By Francesco Martone*
“While managing our livelihood, day-by-day, we have to face reality, we have to involve in a real fight to keep our forest. We are alarmed and concerned over the increasing cases of human rights violations, violence to our communities, criminalization of our peoples and the murder of our leaders. (…) I have to tell you the fact, that the violence was gross. So, apologize, but I have to say this. To anyone involve directly and indirectly to the killings, the violence and the criminalization of our indigenous brothers and sisters, shame on you!”
The cry of alarm came from Mina Susana Setra, a Dayak indigenous woman from Indonesia, representative of AMAN, the Federation of the Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago, counting almost 17 million members.
Mina, a minute body with a strong and determined voice, was addressing the audience of the “Forest day”, made of experts, negotiators, NGOs, business executives, scientists that – as usual – attend one of the key side events of the so-called COPs, notably the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Bonn last November under the chairmanship of Fiji. Her words echoed a widespread concern among indigenous peoples and civil society delegations attending COP23.
As a matter of fact, while the Paris Agreement adopted two years ago – at least on paper – acknowledges the importance of human rights and the role of indigenous peoples and local communities in providing solutions to climate change, in reality words do not seem to be followed by deeds. If only were this just a technical issue. The general sense among Indigenous delegates in Bonn was somehow as follows: “well, ok, we have been struggling for years for the recognition of our role and concrete contribution to address climate change, now it’s official, even science acknowledges that recognizing our right to land can contribute to mitigate climate change in an effective and economic manner. The point now is that if we demand and claim this right we are killed, prosecuted, or put in jail”. Even more so, if to protect their lands indigenous peoples have to resist large scale infrastructural projects or industrial extraction of fossil fuels, or large dams that should produce clean energy.
Last year has been the bloodiest ever recorded in terms of killings of land defenders: as many as 200 people have died in connection to conflicts over land or the environment, mostly in Latin America, but also in Africa and Asia. Almost half of the cases involved representatives of indigenous communities. This is just the tip of the iceberg of an all-out war against those that protect land and the environment to ensure the survival of their communities and peoples, and thereby contributing to mitigate climate change and conserve biodiversity.
Thousands of Environmental Human Rights Defenders (EHRDs) are threatened or criminalized. This is a story that dates back to 1988 when Chico Mendes was killed for his struggle to protect the Amazon. It is the story of Ken Saro Wiwa and the Ogoni 6 hung in Nigeria because of their opposition to the destructive activities of Shell in the Niger Delta. Or more recently of Santiago Maldonado, a supporter of the Mapuche’s legitimate land claims, first disappeared and then found dead by drowning after a violent crackdown of the Argentinian police that stormed a protest camp in Lof Cushamen, Patagonia.
This case is even more dramatic as its evokes a tragic past, that of the “desaparecidos”, as well as a history of violence and oppression, against the Mapuche accused of being criminals, lazy or even terrorists. In the corridors of the Bonn centre, a huge plastic tent camp raised to host the stands of NGOs and official delegations, and the myriad of side-events, it was easy to run into threatened activists, people in flesh and bones – not numbers of a body-count – whose safety would be put at risk once back home.
Peruvian indigenous leader Robert Guimarez Vazques was in Bonn with the support of Forest Peoples Programme to denounce the situation of his community, attacked by gunmen that killed six peasants, and whose fault is to live in a land coveted by oil palm companies. It is also palm oil companies that in Colombia have taken land away from William Aljure, a peaceful owner, that since then had to endure threats from paramilitary groups. Colombia, together with Brazil and Honduras, is the country with the highest number of killings of rural and indigenous leaders, Since January this year, when the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla entered into force, as many as 60 peasant and indigenous leaders have been killed by new paramilitary groups, hired by private business interested to tap the rich natural resources in lands once occupied by the FARC and now by communities that do not intend to sell their territories.
The last case in the body-count was Mario Jacanamijoy, an indigenous leader found dead, his body showing signs of torture, in the Caquetà province in late November. Going South down the Andes, Máxima Acuña de Chaupe, struggles to protect her community from the expansion of the Yanacocha gold mine, the largest in Latin America, with its toxic legacy of cyanide used to extract gold from the massive quantities of ore removed in open-pit mines.
Women are highly vulnerable, particularly in Latin America, since they suffer from a culture of “Machismo”, compounded by the fact of being human rights defenders and in many cases indigenous. Máxima was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2016. As in the case of the Mapuche, Yanacocha evokes a “colonial” past that has never disappeared. Yanacocha is located in the Cajamarca region where – according to the chronicles – emperor Atahualpa filled an entire room with gold to be given as ransom to the Conquistador Francisco Pizzarro in exchange for his freedom, after the latter defeated the Inca army in one of the bloodiest battles of the “Conquista”.
According to various accounts, the first gold brought to Europe by the Conquistadores was used to gild the decorations in the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome. The Amazon subsoil is rich of the same gold. In French Guyana for example, where a mining megaproject threatens the existence of indigenous peoples, the only ones in the world that live in a piece of Amazon that to all accounts is “European”. Leaders from French Guyana were keen to stress this point this while in Bonn, the final leg of a long European tour of the Guardians of the Forest when they joined indigenous leaders from Africa, Asia and the Amazon.
One of them is Sonia Bone Guajajara, a fierceful leader of the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, that went to Bonn to denounce President Temer government at a session of the Tribunal on the Rights of Nature, chaired by Tom Goldtooth, a Diné Indian American, founder of the IndigenousEnvironmental Network in the United States: “ We are experiencing an ethnocide, an ecocide and a genocide, and the responsibilities are to be found in the Temer government and in the alliance with landowners and agribusiness” .
