Coyuntura Socio-Política

Esta es la primera parte de un texto escrito por el corresponsal circunstancial Martin E. Andersen, que nos permite mirar, después de culminado el Congreso de los Pueblos en Bogotá, el pasado 12 de octubre, con la presencia de 27 mil o algo más inscritos en las deliberaciones, y una movilización de cierre en la Plaza de Bolívar, la situación de los pueblos originarios en el Continente Americano. N de la R.

PRIMERA PARTE

Onto the Right Side of History: Confronting the World’s Last Colonial Legacies by Supporting Indigenous Peoples

Martin Edwin Andersen, 8/30/2010

"For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination."

—Zbigniew Brzezinski

"More important than the observable nature of external reality, when it comes to the determination of Washington’s view of the world, is the subjective state of readiness on the part of Washington officialdom to recognize this or that feature of it."

—George Kennan

The struggle for liberation of the estimated two hundred and fifty million individuals belonging to five thousand distinct indigenous communities in 70 nation-states around the world is arguably the final frontier, and the unfinished business, of a more than century-long—or more than two-centuries-long, if the U.S. revolution is the starting point—process of global de-colonization.

As part of a fourth stage of global democratic development—the first three being the struggle against overseas colonialism and national dictatorships, and the expansion of largely "Western" democratic institutions and practices—native peoples have emerged as key political actors in countries around the planet.

The struggle for formal de-colonization from the Western powers "restored a large measure of freedom and dignity to one billion colonized people and [therefore] must be ranked as one of the greatest human rights achievements in the twentieth century."[1] Yet much remains to be done and, until 2010, the United States has appeared to sit on the sidelines, often jeering in diplomatic bureaucratese. Failure to act can fuel ethnic conflicts based on inequitable access to power and resources. Key to the effective remediation of long-standing United States policy, one that put the world’s oldest democracy at odds with a fourth world revolution whose tenor, direction and outcome remain in the balance, is the role played by the U.S. State Department.

The struggle to rid the world of its last colonial legacies continues to be conducted almost entirely in the homelands of indigenous peoples, a wide array of humankind linked by a common term. As José Martinez Cobo, the special rapporteur of the U.N. Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities defined: "Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them.

They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems."[2] Indigenous peoples, those who inhabited the land before it was taken up by colonial societies and who believe themselves to be fundamentally different from those currently governing those lands, can no longer be ignored.

Despite being a devalued currency in the policy debates of today, no doubt the word "genocide" applies to the legacy of colonialism and the neo-colonial treatment of indigenous peoples throughout the world, as measured in the number of indigenous nations exterminated, cultures destroyed, languages lost, and lands stolen. Even when not overtly victimized, indigenous peoples were still ignored; their voices—offering different ways to view and appreciate the world—went unheard. Framed largely in the words, perspectives and history forged in the global North, concepts such as race and ethnicity, statehood and nationalism, and modernity and civilization rest uneasily and uncertainly on the current debate over indigenous peoples’ rights and their places within nation-states.

Generally speaking, however, the challenge of indigenous peoples’ political struggle includes crises of participation (where "sizeable segments of the population, heretofore excluded from the system, demand effective participation in the political process"), legitimacy (where "sizable portions of the politically relevant population challenge or deny the normative validity of claims to authority made by existing leadership"), and distribution (in which "sizable portions of the politically relevant population demand a redistribution of societal rewards and benefits, often economic").[3]

Despite the fact that U.S. policy remains anchored in formal principles of democracy, peaceful change, equal opportunity and respect for private property, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., support for legitimate indigenous aspirations has remained a defaulted promissory note whose redemption could bring the riches of freedom and the security of justice to some of the world’s poorest and most underrepresented peoples. At the same time, State institutions that reflect ethnic diversity and respect for minority rights, checks and balances that reduce the perception of injustice and insecurity, and power sharing arrangements can help reduce the potential for ethnic conflict.

For those policymakers, geostrategists, academics and others concerned about lessening the potential for violent conflict, particularly threats of terrorism and insurgencies around the world, the findings of economists José G. Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol, are particularly important: "The index of ethnic polarization is a significant explanatory variable for the incidence of civil wars." At minimum, they add, "Business as usual is not possible in a society with a high level of potential ethnic conflict, since this situation affects all levels of economic activity." [4]

Recently the State Department has begun to comprehensive review U.S. positions on a variety of issues of critical importance to indigenous peoples. On March 29th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, attending a meeting of Arctic rim states in Ottawa, gave a rare dressing down to her Canadian hosts for continuing to exclude the non-state Inuit people, as well as non-coastal Arctic states of Sweden and Finland and sub-arctic Iceland, from the deliberations.

