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Argentina: trespassers in the nature reserve

By Marcela Valente

Pizarro, Argentina, Aug. 11 (IPS)— The Argentine government’s decision to sell off a nature reserve in the northwestern province of Salta for farmland has not only serious environmental implications, but also shapes the future of a community who do not want to leave their land at any price.

Not that they live in the lap of luxury. In fact, the 3,000-plus people of Pizarro — a town in this former reserve in the department of Anta, Salta province — barely eke out a living, and besides that, they are now legally considered “trespassers.”

“Even with land and livestock, farmers here are poor or indigent,” Carlos Ordóñez, a community representative, told IPS.

But in spite of the hardships, no one wants to leave the land they inherited from their forefathers -- land which, moreover, was declared a nature reserve in 1995 in order to protect the native forests of this region which are home to endangered plant and animal species.

Representatives of the Salta provincial government have visited Pizarro three times in the past two months to propose that the local residents move, so that their land can be passed on to soy producers who bought it by auction after the reserve was stripped of its protective status.

The decision this year to de-classify the area as a nature reserve was unprecedented in Argentina and drew severe criticism from environmentalists and strong resistance from those who have lived there all their lives.

“I was born here in the forest, the town is not for me,” Nicasia Reyes told IPS, leaning on the log fence around the paddock where she keeps her cattle. Every time they bring the papers offering her a mere 25 acres somewhere else, she refuses to sign. It’s not that she can’t read, she said: “I just can’t see the letters very well.”

Reyes, 46, has been widowed twice and has 12 children. Her first husband died of meningitis at the age of 42 and the second “was stabbed by his brother,” she said. The family’s only income comes from the cheese she makes by hand from the scarce milk her cows produce. They graze freely in the woods.

Each cow provides up to a gallon of milk per day. If Reyes had dairy cattle or better pasturage, yields would be four gallons per day, explained Ordóñez. She needs to milk at least eight cows for each 7-9 pound block of cheese she sells, he explained.

“With what these animals eat they can’t give more than that, there is no government technical assistance here to help improve yields,” said Ordóñez. But the people of Pizarro know nothing of technological advances nor efficient production.

Casimira Gómez, 73, is another who does not find the idea of leaving Pizarro attractive. “I don’t want to leave here. If they take us to a town what animals will we be able to raise?” she asked IPS. The old woman keeps cows and goats that roam the forest in search of forage.

Her only farm structure is a small log-fenced paddock where the goats crowd in. She knows each of the animals by sight and counts them when they come home. Sometimes she loses one to predatory animals in the forest, but sees it as one of the risks of this way of herding.

“With technical support, the ‘puesteros’ (as local small-holders are known) could put up barb-wire fences, improve grazing and raise livestock that would provide them with good milk and meat. But with what they have now, even with 100 animals and 2,000 hectares [5,000 acres], they live very poorly,” said Ordóñez.

Lorenzo Cosme is another producer who seems better off than he is to a hurried observer. He has a large farm with a good water supply, but on closer inspection, his farm is on the verge of collapse, and it becomes clear that he barely scrapes by.

Cosme grows corn to feed himself, keeps animals on unfenced land and makes ropes out of tapir leather. He uses these to lasso livestock when animals get stuck in out-of-the-way parts of the forest. He also uses them t o tie up animals when he has to vaccinate them or care for their injuries.

As soon as IPS arrives, Cosme says he is concerned about his water supply. “La Moraleja” a large company funded by Spanish and French capital, has moved into the higher regions of the forest, beyond the former reserve area, and is threatening to leave the local farmers without water for subsistence and livestock.

“We have to kick up a fuss,” Ordóñez told him.

Ordóñez is trying to encourage local people to protest over the sale of the reserve. Their lands are currently in the appropriation process. Some legal issues need to be resolved before the people can be evicted and the new owners take possession.

Cosme said raising cattle on open land is certainly more expensive than if it were fenced, because it is hard to keep an eye on animals which are unwell. But fencing is not a feasible option.

“It costs 180 pesos [$60] per 1,000 meters [3,280 feet],” he explained. In any case, he has no intention of leaving the place where he has always lived.

