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An American Indian denied access to Austria by customs officials said getting to the World Conference may cost him a court case.
Doug Anderson filed charges with the United Nations against the U.S. over that government's role in the dumping of radioactive and toxic waste on his reserve in upper New York State.
But the Native from the Tuscarora Nations near Lewiston, New York, said he was forced to accept the American passport to enter Austria, a move that he believes may hurt his case against the U.S. government.
"I only accepted the passport because I was under duress," he said. "They said I didn't have a passport. They stalled me and generally harassed me."
Austrian customs officials detained him at the Vienna International Airport June 11 when he presented them with a passport from the Haudenosaunee Nation, Anderson said.
"It's a violation. I'm not a citizen of the United States. The Haudenosaunee have been using these passports since 1959. The American government does not accept this passport but I have used it all over. I've used it in Geneva."
Officials from the U.S. Embassy in Vienna intervened after a five-hour delay and issue him an American passport to bring him through customs, Anderson said. During that time, however, two small children he brought from the reserve were running around in the airport unsupervised.
"I didn't know what happened to them," he said.
Anderson was in Vienna to ask the UN for support in his court case against the US. He filed the charges Jan. 23, 1993, in response to U.S. president Bill Clinton's inaugural speech calling for a "cleaned-up government."
The charges, filed under UN Human Rights Procedure 1503, accused the U.S. government of discriminating against minorities and environmental degradation.
They stem from two separate incidents, Anderson said, when U.S. officials allegedly dumped both radioactive isotopes and gasoline on the Tuscarora reservation, which lies on the border between the U.S. and Canada.
During the 1950s, the Department of Defence allegedly buried Strontium-90, a toxic, radioactive by-product of plutonium refining, in a road constructed on the reserve, Anderson said. The incidence of cancer in the community is now around 25 per cent in adults and more than 2,100 times higher than the average in children.
The reservation's water supply was later poisoned in the 1960s when a civil defence gasoline tank buried near the community's elementary school ruptured, he said. State Education officials removed the tainted water from a local well but then dumped it into a local creek.
Accepting the passport from the U.S. creates a conflict of interest in light of those allegations, Anderson said, and it is a situation he expects the American government to use against him.
"They will have the UN believe it is a domestic problem and then it will be dismissed at the court level," he said. "And that's not good enough. They have done genocide against my people."
Anderson said, however, that he might keep the U.S. passport and risk losing his case because it can get him into other countries to talk to people.
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