fPcN interCultural:

friends of Peoples close to Nature

A month-long blockade of logging roads by indigenous people in the state of Sarawak, Malaysia set to protest illegal logging on their communal lands is about to be broken up by police.

More than 100 indigenous Kenyah people gathered at the blockade site on the upper Moh River on the island of Borneo claim that the blockade is their only way of calling on representatives of the Samling Timber Company and government authorities to have a consultation and meet with them to listen to their problems and demands.

Indonesian Military & Police’s alcohol business kills Papuans

* Illegal alcohol business run by Indonesian Military & Police
* Alcohol smuggled in on Indonesian military transports
* Hundreds of Papuans are victims of alcohol poisoning
* Regent’s wife is one of main illegal alcohol traders

(Tanah Merah [red earth], Boven Digoel is in the south of West Papua, near the PNG border)

http://maroke.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/bisnis-miras-tni-polri-di-boven-d...

Report by the Environmental Investigation Agency & Telepak

Extract: Official complicity

For the full report, see:
http://www.eia-international.org/files/reports93-1. pdf

Companies involved in timber theft from Papua are aided every step of the way by officials from the military, police and forestry department, as long as the requisite bribe is paid.

Two Reports from the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG)

on TORTURE by Indonesian Security Forces

1) UN Committee against Torture begins Review of Report of Indonesia (6 May 2008)

2) UN Committee against Torture hears Response of Indonesia (7 May 2008)

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Some extracts from the Review & from the Indonesian response (for the FULL REPORT see below) :

“During his recent visit to Indonesia, the Special Rapporteur on Torture had noted that torture is routine in Indonesian police stations.”

Thu, 06/14/2007 - The Hadzabe, a hunter gather tribe in Tanzania, Africa, are believed to be the second-oldest people on Earth - but of course that is not saving them from being threatened with eviction and extinction.

Some greedy members of the United Arab Emirates 'royal' family want to turn the Hadzabe tribal hunting lands into a private 'by helicopter only' safari playground - so the Hadzabe who have been there for over 50,000 years will just have to go.

Indigenous groups are threatened as Peru gears up for an energy boom.

POROTOBANGO, PERU

Raised in palm huts deep in the Peruvian Amazon, Gregorio Torres never imagined that below his home was something called natural gas.

Now his Machiguengua Indian settlement in this rain-forest river clearing has solar-powered radio gifted by an international oil company, corrugated tin roofs, T-shirts with company logos, and a shelf of Western medicine.

But this incipient natural-gas boom is bringing new worries, too.

The global wave of organized resistance to multinational mining companies continues with a strike at Freeport McMoran in West Papua Workers employed by mining multinational Freeport McMoran in the Indonesian province of West Papua struck from 18 to 21 April, gaining a 100 percent wage increase among other concessions. 6,000 workers at Grasberg, the world’s second largest copper and gold mine, slowed production – resulting in estimated losses of $11.32 million for the New Orleans based company.

The full report (‘The Thousand-Headed Snake’ ) is available at http://www.eia-international.org/files/reports135-1.pdf Summary below from INCL newsletter and also from www.eia- international.org and www.telapak.org

Timber Smuggling from Indonesia Rises as Judicial Corruption Ensures Masterminds Behind US$20 billion Forest Crime go Unpunished

EIA/Telapak - March 28, 2007 Jakarta

Sat, 03/24/2007 - 02:44 — Sentral Info AMP
West Papua

The town dwellers of Kaimana were shocked by the deafening sounds of gun fires from amphibious tanks and warships early in the morning yesterday. Because of this exercise, they said that they are afraid and being intimidated by the massive presence of the Indonesian war machines.

BOTOLAN, Zambales -- The world’s worst eruptions in the second half of the 20th century failed to erase the Aeta tribe from the face of the earth.

Fifteen years after Mount Pinatubo let out its biggest blasts in their ancestral abode on June 15, 1991, the Aeta population in the provinces of Zambales, Pampanga and Tarlac has almost doubled from just over 50,000 at the height of the disaster, data from the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) in Central Luzon showed.

‘My people urgently need the world’s help’ says Papuan tribal leader.

The Freeport Mine in West Papua – the biggest gold and copper mine in the world – is today in a state of chaos, as Indonesia soldiers reportedly use tear gas and live rounds to attack protesting tribal people. Reports from inside West Papua suggest that at least one person may have been killed.

Last month, West Papua made the news when a ‘lost valley’ containing numerous new species was discovered. This week, its people are suffering brutally – it needs to make the news again.

Prof. Dr. David Poeppel maintains that in a child the conditioning of ideas and the strategies for overcoming and perceiving problems is formed by school education through the reduction of the variety of all the connections of the synapses drawn up in childhood. That is to say that school education influences the thoughts and emotions of a child in a certain direction through curricula and an institutional evaluation.

Roy Sesana has seen a lot of the world. Last year the seventy-six year old Bushman travelled to the United States, in order to draw attention both to the ” First People of the Kalahari”, an organisation he had founded in 1991, and to his own tribe. On 9th December 2005 he was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize in Stockholm.

He is sitting beside me in the East Side Hotel in Berlin, and patiently awaiting the questions I am about to ask him. He scrutinizes everything around him. "Here, in the northern hemisphere, the "White” people live at the expense of the people of the South."

One problem aboriginal people living in their traditional manner have, is that their life is not based on a monetary system, and so does not correspond to our conception of economy.

As hunters and gatherers, for example, they can exist independently of any economic system and state form. Since the majority of nations in the world have assumed state forms to rule their own economic interests, it is not possible for them to support, or better still: put up with, other forms of living.

'The propagandist's purpose," wrote Aldous Huxley, "is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

What has changed?