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On August 8, 2002,
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a request to the
Government of Suriname asking that it “take appropriate measures to suspend all
concessions, including permits and licenses for logging and mine exploration
and other natural resource development activity on lands used and occupied by the
12 Saramaka clans until the Commission has had the opportunity to investigate
the substantive claims raised in the case” and that it also “take appropriate
measures to protect the physical integrity of the 12 Saramaka clans.”
This request is
intended to protect the Saramaka people from human rights abuses and
environmental degradation caused by Chinese and Surinamese logging companies
operating in Saramaka territory while the IACHR conducts an investigation of
the situation. Concessions held by the Chinese companies, which were granted
without notifying the Saramaka, are presently guarded by active duty Surinamese
military personnel.
The Saramaka people
are one of the largest of the Maroon tribes living with Suriname’s borders.
Maroons are the descendants of escaped slaves who fought
themselves free from slavery and established viable, autonomous communities
along the major rivers of Suriname’s
rainforest interior in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their
freedom from slavery and rights to lands and territory and the autonomous
administration thereof were recognized in treaties concluded with the Dutch
colonial government in the 1760s and reaffirmed in further treaties in the
1830s.
The Upper Suriname River Saramaka amount to around 20,000 persons living
in some 58 villages located along the Suriname River,
one of the main watercourses in the country.
Despite their recognized use and occupancy of the area, Suriname
presently maintains that the Saramaka, and other Indigenous and Maroon peoples,
have no rights to their lands and resources.
Instead, the government asserts that these areas are owned by the state
and can be exploited at any time. Suriname
is thus the only state in the Americas
that has failed to legally recognize and guarantee, at least to some extent,
Indigenous and Maroon peoples’ rights to own, control, use and peacefully enjoy
their lands, territories and resources.
The case in question was filed with the IACHR in October 2000 by
the Association of Saramaka Authorities, an organization composed of the
leaders of the Upper Suriname River Saramaka communities, and twelve Saramaka
village leaders representing each of the Saramaka matrilineal clans. The
petition cited Suriname’s
failure to recognize Saramaka rights to lands and resources as defined by the
American Convention on Human Rights and active violation of those rights due to
the logging and mining concessions granted in Saramaka territory. In the petition, the Saramaka requested that
the IACHR intervene to encourage government action that would result in the
demarcation and specific recognition of tribal lands in accordance with
applicable legal standards.
Further submissions highlighted the urgent need for the
IACHR’s immediate intervention in order to avoid irreparable harm to the
Saramaka people’s physical and cultural integrity caused by the logging
activities in Saramaka territory.
Writing in support of IACHR intervention, Dr. Richard Price, an
anthropologist and leading academic expert on the Saramaka wrote that without immediate
protective measures, “ethnocide – the destruction of a culture that is widely
regarded as being one of the most creative and vibrant in the entire African
diaspora – seems the most likely outcome.”
And, “The use of Suriname
army troops to “protect” the Chinese laborers who are destroying the forests
that Saramakas depend on for their subsistence, construction, and religious
needs is an extraordinary insult to Saramaka ideas about their territorial
sovereignty. … Their presence in the sacred forest of the Saramakas, with
explicit orders to protect it against Saramakas, on behalf of the
Chinese, is an ultimate affront to cultural and spiritual integrity. By
unilateral fiat, and through the granting of logging and mining concessions to
Chinese companies, the postcolonial government of Suriname
is currently attempting to expunge some of the most sacred and venerable rights
of Saramakas. In this respect, the destruction of the Saramakas' forest would
mean the end of Saramaka culture.”
According
to environmental organizations familiar with logging in Suriname,
although only 10 percent of the trees are cut in a given area, 20-30 percent of
the forest in that area is destroyed by roads and other logging related
activities. Evidence on the ground indicates that the Chinese companies have
caused substantial destruction of the forest.
According
to a Saramaka eye-witness, “The
soldiers told me: ‘Leave the Chinese, go hunting here (in an area where the
Chinese have finished cutting already). But don’t let the Chinese see you.’
Well, I went there: there was destruction everywhere; the forest was destroyed.
In Paramaribo [the capital] people don’t know what the
Chinese are doing. Should not someone control the logging-activities of foreign
investors? The Chinese cut hundreds of trees, dragged them to a place and piled
them up there. They abandoned them in the forest because they did not need them
anymore. For us, people from the interior, it is terrible to see cedar trees
cut down that are so important for us. And all this destruction made the
animals flee away also.”
The case filed by the Saramaka is the first time that either
Indigenous peoples or Maroons from Suriname
have challenged the state’s failure to recognize and respect their land rights
in an international human rights body and, if successful, may represent a
precedent that will benefit all other Indigenous peoples and Maroons. The case
is presently pending a decision on the merits by the IACHR. The Saramaka have requested that the IACHR
make itself available to mediate a friendly settlement to the case that will
hopefully result in a negotiated settlement withdrawing the logging concessions
and recognizing Saramaka territorial rights.
Failing that they ask that the case be submitted to the Inter-American
Court on Human Rights for a binding decision. To-date, Suriname
has failed to respond in any way to the allegations made in the petition
despite repeated requests from the Commission to provide information on the
case.
For
further information, please contact
Fergus
MacKay, Coordinator, Legal and Human Rights Programme,
Forest Peoples Programme
Email: fergus@euronet.nl
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