Drilled and pulped
Canada's Lubicon still threatened

The Lubicon Cree, native people in Canada to whom the NI donated part of the proceeds from its ‘Native American Cards’ in 1994 (see NI 258), are still fighting for their collective life. Based in northern Alberta, an area rich in oil, minerals and timber, the Lubicon world has been turned upside down since 1980.

Unlike some other nations, the Lubicon never signed away their land to the Canadian Government. But this has not stopped the exploitation of resources on their land. In 1980 the first road was built to facilitate the extraction of oil and gas. Almost immediately the Lubicon’s age-old self-sufficient lifestyle was destroyed. Between 1980 and 1984, 400 oil and gas wells were drilled within a 25-kilometre radius of the community, driving away the wildlife they depended on. By 1990, 95 per cent of the Lubicon were dependent on welfare.

The Lubicon are now willing to give up 98 per cent of their land. In return they wish to move back to their traditional site at Lubicon Lake and to establish a reserve with a school, a health centre, a community centre and an elders’ home together with housing that meets federal standards. They also claim one per cent of the estimated seven billion dollars’ worth of oil and gas so far taken from their land.

In February 1994 Ron Irwin, the Minister of Indian Affairs, visited Lubicon Chief Bernard Ominayak and publicly declared that this was one of the top four aboriginal justice struggles and that the Government was committed to a speedy resolution of the problem. It then took him a year to appoint an ‘independent’ arbitrator for the land-rights dispute who in fact has long-term connections with the oil and gas industries in Alberta.

In 1988 the Albertan Government sold the rights to every tree in Lubicon territory to Daishowa, a Japanese multinational with a massive pulp mill on the Peace River. Up to now Daishowa has only taken salvage lumber – trees cut by the oil and gas companies in the course of their extraction. But the Lubicon fear that full-scale extraction will begin soon.

In 1994 Unocal, one of those oil-and-gas companies, built a gas processing plant less than three kilometres from Lubicon Lake. The Lubicon protested to the Energy Resources Conservation Board, which had ruled in 1986 that all oil-and-gas companies had to notify the local people and work with them. In February this year the Board gave Unocal permission to start processing gas – and formally overturned its own 1986 ruling.

In 1989 the UN Human Rights Committee found Canada to be in contravention of the convention on political and human rights. It found that it was impossible for the Lubicon to get redress through the Canadian legal system.

The Lubicon feel that the final push is on to eliminate them. There are only around 500 left. In recent weeks there has been an increased police presence and they are being told that they would do well to join the Woodland Cree or Loon River bands as there won’t be Lubicon around for much longer.

Article and photos by Neilian Glass

Desertification – no problem
The UN Environment Programme has called for $480 billion to be spent on anti-desertification projects over the next 20 years. Right-wing British thinktank, the Institute of Economic Affairs has countered with a new report which claims that the whole idea of desertification is a nonsense. Author Julian Morris claims that the Sahara is not growing and that rising agricultural productivity in arid lands proves that deserts in general are not expanding. He believes the greatest threat in this field is the ‘corrupting’ effect of anti-desertification aid. His report is part of a free-market fundamentalist slant on development which dismisses fears about population growth (which just increases human efficiency and ingenuity) and environmental pollution (carbon-dioxide emissions have a fertilizing effect). Morris’s solution to the world’s ills is typical: the complete elimination of aid to developing countries and a more complete free market. Hmm...

The rich get richer...
The GATT agreement arrived at in the Uruguay Round will certainly increase global trade – but the benefits from that will not be fairly distributed, as the chart above shows. While the European Union will rake in the winnings, Africa will actually lose under the new rules. The chart comes from Oxfam, who have launched a worldwide campaign against poverty founded on a charter asserting that every person has a basic right to a home, clean water, enough to eat, a safe environment, protection from violence, equality of opportunity, a say in their future, an education, a livelihood and healthcare.

Olympian
Burundi, despite its problems, boasts one of the best male middle-distance runners in the world: Venuste Niyangabo. Last year 21-year-old Niyangabo was second only to Algerian Noureddine Morceli in the 1,500m rankings. Burundi will be represented in the Olympics for the first time in 1996 and Niyangabo will be going for gold.