“The people suffer in silence, they are scared of protesting,” explained Ordóñez. “The government says it is [the international environmental watchdog] Greenpeace that is objecting to the sale, because it prefers to ignore the fact that there are thousands of us wanting to protect this reserve,” he added.

Ordóñez keeps bees and also has a shop in Pizarro along with his wife, Beatriz Ponce. The two agree that the business is “taking on water.”

“We have no way of expanding a market which is permanently shrinking. Imagine what it will be like when all the fields are planted in soy,” said Ordóñez.

Their shop sells staple foods and cooking gas. But more than 80 percent of the people use wood for cooking and heating, said Ponce. The couple took out a bank loan to start producing honey, which was paid off at a very high interest rate.

“They are offering us loans to leave, but I already know what it is like paying them off,” she said.

In addition, there are 25 indigenous Wichi families living in the reserve, and they are also unwilling to move. The women and children do not speak Spanish. The men speak a little, as they were forced to learn in order to work in sawmills or collecting wood for farmers around the reserve.

Now Spanish is used to voice their objections. Donato, one of the community leaders, is worried about the sale of the reserve, and attends the meetings of local residents who are organizing resistance.

He told IPS that Wichi women make crafts out of vegetable fibers and seeds from the forest.

The men sell dry wood and collect six different types of honey. When asked what their main type of employment is, Donato invents the term “mielamos” (we honey). They also hunt animals for food. Now they are thinking of planting pumpkins, but losing reserve status will cut short those plans.

“If this is sold, where are we going to plant?” he asked indicating the woods around the Wichi settlement.“If they take it from me, where are we going to go? On this land we have honey, we have quirquincho [a type of armadillo], iguanas... if they want to sell it, they can at least leave us a little land,” he said.

But what Donato needs for his community is far more than the authorities want to give him. They are offering 25 acres, but his people need 5,000 for hunting and gathering, which requires a large area to function properly.

“We don’t have a cash income like the Spanish speakers. If this is sold how are we going to live?” he asked.

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The island idyll and the US occupation

By David McNeill

Aug. 12— Natsume Taira is a mild-mannered, bespectacled parson and pacifist in the Martin Luther King mode, but he warns he will not be pushed too far. “If the authorities come back with more people we’ll be waiting for them,” he says. “I’m not a violent man but they’re not going to get through.”

It is a baking hot day in Henoko, a tiny fishing village in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture. For 110 days, the reverend and 8,000 supporters have been coming to this sun-bleached beach to fight off government engineers trying to begin drilling surveys for a proposed offshore helicopter base for the US military.

As the protest has dragged on, engineers and protesters, many in their sixties, have scuffled. White-haired pensioners have gone toe-to-toe with security guards and taken to canoes and wetsuits to block the invaders. “I’m full of anger,” 64-year-old Sakai Toyama says. “How can they do this to this place? We already put up with so much.”

Okinawans live in one of the most beautiful places on earth, a string of pristine islands anointed in tropical sun, bathed in the azure-blue waters of the Pacific, and coated with a lush carpet of green, spiked with palm trees.

The region has two claims to fame: the world’s longest life-span and one of the world’s largest concentrations of US military bases. The Americans invaded in 1945, mounting a savage attack that wiped out a third of the local population and left 50,000 US troops killed or injured. They never left.

In 1972, the islands reverted to Japanese rule but most of the bases stayed. The bases already occupy a fifth of the main island and include Kadena, the biggest and most active US Air Force base in east Asia, and Futenma, which occupies 25 percent of the second-largest city, Ginowan.

Now, after years of promises by Tokyo and Washington to scale down the military presence, the plan to build the Marine base, 8,000 feet by 3,000 feet, over a coral reef off Henoko to replace an older base in Futenma has enraged the people. Takuma Higashionna, a fisherman, says: “They’re going to steal our livelihood and destroy the local environment, and we’re not going to stand for it.”

Higashionna has just returned from San Francisco where he filed a suit against the US Defence Department, claiming the base threatens the habitat of the imperiled dugong, a gentle sea mammal classed as a “natural monument.”

