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.

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?

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.

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.

The world was clean before we came...
but we did not have even the slightest
sense of decency to think that it is
not a big garbage can or trash mound;...
The world was clean before we came...
with the waters in the rivers and the
oceans clearly reflecting the clouds
and the skies. But we were too complacent
in our attitudes that we dumped every
kind of trash we could not stand the
sight of, much even the smell of;

The world was clean before we came...
with the clean air we breath giving
life to all its inhabitants , until
development as it is called, fouled it

The continuing destruction of the earth goes on unabated and any sign of it ever coming to an end has become a remote possibility, because there still remains places yet to be reached by the destructive ways of the so-called modern civilised man, to put into ruins.