land rights
Piaroa Frustrations with Government
Carlos Morales Peña, assistant coordinator of OIPUS, is frustrated. The leader of the Piaroa organization has been trying for three years to get the government of Venezuela’s Amazonas state to respond to its requests for the demarcation of their lands in Autana municipality. The government does not answer. Last week he told El Nacional, a […]
Discrimination Against the Mangyans
Yagay Sebastian, a Buid leader, is discouraged. “First the lowlanders invaded our land and forced us to move to the highlands and now we might be driven out again,” he says. “Only this time we have nowhere to go.” The Buid, also often spelled Buhid, are one of the seven indigenous groups living in the […]
Nubians Appoint Oddoul to Represent Them
Leaders of the Nubian community, both from Egypt and abroad, met in Aswan last week to air their grievances about their treatment by the Egyptian government and to seek some solutions. They decried the destruction of Old Nubia by a dam built across the Nile at Aswan in 1902, a higher one in 1934, and […]
Nubians Demonstrate for Land Rights
Scores of Nubians demonstrated peacefully last Thursday in front of the parliament building in Cairo for their right to return to their old homeland along the Nile south of Aswan. They were forced out of their villages in the 1960s when the High Dam at Aswan was completed, and the Egyptian government has never adequately […]
Buid Lose their Lands
While the Buid have traditionally relied on rituals for help in maintaining harmony in their families and communities, they will also turn to them when they are threatened by outsiders, such as the Christian lowlanders who are taking away their lands. Recent news stories about the land conflicts do not report any violence, though tensions […]
Kadar News Increasingly Upbeat
The cause of peace is advanced when the rights and interests of minority peoples such as the Kadar are acknowledged and respected by larger states and nations. These small societies are often at the losing ends of disputes—the dams are built, the forests are clearcut, rights to lands are denied, communities are destroyed. Two of […]
New Housing for the Nubians
Most of the peaceful Nubian people were forced to abandon their homes in southern Egypt in the 1960s because the Aswan High Dam was nearly completed, and, until now, they have never been fairly compensated by the Egyptian government. Many were resettled into shoddy new communities north of the city of Aswan. With their villages […]
Land Grants to Orang Asli, Who Complain about Representation
The Orang Asli, the original people of Malaysia, have been making the news lately because of both proposed government grants and the protests of the people themselves. The Deputy Prime Minister of their country, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, announced nearly two weeks ago that the Malaysian states would begin giving land titles to Orang Asli […]
Cheating Tribal Peoples in India
Prof. B.K. Roy Burman, referred to 10 years ago as the “grand old man of Indian anthropology,” has just published a critical analysis of the roots of the Naxalite movement. His lengthy essay, over 11,000 words, appeared in the October 17th issue of Mainstream, an Indian current affairs weekly. The author has been a member […]
Promises to the Nubians
Gamal Mubarak, a powerful young Egyptian politician, traveled to the Aswan area last week to address some of the concerns of the Nubian people about the government’s intentions toward them. The second son of aging Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Gamal is head of the Policies Committee of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). The younger […]