More than 50,000 US military personnel and dependants, including 17,600 Marines, are on Okinawa, which has a population of 1.3 million; the US military controls much of the land, sea and air, including all air traffic up to 3,000 feet. Over the years, Okinawa has sent off troops to wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and if war with China or North Korea comes, US troops from Okinawa will fight it, whether the Okinawans like it or not.

Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant and author of Okinawa: Cold War Island, says: “It is simply unimaginable that an ally would do this sort of thing. It’s just an accident waiting to happen.

“When [US Secretary of Defence] Donald Rumsfeld visited Okinawa last November, he was told by the island’s governor, ‘You people are on the active volcano and when it explodes it is going to bring down your entire strategy in Asia in much the way the fall of the Berlin Wall did for the USSR.’ Building a 39th military base in Okinawa is absurd.”

The past four weeks or so have been typical, the people say, just low-level stuff: On July 8, a Marine major charged with the rape of a Filipina base worker was convicted of molestation. On July 16, an Okinawan was hurt in a hit-and-run accident traced to a soldier at Camp Hansen. On July 23, a drunken off-duty Marine hit a policeman. On Aug. 8, another Marine attacked a taxi driver. The day before, the US Air Force had admitted that a 5.5 pound piece of metal embedded in the garden of a house had fallen from an F18C fighter in June. The Okinawa Times made it the lead story and asked: “What if children had been playing in the garden?”

Nothing major happened; nothing like the rage that overtook the island in 1995 when two Marines and a sailor kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old girl and left her for dead, a crime that capped years of brutal sex crimes. This is what happens, said the thousands who came out in Okinawa’s largest protest, when you train young men barely out of their teens to kill like machines on a crowded island that does not want them.

The gang rapists knew that if they made it back to base before the police found out, they were safe under the Status of Forces Agreement that protects US forces here, which is why most of the rage was directed at the Japanese government that foists 75 percent of all US military bases in Japan on this little speck in the Pacific. Islanders believe they are bearing the burden of Japan’s military alliance with the US and, with it, America’s military strategy for east Asia.

Shoichi Chibana is Malcolm X to Natsume Taira’s Martin Luther King, a firebrand famous on the island for burning the Japanese flag on national television. “The Japanese government wants US military protection but it knows they can never move these bases to the mainland because there they would be kicked out,” he says.

These days, Chibana fights for the return of 2,500 square feet of ancestral land, part of almost six million square feet leased by Tokyo to the US military. “Here, we’re powerless so they get away with it. This is the best place in the world for the US military. They love it here. The Japanese government pays them $58 billion year. They pay for their houses, their fuel, water, cars. The only thing the government doesn’t pay is the salaries of the soldiers.”

The 1995 protests were a watershed and forced the US and Japanese governments to agree to return Futenma Marine Corps air base to Okinawa within five to seven years. The agreement was timed to greet the arrival of Bill Clinton, then US president, who had come to Japan to renew the US-Japan security treaty. Clinton shook hands with the then Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and the protesters left the streets. Today, the return of Futenma is still 16 years away and another base is being built.

Military planes constantly roar overhead and the narrow roads are choked with green machines. The soundtrack to this pounding symphony of moving machinery is Limp Bizkit, Nickelback and Slipknot, the music that leeches from cars driven by military personnel and the bars that cater to them. Most of these bars are on a strip outside the main gate to Camp Hansen in the village of Kin, where riots against the bases in the 1970s shook the shaky truce between the military and the people to its core.

In one bar, the Japanese mama-san, who claims she knew R. Lee Emery, the pit-bull drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket, says the Henoko protesters are “idiots,” adding: “The bases bring revenue.”At 7pm, the bar is starting to fill with big, tattooed men with boy’s faces.

Major Michael Brown, the veteran convicted of molesting the Filipina base worker in July, said about the Kin strip during his trial: “GIs go to the bars and drink like fish, get into fights, and pay mama-sans for the company of young ladies. Deals are made for hand-jobs, blow-jobs, full, unadulterated sex, and just about anything in between.”

The area around the strip has been the site of dozens of rapes and attempted sex assaults; few Okinawan women will go there after dark. The word many islanders use to describe this situation is “occupation.”

