Sting's Amazon tribe in peril as miners return

AN Amazonian tribe that was saved from extinction 15 years ago by an international campaign is once again facing genocide as a new wave of gold-miners invades its lands.

The Yanomami lost 20% of its people in just seven years during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Thousands of garimpeiros, or gold-diggers, polluted the rivers with mercury and brought violence and illnesses such as influenza, against which the Indians had no immunity.

After years of campaigning by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, the tribal leader, with backing from celebrities such as Sting, and international pressure led by Survival International, the London-based organisation, the Brazilian government finally agreed to demarcate the Yanomami land in 1992. It expelled the miners and created a reserve the size of Portugal.

Despite this success, Indians in Brazil still do not have proper rights over their land. The government refuses to recognise tribal ownership and many politicians would like to see the Yanomami Park reduced in size and opened up to mining and ranching.

The past two years have seen garimpeiros returning to the tribal lands, threatening the remaining 12,000 Yanomami in northern Brazil and prompting fears of a new gold rush.

"Yanomami are starting to die again," said Fiona Watson, research co-ordinator of Survival International. "If the Brazilian government doesn't act soon we'll be seeing the genocide of the Yanomami."

Davi Yanomami and his son, Dario, will arrive in London tomorrow to highlight the plight of their people and present a letter to Gordon Brown.

According to Dario, 600 miners have already entered the protected lands and more arrive each week. "It's a really bad problem because the garimpeiros are bringing in alcohol, prostitution and diseases like influenza and malaria," he said. "Our people are dying."

The Brazilian congress is debating a draft bill that, if approved, will legalise large-scale mining in Indian lands. The Yanomami have the ill fortune to be sitting on what is thought to be one of the world's richest mineral deposits.

Two weeks ago Davi Yanomami confronted President Lula da Silva at a conference. "I looked into his eyes and said: Yanomami don't want mining in indigenous lands," he said. "The government needs to be very careful because you don't know how to converse with nature, but I tell you the machine which digs the hole will damage the lungs of the earth and leave the whole world bleeding."

The Yanomami leaders will speak in Westminster on Tuesday at the launch of Progress Can Kill, a report by Survival International. This details how separation from their lands has led to the physical and mental breakdown of tribal peoples throughout the world from the Aborigines to the Yanomami.

Davi Yanomami argues that the only way to save the rainforest is to save the Indians by recognising their land rights. He will ask the British government to ratify an international convention guaranteeing tribal ownership. He will also criticise schemes to buy the rainforest such as Cool Earth, set up by Johan Eliasch, the millionaire businessman, and Frank Field, the Labour MP. Cool Earth urges the public to "protect an acre" for £70 to help to save the world.

"You whites talk about what you call 'development' and tell us to become the same as you. But we know this brings only disease and death. Now you want to buy pieces of rainforest or to plant bio-fuels. These are useless," he said.

"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."

Amazon tribe hits back at green 'colonialism'

It's one of the most fashionable ideas to save the planet from global warming: buying up tropical rainforest to save it from destruction. Gordon Brown has even appointed the millionaire founder of one such charity, Johan Eliasch, as his special adviser on deforestation.

But like all big ideas it is controversial, and this week a leading Amazonian campaigner will visit Britain to protest that this latest trend is linked to a health and social crisis among indigenous people, including sickness, depression, suicide, obesity and drug addiction.

Davi Kopenawa, a shaman of the Yanomami tribe, will help launch a report that, says Survival International, the charity behind it, claims separation from the land is directly linked to the 'physical and mental breakdown' of indigenous communities, whose lifestyle and culture is already under threat from mining, logging and resettlement away from traditional lands.

In a statement issued through the group, Kopenawa said: 'You napepe (whites) talk about what you call development and tell us to become the same as you. But we know that this brings only disease and death. Now you want to buy pieces of rainforest, or to plant biofuels. These are useless. The forest cannot be bought; it is our life and we have always protected it. Without the forest, there is only sickness.'

Survival International, which announced Kopenawa's visit, said that destruction of the rainforest had been blamed for the release of 18-25 per cent of human carbon dioxide emissions, the biggest greenhouse gas blamed for climate change.

Charities such as Cool Earth, the organisation set up by Eliasch and former Labour minister Frank Field, could buy a tiny fraction of the rainforest, but their popularity 'diverts attention' from the more urgent need to return rainforest to indigenous people, claims Stephen Corry, Survival International's director.

'It's like a bucket of water in the North Sea: the amount of land that's being bought by outsiders is infinitesimally small, and if you look at [the land bought by Cool Earth] there's 15,000 times more land protected because it's under indigenous control in the Amazon,' said Corry. 'We're not saying it's imperialistic, we're not even saying there's anything wrong with it: what's wrong is the claims being put forward in its name, that this is a permanent solution.'

Matthew Owen, Cool Earth's director, defended the charity against claims that the benefits of buying rainforest were exaggerated. Cool Earth only bought land which had rights for logging and was on the 'frontier' of the risk of destruction, said Owen. The charity, which charges donors £70 an acre, has bought 32,000 acres in Brazil and Ecuador. An estimated 50 million acres of rainforest - an area the size of Britain - is cut down annually.

Cool Earth and other charities have previously been accused of 'green colonialism' - a criticism they tried to counter by giving the freehold of land to local organisations, along with funds and training to protect it, and encouraging local people to carry on traditional trades such as rubber tapping and gathering fruits and nuts. 'We give it to them with no strings attached except it's kept standing,' added Owen.

The Survival International report, 'Progress can Kill', says land ownership has the biggest impact on health of indigenous tribes because people separated from their land are prone to imported western diseases, suffer mental illnesses and high rates of suicide, said Corry.