fPcN interCultural:

friends of Peoples close to Nature

KUALA LUMPUR: Police yesterday stopped a march by a group of indigenous people seeking greater protection of their rights. Some 150 members of the Indigenous Peoples Network of Malaysia (JOAS) had planned to go to Istana Negara to hand over a memorandum to the king.

The memorandum was to urge the government to honour the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People (DRIP), to which Malaysia is a signatory.

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.

Fri, 11/30/2007 - 09:24 — Carried out by North American missionaries, this ethnocide, is an outrage that just has to be stopped, before the extermination of the home less & land less Akha is completed. What kind of a world is this, if we just stand by and allow these so called christians! to get away with this.

Mon, 11/05/2007 - Akha

Press Release
Nov. 3, 2007
The Akha Heritage Foundation
PO BOX 6073
Salem, Oregon 97304
www.akha.org
akhalife (a t) gmail.com

"Ride For Freedom"
Coast to Coast by Horseback for Akha Human Rights

Matthew McDaniel and members of the Akha Heritage Foundation will be campaigning for Akha Human Rights and Akha Project advancement with a US National Human Rights Tour.

But there is something different about this tour.

Here is a video about the Akha Intervention that I presented at New York for the 6th Session of the UNPFII.
See it here, on YouTube.com
The Thais have not responded to our concerns about the Queen taking the land of Hooh Yoh Akha, in more than two years.
The Queen of Thailand in fact has taken the land from adjacent villages including Pah Nmm Akha, in Ampur Mae Faluang, Chiangrai Province and other villages as well.
We need volunteers and lots of help to change this situation.

The end of the Batak had come and gone. Their culture was already gone. The language was all that remained. Do you doom yourself and your children to lives of abject poverty, ridden with disease and living with hunger on a daily basis just to preserve a language?

Description:
Its about the investigation into the situation of ACF staff in Laos sexually abusing Akha women and girls in the target villages.

Download here:
1.8MB PDF
For more info see: www.Akha.org

Ranchi - Jharkhand tribal leaders and priests want immediate stripping of reservation facilities of past members of their community who are now converted Christians.

The tribal group, known as Sarna, has demanded that the reservation facilities provided to tribal Christians be stopped immediately.
The Kendriya Sarna Samiitee (KSS), one of the prominent organisations, has taken the lead in making the demand.

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 name is Michu Wurh Zurh. I am an Akha woman and I live in northern Thailand.

My husband helped the Akha people, that is all he did and the Thai government kicked him out of Thailand in April of 2004. They did not like that he helped my people. We are 70,000 in Thailand. He gave the Akha free medicine, milk for mother’s, vitamins, took people to the hospital. He did it all for free. He did not kill anyone, he did not sell drugs, so why has the Thai government kicked him out of Thailand?

The Akha struggle for their human rights in SE Asia. One of the most severe human rights situation for the Akha People is in Thailand.
The Thai government continues to seize Akha land as confirmed in the US Human Rights Report on Thailand for 2005. The Thai government continues to harass Akha Human Rights workers. The Thai government continues to carry out extra-judicial killings of the Akha people.

Akha villagers in Northern Laos testified on video that Norwegian Church Aid and Action Contra La Faim staff coming to their villages to do various projects had demanded village girls to rape on repeated occasions. Staff often stayed for weeks at a time in villages while doing projects. Akha villagers said that the practice was widespread on the part of numerous NGO‘s in the Muang Long area. Akha villagers gave the names of many villages where the rapes occurred and the names of specific girls who had been raped and became pregnant. Girls ranged in age from 15 to 18.

Forty-two children from the isolated Jarawa tribe of the Andaman Islands have been hit by disease in the last three weeks, in an epidemic which could wipe them out. The figure represents 16 percent of the tribe's total population of 270.

AHWA: Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi Saturday criticised Christian missionaries' conversion activities and told a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) meeting here in the Dangs district that the central government had failed to stop them.

"The constitution is against forcible conversion. The state, however, is doing little to stop such conversions," he told a gathering of more than 150,000 RSS activists.
"Mahatma Gandhi too had opposed forcible conversions. If he were alive today and were to say so, they would have lambasted him as well," Modi said.

The first authoritative reports are now coming in on the fate of the five isolated tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, hit hard by the Asian quake disaster. All appear to have survived. The more numerous Nicobarese tribe, however, has suffered huge loss of life.
The 270 Jarawa, who lived in complete isolation until recently, appear to have escaped unharmed. They almost certainly were living in the forest when the tsunami struck.