Tatsuno Kuba, a mother raising four children in the shadow of Kadena, says: “Why should they be able to stay and take all the best land? Some people say the US soldiers are shut up in the bases, but they can come out anytime they like to drink and play and grab local women. We’re locked out of our land.

“They train people to kill behind those fences. I can hear them shouting all the time. Every day my house fills up with the smell of gasoline, the windows shudder and the engines drown the kids’ lessons. And the planes roar over so close. It’s only a matter of time before they kill someone again.”

Like most islanders, she knows planes regularly crash inside and outside the bases. In the worst, in the 1950s, a jet fighter hit a school, killing 17 children and injuring 121.

The Japanese government has responded to the anger by pouring in cash from the public trough, and backing political conservatives such as the present governor, Keiichi Inamine, who replaced the fiercely anti-base Masahide Ota, who wrote in the Asahi newspaper: “When local people are denied free use of their own land, air and sea how could they be considered citizens of a free nation?”

The refrain from Tokyo and from the Governor’s office is that if the bases go the economy will collapse. Ota says: “Base-related revenues make up only 5 percent of the total. There would be jobs for 10 times more people if the US forces were to vacate their bases in urban areas and the returned land was developed.” He believes Okinawa could earn much more from tourism. “The bases are hampering the development of Okinawa’s economy, not sustaining it.”

The Henoko movement arrives at a crucial time. Washington is experimenting with plans for a more mobile, decentralized military, and, with South Korea increasingly chafing against the US presence there, Japan is seen as the key regional centre of control.

Johnson says: “The US must prevent what happened in Korea, which is the more genuine anti-American democracy, and the Americans there are just hated. Rumsfeld is not worried about democracy but he knows Okinawa is prone to something that may be outside the control of the government.”

Douglas Lummis, a former Marine and now political scientist who lives in Okinawa, says: “People have been saying for years, ‘Of course we don’t want the bases.’ Then they lower their voices and say, ‘But what can we do.’ Now they have something. I think the Henoko battle will be won and it will energize the anti-base movement.”

The Rev. Taira says the islanders have had enough. “The soldiers get drunk and crash their cars. There are four accidents a day; two rapes a month. Almost every person on Okinawa has a family member who has been assaulted. Then the soldiers go off to kill poor people in Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes my blood boil.”

Source: Independent (UK)

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Free from slavery but bonded to hunger, 200,000 grab land in Nepal

By P.C. Dubey

Lumbini, Nepal, Aug. 13— Over 200,000 Nepalese tribals freed from slavery and living in makeshift tents have grabbed more than 10,000 acres of government land in protest against the state’s failure to rehabilitate them more than four years after their release.

In July 2000, Nepal had officially declared the Kamaiya system — bonded labor — illegal and freed the laborers belonging to the Tharu tribe from the clutches of landlords who had given them ruinous loans.

According to 62-year-old Anirudha Shakya, a Tharu Buddhist monk from a village in Dang district, some 249 miles southwest of the capital Kathmandu -- while the tribesmen have been freed from the yoke of the landlords, thanks to official apathy, they are still in the grip of poverty.

“The laborers have launched the mini revolt because of the state’s failure to grant them land promised four years back,” explains the monk affiliated to the indigenous Nepalese Buddhist Bhikshu Mahasangh (Confederation).

According to a land reforms official of Dang district, since July 17, the day of the fifth anniversary of their liberation, “The ex-Kamaiyas have already occupied over 10,000 acres of government land.”

The official says the ex-Kamaiya’s were running amok and grabbing government land wherever they could find it. “We are helpless spectators. The police and army are not intervening on the plea that annoying the tribesmen could drive them straight into the arms of the Maoist separatists.”

He concedes the ex-Kamaiyas’ intransigence was due to the government’s apathy.

He adds: “The poor fellows have been left in the lurch. The government merely made pledges on paper without any strategy in place to implement them. They have no option except to resort to such wild tactics.”

For a monk, Shakya isn’t bothered about the means adopted by the tribesmen.

“We are happy they are now shedding their dependency and are no longer waiting with begging bowls for the government to give them some land to build homes and grow grains in order to live with dignity,” he says.

He is quick to clarify though that the ex-Kamaiyas are forcibly occupying not ordinary people’s land but state land like airports, forests, or agro-industries farmlands.

