Untitled Document
Stop buying our land because it's
killing us, Amazon tribe tells Britain
Wednesday,
17 October 2007
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Tribal
leader Davi Kopenawa is in London battling to have his tribe's voice
heard
Amazon
Indian tribes have been infected and weakened by "white man's diseases"
which they cannot fight off and which put one of the earth's vital life
sources at risk, a leading tribal spokesman has said.
Davi
Kopenawa, a shaman of the Yanomami Indian tribe from Brazilian Amazonia,
said that what non-indigenous people see as "development"
or "progress" had brought nothing but death and destruction
to his lands.
He
hit out at what he said were "useless" schemes which offer
people a chance to "buy" the rainforest to protect it.
One
of the best known such schemes is offered by the London-based "Cool
Earth" organisation set up by a British businessman and a member
of parliament. It asks members of the public to pay £70 to protect
an acre of rainforest.
But
Davi insisted: "The forest cannot be bought - it is our life and
we have always protected it. Without the forest, there is only sickness,
and without us, it is dead land."
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Cool
Earth's director Matthew Owen said it was not buying rainforest land to keep,
but returning it to local people and ensuring it is kept out of the hands of
loggers.
Davi,
however, insisted that white involvement in the rainforests was only harming
his people.
"If
we just sit back and do nothing, the white people won't help us," he said.
"We
need a lot of courage and we need to go out and ask for help. We are battling
to show our strength to the white man."
Davi,
who will hand a letter about his people's plight to British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown during his visit to London, urged the global community to put pressure
on the Brazilian government to make good on pledges to protect the Yanomami.
"The
Brazilian government has a duty - it promised to protect the Yanomami, to protect
our environment and nature, and to preserve our culture and our language,"
he said. "This is important for everybody, for the white people, for the
Indians and for future generations."
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The
Brazilian Amazon basin, home to Davi's tribe
The
Amazon, the world's largest tropical rainforest, is the planet's most diverse
terrestrial ecosystem and is thought to hold a quarter of all species.
The
Yanomami are the largest isolated tribe in the Amazon, with a population of
around 32,000. Their territory spans 9.6 million hectares and straddles the
border of northern Brazil and Venezuela. The Indians live in communal houses
of around 400 people and live by hunting, fishing and growing crops.
Davi
said one of the worst times for the Yanomami was during the 1980s, when hundreds
of thousands of gold miners invaded their land, destroyed their villages, shot
people from the tribe and prostituted indigenous women.
But
in 1992, after a sustained and high-profile international campaign, the Yanomami
persuaded the Brazilian government to demarcate their land and expel the miners.
"The
biggest problem is that the diseases have stayed - malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery,
venereal disease - these diseases entered at the time of the invasion of the
gold miners, and we became infected, and now we have to fight for our health,"
said Davi.
Davi
also warned that hundreds of illegal miners had also started to re-invade Yanomami
areas and urged the Brazilian government not to pass planned legislation which
would allow large-scale mining in Indian lands.
"Mining
is not good for indigenous peoples or their land," he said. "It won't
bring any benefits to the Indians. It will bring pollution of the water and
kill all the fish, it will destroy our houses and destroy the forest.
"If
all the indigenous people die, it is not good for the earth. The world needs
indigenous peoples to survive. The world needs clean water and air, the world
needs the rainforest."