UN: Indigenous People Must Get Protection

KHMER TIMES
SAFIYA CHARLES

A community school built for Phnong ethnic minority children in Chet Borey district, Kratie province. KT/ Muny Sithyna

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon challenged the world’s governments to tackle the issues facing its aboriginal communities yesterday in a statement on International Day of Indigenous Peoples.

The UN declaration warned that without protection, indigenous culture, stories and knowledge are in danger of being lost and urged states to better prioritize the lives and livelihoods of native peoples in policy planning and implementation.

“The benefits of a country preserving its indigenous heritage are manifold,” said Noel Boivin, a representative for the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Bureau for Education in Bangkok.

“There are the benefits to the indigenous people themselves – by being taught in their own language and within their own cultures...The fuel for cultural diversity, encouraging intercultural dialogue amid globalization...[and] the significant benefits to be had from the wisdom accrued over generations by indigenous people living in a specific environment.

“Indigenous knowledge can be invaluable, for example, when it comes to areas such as disaster risk reduction and management or coping with the effects of climate change.”

In Cambodia, indigenous communities live under threat of land grabs and deforestation, which endanger the environments they inhabit, a lack of access to healthcare, proper reproductive planning and barriers to education, including inadequate funding and discrimination.

This year’s UN theme focuses specifically on the latter – “Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Education,” and calls on nations to both recognize and guarantee their right to be educated in their own languages and cultures. Language barriers, among other things, are obstacles to education when instruction is administered solely in the national language, with little instruction or recognition of native languages.

“On this International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, I call on governments everywhere...to improve access to education for indigenous peoples and to reflect their experiences and culture in places of learning,” said Mr. Ban.

Worldwide, 370 million indigenous people inhabit 90 countries across the globe. Two-thirds live in Asia and the Pacific.

In Cambodia, the exact population of the country’s indigenous citizens is still unknown. The last official measure was a 1998 census that recognized 17 different groups numbering about 101,0000, but more recent research conducted by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs suggested there were almost 200,0000 indigenous peoples living in Cambodia in 2007.

Most indigenous people live in the country’s less densely populated north and northeastern provinces of Mondulkiri, Ratanakiri, Stung Treng and Kratie. Many of their communities straddle the borders of Vietnam and Laos, areas that have been hard hit by development projects. But groups like the Kuy are also present in Kampong Thom and others even as far south as Kampong Speu and Sihanoukville.

Many of the country’s indigenous people have been unfavorably impacted by land sales and development, losing their ancestral lands once used for farming and foraging to rubber plantations and private sector development. To complicate matters, the spirituality and cultural fabric of many of these communities is often directly tied to the environment.

Despite favorable regulations in the 2001 Land Law that granted collective land ownership rights to indigenous communities, lack of enforcement and implementation has left these communities vulnerable to economic exploitation.

“In a rapidly changing and increasingly globalized world, education underpins all aspects of development. For indigenous people, often the most impoverished and marginalized in societies, quality education offers an opportunity to engage more effectively on the issues that impact their lives,” said UNESCO’s Mr. Boivin.

International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 163 was established in 1989 and remains the sole international treaty focused on the rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples around the world. Cambodia is not yet a signatory.