Rajesh Danwar, one of the 1,000 ex-Kamaiyas who recently captured an airstrip in Kailali district, threatens that if the government remains callous to their plight, “we will plough the airfield and start cultivation.”

Boasts 50-year-old Moti Devi, a female central committee member of the Freed Kamaiyas Society (FKS): “We have occupied over 10,000 acres of land. We will wind up the campaign only when all families get enough land for a dignified living.”

The FKS, founded in early 2001, claims to work among 200,000 former bonded laborers in the five southwestern districts of Kanchanpur, Kailali, Bardiya, Banke and Dang, some 400 to 373 miles southwest of Kathmandu.

Ishwar Dangoria, 41, one of 800 ex-Kamaiyas who have begun cultivating some 300 hectares of government land they occupied in Dang district, says, “We will face bullets if needed, but we won’t vacate the land.”

“Actually, bullets are better than the constant threat of hunger haunting us,” she maintains. “We can no longer let our children succumb to starvation and disease in the false hope that the government will fulfill its promises made four years back.”

Moti Devi points out that of the 14,000 families of ex-Kamayias consisting of over 70,000 members in Bardiya district, only 5,000 families have been allotted land.

“Four years have passed but still most of us are languishing in tents. So we have resolved to fight back and occupy government land wherever available. Our campaign is going on in full swing. We are occupying land literally every day,” she claims.

Nathuram Kathariya, 59, a senior ex-Kamaiya, lashes out at the Nepal government. “They think we Tharus, because we are descendants of Lord Buddha, are docile and simple and would not even raise a protest against their deception.”

Another ex-Kamaiya, Lochan Kochila, 62, laments: “While in bondage to the landlords, we lacked honor but we did not suffer starvation. We had no dignity, and we had to toil like donkeys on the fields. But now we have been deprived of both food and honor.”

Most of the ex-Kamaiyas belong to the Tharu tribe which had ruled over the region for ages. But over the past 100 years, landlords from the upper castes had usurped their land, leading to establishment of the Kamaiya system.

The ex-Kamaiyas are agricultural laborers. Very few have skills for other jobs. Most of them have no land and live in makeshift camps, away from towns, mainly in forest areas where there is no opportunity for daily agricultural jobs. The average family rarely earns more than $25 a month, says Kochila.

Under the Kamaiya system, a landless laborer worked for a landlord on the basis of an oral contract for one year, for a wage that was generally low -- and paid in kind.

Dilli Bahadur Choudhary, 52, president of BASE (Backward Society Education), a nongovernmental organization headquartered in Dang district, explains how the trap worked.

“The laborer earned little so he could never save enough to pay off the debts which virtually sealed his fate. It often bogged him in a vicious cycle of debt and bondage that did not end with his demise but was passed down from one generation to the next.”

Since the Kamaiyas did not own land, they lived in huts on their masters’ lands. So once the government declared the system illegal, the landlords promptly expelled them.

The government had even set up a high-level Central Coordination and Monitoring Committee for the freed laborers identification and rehabilitation.

Headed by then Deputy Prime Minister Ramchandra Poudel, the committee had a specific deadline to complete its job by Sept. 27, 2000 — that is, within two months after slavery was abolished.

“But as the government has been toying with various committees, for most of us, rehabilitation and land have remained a mirage,” says Dhuri Bardiya, an activist who strongly believes that only direct action like capturing government land will be effective in alleviating their misery.

Camp leaders have already carved out parcels of land for each family. In some places in Kailali district, some 500 families had moved in from various camps, clearing up the shrub, dividing the land, building sheds and even assigning names to emerging hamlets.

“The government has been cornered. It must either legalize these settlement[s] or soon show the laborers places where land is available,” contends Rishiraj Lumsali, 55, former chairman of the Kanchanpur District Development Committee (KDDC).

Lumsali claims that there is enough land to go around - for each of the 40,000 ex-Kamaiya families in the district. He backs his claim with official statistics that show tens of thousands of acres of government land in Kailali district, which has been encroached upon by the big landlords.

Shiva Dahal, 38, a land reform official of Nepal’s Lumbini zone, maintains over 600,000 hectares of government land are in the illegal possession of big landlords in the very districts where the ex-Kamaiyas were living in atrocious conditions.

