Indigenous Women Bear Burdon of Violence

Activists Say (UN Wire)
received 17 May 2004

By Jim Wurst

U.N. Wire

UNITED NATIONS - Indigenous women, often the most powerless people in society, bear the brunt of both criminal and political violence, participants at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said this week, the first of a two-week session.

"Indigenous women suffer multiple layers of discrimination, including gender and racial violence in all its forms," said Kukdookaa Terri Brown of Canada at a news conference yesterday.  "This is a cultural genocide in a modern-day context."

"There is an undeclared war against the first people of the land," she added.  "The U.N. must take notice to bring change and make countries safe for all," she said.

The indigenous peoples of Sudan are in a particularly desperate situation since so much of the country is in turmoil.  Susan Oduho from southern Sudan said that after 21 years of conflict in her country, she hoped the forum would take up the issue of region, as well as torture in refugee
camps.  "The little help we get is not enough," she said at the same news conference.  "There is no law ... there is nothing we can do."

Akuthi Okoth of the Anywaa Survival Organization, addressing the forum earlier this week, said the 100,000 Anywaas who live on the border between Sudan and Ethiopia "have been oppressed and marginalized by both countries for a long time."  In December, she said, "a well-planned genocide" of the people was launched by the Ethiopian armed forces that included rape, torture and murder.  Some fled into Sudan despite the war raging there. Other Anywaa who tried to escape Sudan were "arrested by the Ethiopian government simply because they were [Anywaa]," said Okoth.  She asked the forum to call on the Ethiopian army to withdraw from Anywaa land and asked the Security Council to investigate.

Another border region participants in the forum highlighted was the area where India, Bangladesh and Myanmar meet.  Sumshot Khular of the Community Action and Research for Development in India said at yesterday's news conference that often violence occurs in the remote hill country so it is hard to get the news out to the wider world.  In addition, she said, "The government [of India] does not want to recognize that it is the perpetrator of the violence. ... Indigenous women have been disappearing but it has ever been reported because there is no mechanism to get information out."

"The same thing is happening all over Asia" - disappearances, land confiscation, trafficking in women, and agriculture and other "traditional livelihood systems are destroyed," Khular said.

Women from Nepal made the same points.  Suhas Chakma, speaking for several Asian indigenous networks, said that in "low-intensity armed conflicts" in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines and Vietnam, "indigenous women are targets in these conflicts because of their gender and ethnic origins."  In Nepal, the army fighting Maoist guerrillas raped indigenous women as the guerrillas moved into indigenous territories.

  She said she could cite more cases and "in each and every case, the security forces enjoyed absolute impunity."

Chakma called on the United Nations to insist on accountability for these actions. "Accountability is not revenge, accountability is not retribution.  It is the assertion of the civilized society that barbaric methods of law enforcement will be dealt with by upholding the majesty of the rule of law," she said.

Ang Dawa Sherpa of the Sherpa Association said Sherpas in Nepal are being forced into combat "in the so-called movement for liberation led by non-indigenous people. Indigenous women and young are being targeted for misuse by the Maoists" and therefore government forces "hold them in suspicion."  She added, "Because of the surrounding armed forces, the rates of violence against women ... have been increasing in this ongoing armed conflict."

Indigenous women are not only victims of war-related violence, Brown said. In Canada, some 500 indigenous women have disappeared over 20 years. "There are two layers of justice, one for non-aboriginal people and one for aboriginal people. ... When aboriginal women go missing, police take little notice."

The worst case comes from near Vancouver in British Colombia, she said, where the bodies of 23 women have been found on a pig farm, half of the women indigenous.  "There is a certain level of denial that this severe form of racism and gender discrimination exists in Canada," she said.

Brown said the forum should "take notice" of this and other such cases. "Why would we have a permanent forum?  We don't want to go home and not hear anything" from the United Nations, concluded Brown.

(from the UNAC-DISCUSS list - please pass on)

 

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