daeng community but the main factor is the range of commercial interests involved: influential Thai business groups in Chiang Dao district want to build resorts and other tourist facilities in the scenic mountain area as well as expand fruit orchards; the RFD wants the area for commercial plantations of teak and other species; illegal logging by influential outsiders is also rampant in the area.

Tourism in Chiang Dao has rapidly expanded since 1995. The Chiang Dao Mountains are well-known for their scenic beauty – towering above the paddy fields is Doi Luang, a soaring peak of limestone rock that stretches 2,195 meters up into the sky; the centuries-old limestone geology of the area has created vast tunnels and caves dotted in the mountains. Given the high money stakes involved in tourism, state and business interests would rather have the Pang Daeng community removed from the area to make way for more resorts as well as fruit orchards and tree plantations.

Many of the Palaung people moved from Burma across the border to Thailand to escape the forced labour by the Burmese military. Ironically, however, after they moved to Thailand, the RFD began to use them as unpaid labour for its “reforestation” projects.

Mr. Aai Sangoii, 32, arrested once in 1998, says: “The RFD gave some land and hired us to do about 600 rai of teak reforestation in Pang Daeng Nai village. But although we planted their saplings, we only got paid some money for food but never for our labour.

“Last year, the RFD provided the Pang Daeng villagers with 1000’s of saplings of teak and other species and told them to replant in the surrounding forests. The villagers walked long distances to reach the forest areas and used about 5 days for replanting. A few days later, the Minister of Natural Resources visited the area and said the villagers were a good example of cooperation with the government. We don’t know if the saplings have survived.”

Kingkorn Na Ayuthaya, of the Northern Development Foundation in Chiang Mai, states that, “Most of the RFD’s reforestation projects are never actually intended to recover degraded forests but only to get a large budget. The officials use some of the money for saplings and to pay village people for replanting. But usually there’s a lot of corruption. It’s not surprising that many reforestation projects fail and the planted trees don’t last very long.”

Few of the Pang Daeng people have full Thai citizenship status as they are comparatively recent migrants to the area, many having moved in around the early 1980s and thus have little recourse to the laws protecting Thai citizens. Forestry officials eager to accomplish “annual reforestation targets” or to prove their official zeal in protecting upland forest areas exploit this situation.

Forest politics in Thailand has an underlying dimension of racial and ethnic prejudice. State officials and lowland Thais find it convenient to scapegoat upland ethnic minorities for ecological problems in the watersheds in north Thailand. Particularly since the late 1980s, increased water shortages have resulted in lowland Thai farming communities putting pressure on ethnic communities living and farming in upland areas to move down to “protect the upland watersheds”. This is despite the fact that the water shortages are usually attributable to increase in lowland cash crop and orchard farming and the expansion of urban areas, golf courses and tourist resorts rather than the upland farming of ethnic communities.

Kingkorn Na Ayuthaya adds, “The Pang Daeng community is an easy target for racially or ethnically motivated state officials to prove they are protecting the ‘upland forests’ from ‘hilltribes’.

This time, the arrests of the Pang Daeng community also serve a more insidious agenda of the RFD. Since the 1990s, rural people’s movements allied with nongovernmental organisations have fought for stronger legal recognition of forest-dwellers’ rights. Thailand’s 1997 Constitution contains several provisions protecting the rights of forest-dependent communities and ethnic minorities. But if the RFD can convince the court to order the eviction of the Pang Daeng community for forest encroachment, they would obtain a legal precedent encouraging further state arrests and intimidation of forest-dwelling communities and ethnic minority groups all over Thailand.

The Pang Daeng ethnic peoples are not willing to give up their lands and move from the area. The community has petitioned the Prime Minister, United Nations (UN) offices in Bangkok, the National Human Rights Commission and the National Lawyers Council. Civil society organizations have supported the community through merit-making ceremonies and fund-raising to assist the family members of the detained villagers.

Ms Anchalee Ponkleang of the nongovernmental group, Intermountain Peoples Education and Culture in Thailand (IMPECT) stated: “We are demanding that the provincial government set up a committee to solve the forest problems over the long-term. The government has to deal with the issues of citizenship as well as secure rights to housing and farmland for the Pang Daeng community.”

By: Noel Rajesh, e-mail: noelrajesh@yahoo.com , and Helen Leake, International Alliance of Indigenous Peoples (Chiang Mai Secretariat), e-mail: helen@international-alliance.org