But reclaiming such land won’t be easy. Choudhary says the encroachers are Nepal’s elite which has enjoyed hegemony over the country’s polity.

But pushed to a corner, the laborers are ready for a “do or die” gambit. While the politicians fiddle and the country’s elite looks the other way, the crisis brews. The Maoists surely are watching with interest.

Source: OneWorld.net

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Agent Orange victims sue US

By John Gauci

Aug. 18— Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange have lodged the first ever lawsuit of its kind in a US court. Six victims initially filed the lawsuit against a consortium of petrochemical companies on Jan. 30, however, the Viet Nam Society for Agent Orange Victims is now representing more than 100 victims in the case.

The plaintiffs claim US chemical companies violated international law in order to get rich by producing and supplying Agent Orange to the US army for spraying in Vietnam, causing a serious aftermath.

More than three million Vietnamese are suffering from diseases caused by Agent Orange. Many have died, and many more will die. US and Australian military personnel also fell victim to the chemical while serving in Vietnam. At a meeting in Hanoi on Aug. 10, Dr. Nguyen Trong Nhan, the deputy president of the Society for Agent Orange Victims said, “The society and victims filed the case not only for their life but also in the interests of the victims in many other countries, including the US.”

According to research carried out by scientists from Columbia University and published in the April 2003 Nature magazine, over 80 million liters of the chemicals were sprayed over the southern area of Vietnam during the war, including 366 kilograms of dioxin.

As of Aug. 10, more than 73,100 people worldwide signed the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin online petition. Many Vietnam war veterans from the US have also signed the petition.

The petition calls upon the US president, government, and chemical companies to accept responsibility for the damage caused by their actions and products, and to pay full compensation to the victims. The petition was sent to the court in the US on Jan. 30, however supporters are encouraged to sign on online.

British born Len Aldis, Secretary of the Britain-Viet Nam Friendship Society (BVFS) set up the online site on <http://www.petitiononline.com/AOVN/petition.html> to gain support for Vietnamese Agent Orange victims.

He calls upon individuals, organizations, nations, and all who love peace and justice around the world to raise their voices in support of the victims and their demands that the US authority admit its responsibility.

In 2000, Aldis sent an open letter to then US President Bill Clinton, the first US president to concede the harmful impact of Agent Orange and agree to compensation for US veterans who were affected by illness caused by the toxic chemicals when they were in Vietnam. In the letter, he asked Clinton to admit and remedy the situation caused by the chemicals used by the US on the Vietnamese people.

Early this year, Aldis sent another open letter to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is entitled to disability payments for his prostate cancer relating to the use of chemicals by US forces in Vietnam, calling on him to join with the many US Vietnam veterans and others who have been and are campaigning for the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange to get similar compensation.

Source: Green Left Weekly

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Civil disobedience movement snowballs in India’s northeast

Imphal, Manipur, Aug. 9— As turmoil rages in India’s troubled northeastern state of Manipur, with most government offices shutting down on Aug. 9, and employees boycotting work to support a public rebellion against a federal law giving the army unlimited powers, experts fear the unrest could fuel insurgency in the region.

Manipur’s additional police chief C. Peter admits functioning in most government offices is disrupted, with little or no attendance of employees. Remarks a police official, “In many areas we have reports of protesters preventing office-goers from leaving their homes for duty.”

The Aug. 9 protest is part of an ongoing campaign launched by 32 rights groups and women organizations demanding withdrawal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act enforced in the state since 1980. The Act gives security forces exclusive powers to arrest anybody without a warrant, although rights groups accuse the armed forces of committing excesses on civilians in the name of curbing insurgency by taking advantage of the legislation.

The response is indeed overwhelming with an estimated 80 percent of the 90,000 government employees abstaining from their work, says rights leader Jagat Thoudam.

Manipur’s public transport associations have also joined the indefinite “civil disobedience movement” launched by the 32 groups that began Aug. 9.

“All public transport, including buses and three wheelers, remained off the road, while many shops and other businesses downed their shutters to express their solidarity with us,” says S. Tompok, a leader of one of the agitating groups.