Then, on April 20th, Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, told the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues that Foggy Bottom was reviewing its long-held rejection (a last hold-out on the international scene) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a document that sets forth an unprecedented set of guarantees for indigenous peoples, protecting their rights to land, resources, languages, cultures, spiritual beliefs and self-determination.

And on July 7-8, State Department officials, along with other federal officials and agency representatives, met with Indian leaders and non-governmental organizations to discuss possible support for the U.N. Declaration, an important signal to the world that the U.S. was prepared to turn words into action. United States support for the declaration, noted Leonardo Crippa, a staff attorney with the Indian Law Resource Center in Washington, D.C., "will have a huge impact on international law." [5]

The possible sea change in U.S. policy is particularly noteworthy given Washington’s previous stance. During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, the dawn of a purported "new world order, the United States cold-shouldered U.N. efforts to address the indigenous agenda. Then, in the first year of the Bill Clinton Administration, a U.S. delegation did not even have a position paper ready for discussion on indigenous rights, the hottest topic on the agenda after women’s rights at a June human rights summit in Vienna.

According to one participant in closed-door talks with the U.S. team: "They were all bent out of shape about anything that might be said that might go against U.S. interests. There were a lot of older, white males worried what the effect might be on U.S. internal politics, whether we’d have to give Manhattan back." In 1994 Richard Feinberg, Clinton’s principal architect for the first Summit of the Americas tried several times to eliminate any mention of indigenous peoples from the conference declaration (only to be thwarted by an activist Treasury Department official who repeatedly reinserted the nixed language surreptitiously back into the document). Also during the Clinton presidency the Organization of American States (OAS) engaged in an extensive consultation with indigenous peoples from around the hemisphere on a "Proposed American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples."

Even though the draft did not include the concept of self-determination, or protect traditional hunting, fishing and gathering rights as Indian peoples wished, State Department lawyers operating in a vacuum were allowed to use their position in the interagency process in order to gut the draft declaration. The lawyers argued, improbably, that failure to offer a precise definition of the term "indigenous peoples" would lead to armed militia and hate groups taking advantage of Native rights, services and benefits in the United States. The failure of states to recognize indigenous groups as "peoples" in international forums, "the failure to affirm their full, unqualified right to self determination, insults and inflames the sensitivities of indigenous leaders," Steve Tullberg, then an attorney with the Indian Law Resource Center, told an OAS hearing, because it suggested that there are "two classes of peoples in the world: a second class comprised of indigenous peoples and a first class comprised of all other peoples."[6]

Meanwhile, a 1995 proposal by the U.S. Department of Justice to assist the Bolivian government to create a rural police force that would have incorporated elements of Native American (or customary) law in the formation of an indigenous-oriented community police, and which would also have had first-line responsibilities for protecting the environment, was successfully vetoed by a U.S. embassy political officer in La Paz.

The decision came despite buy-in for the project by the Bolivian vice president—himself a Native American—and the Bolivian National Police and support from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In killing the proposal, the diplomat justified the decision by saying flatly, based on his experience growing up in Rocky Mountains, that Indians were "not interested in justice." (In March 2007, the leaders of the Bolivian Conamaq—an important group of indigenous leaders—called for the establishment of a community justice system on par with the existing national justice system.

The Evo Morales government implemented the demand, although in a haphazard and controversial fashion that has called into question the wisdom of the move itself. In August 2010, the U.S. Embassy in La Paz sponsored a group of four Choctaw Indians from Mississippi to share knowledge of their traditions and culture, including the fact that tribal courts try both criminal and civil cases. "If a person is detained by order of a judge, and he or she is Choctaw, that person is brought before an indigenous court," Joshua Breedlove, one of the delegation, explained.)[7]

The lack of serious attention and hostility to the indigenous agenda continued into the new century; one of the most important backward steps taken was when the George W. Bush Administration began backfilling on the narrow acceptance by its predecessor to accept the terms "indigenous peoples" and "self-determination" in international discussions. When the United Nations met to consider the declaration of rights of indigenous peoples, the United States was one of a handful of countries that opposed it (together with Canada, Australia, Russia and New Zealand). Opposition to the declaration’s self-determination language was based on the possibility of secession that would imperil the political unity of member states, as well as their territorial integrity. [8]