Phil Minshull, Gemini News Service

 

Copped by cops
In Brazil an élite police anti-kidnapping squad raided a Rio de Janeiro slum and freed 13-year-old Paula Zamboni, only to learn that her kidnappers were Rio military police. The ensuing scandal sparked a shakeup and the head of the anti-kidnapping squad was replaced by Hélio Luz, a no-nonsense cop reputed to be immune to corruption and keen to clear up the streets of Rio. However, hopes for this were not raised when less than 30 hours after Luz was sworn in, four heavily armed men abducted Sarah Maria Lambréia, the wife of a construction-company owner. Chief Luz and his kidnapping squad did not even learn of the incident until a full eight hours later.

Time, Vol 145, No 24

False religion
Nine board members of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights are taking one of Egypt’s top Muslim clerics to court over his pronouncement that ‘female circumcision’ – female genital mutilation – is a religious duty. The activists blame the edict by Sheik Gad al-Haq for the Egyptian Health Minister’s decision to allow genital mutilation to be performed in government hospitals and clinics. They are basing their case on the ‘doctrine that Islam does not sanction any practice that constitutes harm to society or human beings’.

World Press Review, Vol 42 No 7

Downtrodden to the top
Mayawati, India’s first-ever female chief minister from the Harijan or ‘un-touchable’ group – beneath the formal caste system – has assumed office in the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. Her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP, or Downtrodden People’s Party) has formed a tactical alliance with the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the single largest party in Uttar Pradesh. The tactics seem to be an attempt to consolidate her position and win enough seats next time for her party to form a government on its own. Her government’s objective is to raise the living standards of Dalits (lower-caste people) and minorities.

Rahul Bedi,
Gemini News Service

 

MULTINATIONALS

Big Mac in the mire
Heroic battle against the fast-food giant continues

The international campaign against the McDonald’s corporation has for the last year been concentrating on the longest libel trial in British history. The case, which began on 28 June 1994 and looks set to run until March 1996, was brought by the $26-billion-a-year corporation against two unemployed activists for London Greenpeace, Helen Steel and Dave Morris.

The corporation has been notoriously ready to sue in the past but this time, thanks to the tenacity and determination of Steel and Morris, who have conducted their own defence, the tactic has completely backfired. The original allegations in the 1989 leaflet – which attacked the corporation’s record on nutrition, employment and the environment – have been publicized all over the world. McDonald’s has been forced to devote huge amounts of money (estimated at $8,000 a day) to maintaining its crack legal team and supplying a host of expert witnesses and senior executives. Yet the wounds to the corporate image grow deeper.

The court was told, for example, that a McDonald’s representative promised Japanese customers that eating the company’s food would make them tall, blond and pale. One of the corporation’s own expert witnesses admitted under cross-examination that a diet high in fat, sugar, animal products and salt, and low in fibre, vitamins and minerals is linked to heart disease and cancer – the allegation which has most alarmed McDonald’s. The corporation has stated in court that it does not object to its products being described as ‘junk food’.

The recent phase of the trial has focused on employment practices. The corporation’s British Vice- president, Sid Nicholson, has been forced to agree that for its employees over 21 they ‘couldn’t actually pay any lower wages without falling foul of the law’. He conceded that staff often mention pay as an area they would like to see improved, but said that no working person, including himself, ever felt they were paid enough. The corporation’s senior managers in Britain received £75,000 ($120,000) a year plus benefits in 1993.

The case has become such a public-relations disaster that shareholders at the corporation’s AGM in Chicago in May called for it to be abandoned. McDonald’s has found itself in a no-win situation. The international bad publicity in the course of the trial will have far outweighed any judgement in its favour. Steel and Morris, meanwhile, despite the immense difficulties the case has caused them, will not settle out of court unless the corporation undertakes not to sue anyone making statements similar to those in the leaflet – effectively accepting the truth of their allegations.

The corporation is doing its best to contain the case ‘as a UK issue’. A leaked internal memo from McDonald’s Australia says ‘We want to keep it at arm’s length, not become guilty by association’.

International protest against McDonald’s is, however, growing as fast as the burger chain itself. On the corporation’s 40th anniversary in April there were protests in at least 20 countries, including Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, Spain and Sweden. Steel and Morris were flown out by US supporters to a demonstration outside the corporation’s first store, in Des Plaines, Illinois, which is now a museum, while in June British protesters successfully forced the abandonment of filming for McDonald’s’ latest TV ad, at an estimated cost of $160,000.

Chris Brazier

UNITED NATIONS