More than a thousand protesters took to the streets in the western Chura-chandpur district in Manipur Monday. Warns women rights leader, Taruna Devi, “There would be more protests and we are ready to shed blood until New Delhi agrees to concede to our demands.”

Since July 14, many parts of Manipur have remained under curfew with police firing rubber bullets and teargas canisters to disperse violent mobs defying curfew orders to protest against the Act.

The immediate provocation for the violence and protests was the July 11 alleged killing in custody of a 32-year-old woman, Thangjam Manorama, by soldiers in Manipur’s capital, Imphal.

India’s federal home minister Shivraj Patil told journalists in New Delhi that the law was “required in Manipur till normalcy returns.”

The home minister’s statement has further angered the agitators.

According to rights leader Jagat Thoudam, “There would be more trouble in Manipur with New Delhi failing to respect the sentiments of the locals.”

With New Delhi rejecting the demand for the Act’s withdrawal and pressure groups bent on intensifying the uprising, observers fear the movement would be hijacked by some of the rebel armies active in the state.

Manipur is one of the states worst-hit by militancy in the northeast with at least 19 outlawed rebel armies operating with demands ranging from secession to greater autonomy and the right to self determination.

Says irate women’s rights campaigner M. Devi, “By refusing to concede to popular demands, New Delhi is pushing Manipur to a point of no return. People in the long run would be forced to raise demands for secession from India.”

As she adds, “New Delhi is not even prepared to listen to our woes, then what is the point in Manipur being a part of India?”

Manipur’s main opposition political parties have publicly announced their support to popular demands for the Act’s withdrawal, with three former chief minister’s courting arrest and displaying placards reading, “We are with the people.”

Experts are concerned that as the protests turn violent, and public anger against the federal government’s attitude gains steam, it could further boost insurgency in the region.

A political analyst in Imphal, Pradip Phanjoubam cautions, “Growing sense of alienation would only breed insurgency and that is not a good sign.”

Agrees analyst Wasbir Hussain, “The fact that thousands of people are taking to the streets demanding withdrawal of a legislation which was imposed to curb militancy is in itself a major victory for the rebels.”

But he warns that the growing anti-Indian sentiments brewing in Manipur could trigger an escalation of the already volatile insurgency in the region in the days ahead.

Experts add that the Act has failed to yield desired results despite being enforced in 1980, with insurgency continuing to thrive in Manipur with more than 10,000 people killed since the past two decades.

Remarks Hussain, “Incidents like custody deaths have made the people revolt against the Indian government’s legislation.”

Manipur rights groups are planning to take up the issue with the London-based Amnesty International and also raise the matter in other platforms worldwide.

Although militant groups in Manipur have not joined the protests as yet, observers are worried they could now launch attacks on federal troops taking advantage of the volatile situation.

The rebels are very influential in the region. From ordering students to wear traditional sarongs to calling for a ban on Indian movies, their writ runs over much of Manipur.

Source: OneWorld.net

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Mexico: sectarian violence wreaks havoc in Tzotzil community

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, Aug. 11 (IPS)— Impunity and political and religious intolerance will lead to an increase in sectarian violence in the highlands city of San Juan Chamula in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas over the next few months, warn human rights activists.

The city, which is home to 60,000 Tzotzil Indians, ended the latest chapter Aug. 10 of violent clashes in which more than 100 people have been killed in the past 30 years.

A majority of the murders have gone unpunished, the Chiapas police acknowledge.

A group of around 200 Indians agreed Aug. 10 to release the mayor and five other officials, including the local police chief, who they had thrown in jail and held for nearly three days, accusing them of corruption.

The release was the result of over 20 hours of intense negotiations with Chiapas state authorities, who promised to investigate the allegations of the local residents.

The group that seized the city officials accuses them of embezzling around $265,000 in public funds.

According to journalists and local residents, the group came close to lynching Mayor José Gómez of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

“We were treated like animals,” Gómez told the press after he and the other officials were freed. “They threw urine, excrement, sticks, cold water and stones at us, and kicked us.”

There is a state of “total impunity” in San Juan Chamula, and this week’s events were “one more demonstration of the prevailing climate, and of what could lie ahead,” Michael Chamberlain, coordinator of research in the Chiapas-based Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, told IPS.

