Asiawatch
The prospect of an International legal Instrument recognising Indigenous peoples, rights to self-determination has had Asian governments in a tizzy. These governments have taken the stand that international human tights standards deny collective rights and consensus politics. Instead, they have insisted that since all Asians are 'Indigenous' to Asia, an instrument on indigenous people's rights does not apply to them!
In India, the rights of the estimated 70 million adivasis to the collective ownership of their lands remain largely unrecognised and most are subject to restrictive forestry laws which place them at the mercy of local forest departments. In Sri Lanka, the surviving community of Veddah hunter-gatherefs has been expelled from its lands to make way for a national park. In Bangladesh, the Jumma (shifting cultivators) peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts remain subject to genocidal policies of colonisation and military repression.
Military governments in Burma have denied ail attempts by non-Burmese peoples to assert regional autonomy and have been engaged in warfare with the ethnic insurgencies that have sprung up. In Sarawak (Malaysia), the Dayak people have been in open conflict with government-supported loggers. Taiwanese aborigines have lost most of their lands and have been forced by poverty Into slum-dwelling and child prostitution; on Taiwan's Orchid Island, the Yami people have had their lands turned into a nuclear waste dump. In Japan, the Ainu of Hokkaido are struggling to reassert their identity after a century of forced assimilation, but the government, while accepting them as a religious and cultural minority, regards their demands for autonomy as unacceptable.
The Asian governments' stand has brought the whole question of the definition of who is 'indigenous' into focus. Asian delegates to the UN Human Rights Commission working group meeting in Geneva (November 199S) led by Bangladesh and Nepal, argued that the term applied only to "the unique situation of the original inhabitants of the Americas and Oceania, who were, at a point In history, overrun by settlers from overseas". They were quickly refuted by indigenous representatives who pointed out numerous government pronouncements and laws in Asia which use the word "Indigenous'. The Government of Nepal had constituted a national committee in 1993 to oversee Indigenous activities In the context of the UN's Year of Indigenous People. In 1995, the Bangladesh government had itself promulgated special laws directed at "indigenous hillmen" in Chittagong.