Indigenous peoples worldwide suffer human rights abuses

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Natives endure the same human rights violations world-wide, the United Nations World Conference of Human Rights Non-Government Organization Forum was told.

The NGO forum's Working Group on Indigenous Peoples heard two days of speeches from dozens of Native peoples from round the world June 10 and 11.

The all-day meetings were designed to give Indigenous peoples the chance to voice their concerns and to construct a draft document for the UN's World Conference the following week.

The five-member working group panel, led by Maori Paul Reese, heard countless stories of land expropriation, cultural suppression and government indifference.

Where Indigenous peoples in Russia were once at the mercy of a cruel central government, they are now the victims of smaller, regional political bodies, said Vladimir Sanghi, an Inuit from The Association of Small Peoples of the Russian Far North.

"Different regions of Russia are trying to get our land. The lands of Indigenous peoples in Russia were expropriated by the central government before (and are) now being (taken) by local governments."

Inuit population in the Sakhalin region of northeastern Russia has dropped from tens of thousands to only 4,000 through the deliberate expropriation of land and cultural genocide policies of local governments, Sanghi said.

"Indigenous peoples of Russia want self-determination," he said. "But there is no way to enforce it. We want the UN to tell (Russian President) Yeltsin to accept Indigenous government and give us our traditional lands. We would adopt our older forms of self-government."

The Indigenous of Bangladesh are also struggling with government to obtain the right to self-determination, said Shubatl Bikash of the Asian Independent Peoples Party.

"We've been fighting 20 years for the right while 52,000 people live in substandard conditions."

"We all face the same problems in varying degrees and we are all prepared to struggle to resolve them," said Euclides Pereira of the Indigenous Council of Roraima, a Native political group in Bangladesh. "But meeting my brothers from Latin America, North America and Asia has been a painful recollection of abuses at the hands of so-called civilized men."

According to UN figures, at least 90 per cent of all Indigenous peoples live in severe poverty. Unemployment is on average six times higher than that of their co-nationals and Indigenous peoples have less access to basic needs like fresh water, food, and health care.

The principal demands of Native peoples worldwide are simply the recognition of their status as "peoples" and the resulting right to social, economic and political self-determination, said Diom Romeo Saganash, vice-president of the Grand council of the Crees of Quebec.

But obtaining such rights is unlikely as long as governments refuse to speed up the rights acquisition process, said Chilean Mapuche leader and International Council of Indigenous Treaties member Mario Ibarra.