In the 50 square mile municipality of San Juan Chamula, two rival religious and political groups have coexisted in tension for decades, and neither the state nor the federal government have been able to impose a state of law.

On one hand are the local political leaders who belong to the PRI, merchants and “traditionalist Catholics” opposed to the reforms ushered in by Vatican Council II in the 1960s. On the other are locals who belong to Protestant churches and are politically aligned with the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

In the midst of the tension, the indigenous people who have suffered the worst violence are the Protestants, because the PRI, which was in power for 71 years until 2000, has also governed San Juan Chamula since the 1930s.

Since 1970, more than 30,000 local Indians have been kicked out of town on the argument that they were breaking local laws and professing to Protestant religions.

The mayor and his associates were seized by a group of Protestants, backed by local shopkeepers opposed to the PRI.

Meanwhile, the traditionalist Catholics accuse that group of killing more than 30 local residents over the past few years.

The group that threw Mayor Gómez in jail says he and his cronies embezzled funds from public works.

The state police were unable to rescue Gómez, because hundreds of locals armed with sticks and stones blocked the roads leading into town. The officials were finally released after negotiations that were closed to the press.

The group also ransacked and set fire to the home of another city official, Juan Pérez, who had previously fled the town, according to press reports.

The escalation of the decades-long conflict occurred as the government of Chiapas, in the hands of independent Governor Pablo Salazar, is preparing for the October state elections, in which mayors and state legislators will be chosen.

The federal government of President Vicente Fox and the Salazar administration in “Chiapas promised to bring about a state of law in Chamula, but they have utterly failed to do so,” said Chamberlain.

“They have not been able, or have not wanted, to do anything, which is why sectarianism reigns supreme,” he argued.

According to the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre, created by former bishop of Chiapas Samuel Ruiz in 1989, religion has been used by the PRI in San Juan Chamula as a pretext to repress dissidence by anyone who defies the political, economic and religious status quo.

The Human Rights Center’s report “Expulsions and Human Rights in San Juan Chamula,” said the PRI converted the town into a model for a structure of local bosses used to control the population in political, social and religious terms.

“Opponents of the PRI are fed up, and have decided to lash out, as shown by the seizing of the mayor,” said Chamberlain.

Gómez admitted to the press that in San Juan Chamula there is an unresolved conflict “between Catholics” who support the PRI and Protestant opponents of the party.

The discrimination against Protestants has led to the expulsion of 200 children from public schools because they come from non-Catholic families.

Local indigenous resident Guadalupe López decided in March to abandon Catholicism and join a Protestant church. A week after she told some friends about her decision, she and her husband found themselves without electricity or water, she told journalists.

In addition, the city education committee called them to say that their children — ages six, nine and 12 — would no longer be accepted in the neighborhood school due to their new faith.

The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center has offered several times to help seek a solution to the sectarian conflicts, but without success.

The pastoral team of former bishop Ruiz — an exponent of liberation theology or the “preferential option for the poor” — and current Chiapas Bishop Felipe Arizmendi, who was appointed to his post in May 2000, also failed in their efforts.

According to the public prosecutor’s office in Chiapas, the confrontations in San Juan Chamula — in which the groups in conflict often use high-powered weapons — are the result of a dispute over control of the city government, not just religious rivalries.

In San Juan Chamula, nothing changed when the PRI finally lost its hold on power in 2000 in the elections in which Fox, of the National Action Party (PAN), was elected president.

Legal investigations show that the PRI sponsored the political and educational training of several indigenous leaders in San Juan Chamula, who were later integrated into the community’s system of religious posts, in different leadership roles.

In time, those local leaders and their heirs became the undisputed political heads of the city, who PRI governments furnished with funding, thus helping entrench them in power.

Chamberlain warned that “the mayor’s release has not put an end to the violence.”

“It is very likely that there will be a vengeful reaction and that the October municipal elections will become a battleground without any guarantees” of safety or fairness, the activist predicted.

The Tzotzil Indians in San Juan Chamula have nothing to do with the internationally renowned indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) that rose up in arms in January 1994 in remote mountain jungle regions of Chiapas.