SURVIVAL INTERNATIONAL NEWS RELEASE

5 December 2003

RACISM ALIVE AND WELL IN COMMONWEALTH

As the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting opens in Nigeria, Survival International is highlighting the continuing racism against tribal peoples which fuelled the British empire, and is still used today by Commonwealth states to deny tribal rights.

Just as Europeans excused the pillage of the empire with the claim that they were civilising 'savage races', tribal peoples face destruction at the hands of Commonwealth governments that see them as 'backward' and 'primitive'.

The Gana and Gwi Bushmen of Botswana were evicted in 2002 from their ancestral land and forced to live in government resettlement camps, supposedly for their own good. Botswana's foreign minister has said, 'We can't allow them to be primitive or backward.... [the government has a] responsibility to improve their cultural background.' One Canadian Indian leader has appealed to Botswana 'to learn from Canada's mistakes, and end the misguided policy of trying to forcibly integrate the Bushmen into your cultural mainstream.'

India is guilty of continuing the work of the colonial age on the Andaman Islands. Two of the Islands' tribes have been all but wiped out by British and then Indian attempts to 'civilise' them. A high court order bans all attempts to assimilate the remaining Jarawa tribe. Yet the Tribal Welfare Ministry has been working on a plan to, 'reform the tribals and assimilate them with the mainstream', whilst the Minister himself said in October, 'It is not right to leave them as is.'

In Australia until the 1970s, whole generations of Aboriginal children were taken from their homes and families and raised in government boarding schools, in the belief that they must be 'saved' from an inferior way of life. The recent film 'Rabbit Proof Fence' told the true story of one such family; the author of the book on which the film was based has recently filmed an ad for Survival, in which she says it is 'incredible' that 'the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples like that once suffered by the Aborigines is not over, and some governments still openly support and practice such policies.'

Photos and footage available. For more information contact Miriam Ross on (+44) (0)20 7687 8734 or email [email protected]

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