The situation in the countries of the so-called Socialism of the XXI Century isn’t any better, as evidenced in the stories told by representatives of the Sarayaku people in Ecuador engaged in a years-long struggle against oil companies to protect their right to “Buen vivir” (“Sumak Kawsay” in native language). Bolivian indigenous leader Marqueza Teco Moyoviri de Maleca also spoke at the Tribunal on the Rights of Nature and then at the Indigenous Peoples Pavillion: “See here? Here on my head, I was hit by Evo Morales cops, because we want to defend the protected area of the Tipnis where they want to build a highway. Evo talks a lot of mother earth but had no compassion for us or Mother Earth”.
Francisca Ramirez, “Chica”, vice-coordinator of the National Council for the Defense of the Lake, Land and Sovereignty of Nicaragua, had attended a conference convened in Dublin a couple of weeks before COP23 by FrontLine Defenders, to share her experience with the resistance movement against the Transoceanic canal, strongly supported by President Ortega and the ensuing climate of threat and repression that – however – is not stopping their mobilization.
The number of people killed because of their activism for the environment is growing: according to Global Witness that runs a section on environmental rights defenders in the Guardian website, as many as 157 Environmental Human Rights Defenders, men and women, have been killed as of October 2017. Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders dedicated his 2016 annual report to them, to then focus this year on the role of business in protecting human rights defenders. According to the former report – whose cover page carries the photo of Berta Caceres, an indigenous leader of the Lenca people in Honduras, killed in a ploy of security forces and corporate interests to quell the resistance against the Agua Zarca dam – “
“With the growing global demand for natural resources environment is becoming the new frontline for human rights and out future. In many countries in the world, activities and communities are raising their voices to protect the environment and promote alternative models of sustainable development to protect the planet. For many these are heroes that defend out Earth and our rights. They are not only defenders of land and environment but are HRDs. Their opponents demonize them defining them as antipatriotic and accusing of being against development”:
Extractivism needs to extract value and resources everywhere, to the most remote corners of the Earth, in lands that have been inhabited by indigenous peoples for time immemorial or whose ecosystems are very fragile. Worldwide a flurry of drilling, digging, building, tracing pipelines, raising dams, planting millions of oil palms to meet the demand for “clean” energy is underway. Funds are being invested to protect forests without allowing forest peoples to continue using their resources in a sustainable manner according to their traditional patters. These ecosystems upon which their very survival depends are transformed in carbon credits for global markets to allow those that pollute not to pay but rather to purchase emission permits to the detriment of whole communities that would only get money in exchange.
It is extractive capitalism, stupid! Its social and environmental costs are shouldered by communities all over the works from those that mobilized to defend Standing Rock in the United States, to those that occupied the Hambach forest in Germany to stop the expansion of the Ende Gelaende coal mine, to the people of Salento, Apulia, that hug olive trees to prevent them to be felled to allow the construction of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) terminal, and for this reason are put on trial.
African philosopher Achilles Mbembe would have defined this as “necropolitics”. Italian antipsychiatry founder Franco Basaglia would have called them “crimes of peace”. Regardless of definitions, there is nowadays a clear connection between the extractivist model, global environmental and economic injustice, expansion of free trade and investment agreements, endless appetite of business over scarce resources, the growing “corporate capture” of state apparatuses and the peaking curve of killings of defenders of land and the environment. Global Witness estimates that of the 185 land defenders killed in 2015, at many as 42 were those that opposed to extractive and mining activities, 15 for their resistance to large dams or for the protection of water, 20 for their resistance to agribusiness, and 15 for their activities against illegal logging. In his latest report on business and human rights defenders, Michel Forst goes into detail:
Their important work notwithstanding, defenders are increasingly subject to attacks by States and business-enterprises. Such attacks have taken place in all sectors and all regions. Based on the 450 cases documented by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre in 2015 and 2016, the most common form of attack is criminalization, followed by killings, intimidation and threats. More than 52 per cent of the documented attacks took place in Latin America: Guatemala (10 per cent), Colombia (10 per cent), Mexico (9 per cent), Brazil (9 per cent), Peru (8 per cent) and Honduras (6 per cent). Companies belonging to land-consuming industries, such as mining, agribusiness, oil, gas and coal and dam construction, remain the most dangerous for defenders
What can be done? Recently the UN and the Interamerican Court on Human Rights have launches a common plan to face the tragic situation of human rights defenders in Latin America, but more is needed, urgently, to address the root causes of this underground war, from business behaviour, to impunity, and inaction if not connivance of the State, to the evident connection to the dominant development paradigm and the role and co-responsibility of public and private financial institutions. Social movements from all over the world are campaigning for a global binding treaty for companies and human rights, currently negotiated in Geneva. 2018 will mark the 20th anniversary of the UN Human Rights Defenders Declaration, one more reason to step up the level of attention on the plight of defenders of the land, offering opportunities and proposals originating from communities under threat, allowing them to exchange ideas and experiences and define tools for protection “from below”, in parallel to what organizations such as Amnesty International and FrontLine Defenders already do. Furthermore, local authorities should follow the example of some municipalities that have established “shelter city programs” for activists that need to leave their country for a limited period of time, but want to continue their activities in support of their communities.
Mina’ appeal to the international community was loud and clear “We need protection for our communities. Our right to land and livelihoods has to be recognized”. This must be the first and foremost precondition.
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* Italian activist, former senator of the Republic now engaged in the world of international solidarity, pacifism, environment and human rights. Analysis published in Italian on “QCode magazine”.
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