Posted on 05/11/2003 12:42:47 AM PDT by chance33_98
Analysis: Political paradox clouds United Nations forum
Posted: May 09, 2003 - 9:52am EST by: Jim Adams / Managing Editor / Indian Country Today
NEW YORK - More than 1,700 indigenous peoples representing 546 organizations from around the world will converge on the glass tower of the United Nations for two weeks in mid-May. The occasion is the second annual meeting of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, a fledgling UN body that gathered with little mainstream notice a year ago. Its importance paradoxically is not that the UN is hosting the meeting but that such a wide array of Native peoples is coming.
When the Forum convenes on May 12, it will mark the close of the UN Decade of Indigenous People, whose main achievement, some might say, is the establishment of the forum. Declarations of the rights of indigenous peoples have been limited by a fundamental contradiction.
The UN is an organization of nation-states, which almost without exception have engulfed the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples and represent populations of latecomers. All the countries of three continents, North and South America and Australia, were established by invaders from Europe, and the nations of Europe itself derive from thousands of years of population migrations which, except in the far North, have obliterated most traces of the original inhabitants. This is not the most sympathetic audience for indigenous claims for sovereignty.
By definition, indigenous peoples precede the politics of nation-states, and even politics itself, in its literal Greek sense of the governance of a city (polis). One of the concerns of many indigenous groups has been to preserve an environment and a compatible way of life threatened by the types of developments favored by the UN and parallel bodies like the World Bank. Such concerns ironically have brought Natives like the tribesmen at the headwaters of the Amazon out of their isolation and into alliance with counterparts throughout the world.
The rise of a world indigenous movement will be dramatically on display at the Forum, where organizers are already seriously worried about overcrowding in the meeting rooms provided by the UN secretariat. But this movement derives from the growing political will and sophistication of indigenous groups and leaders, taking advantage of the networking opportunities that various UN meetings and commissions have given them. As might become clear at the Forum, indigenous rights originate independently of nation-state principles of international law and occasionally, as in border-crossing issues, clash with them.
It’s a sign of this contradiction that the Permanent Forum is not linked with the UN’s General Assembly but is buried within its bureaucracy. Formally the organization is part of the Division for Social Policy and Development in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. The Forum itself, consisting of 16 members allocated to world regions, was established by the Economic and Social Council on July 28, 2000, on the recommendation of the UN Commission on Human Rights, after indigenous groups had lobbied for an outlet at the UN for more than 25 years. The first session took place at UN headquarters from May 13 - 24, 2002. It was only this February that the UN established a Secretariat for the Forum, to give it support staff.
The Secretariat is charged with representing indigenous concerns to the rest of the UN and its agencies. It will also administer a Voluntary Fund for the Permanent Forum.
The agenda for the second session emphasizes social issues rather than political rights. It is taking the theme "Indigenous Children and Youth" and devoting the next two weeks of meetings to its "mandated areas," topics like "economic and social development," "environment," "health," "human rights," "culture" and "education." If last year’s session is any indication, however, representatives tend to ignore the topics in their speeches and talk about their own burning issues.
Much of the important work will probably take place outside of the sure-to-be cramped conference halls, in a series of receptions and networking events.
New York City’s American Indian Community House, a focus of the United State’s largest concentration of urban Indians, will be one center of activity away from the UN. On May 19, it will host a Remembrance Ceremony for Ingrid Washinawatok, the Menominee activist murdered in Colombia while on a mission to its oppressed U’wa Indians. John Trudell, poet and veteran spokesman for the American Indian Movement, will read his poems at the tribute.
Another event sponsored by indigenous peoples of North and South America will unroll May 14 at 9 a.m. at the door of the United Nations, when a delegation carrying the Sacred Staff of the Peace and Dignity Journeys will arrive from a run across New York state to deliver a traditional message. According to a press release, Spiritual Runners from this group have traversed the hemisphere three times since 1992. This run began May 6 in Seneca territory in New York’s "Western Door" and will pass through other Haudenosaunee territories on its way to the UN.
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