Friday, February 17, 2006
Ethnic Cleansing
Sometimes it helps to step outside the pervasive incoherence that presently characterizes America, in order to look at our problems in a more global context. And no problem in the US is more elemental in that regard than our relations with First Nations, both at home and abroad.
Without getting into the local particulars of countries like Colombia, Bolivia, Nigeria, or Peru, the one fact that they share in common is that the rights of their internally displaced indigenous nations are--according to international conventions--human rights in their most elemental form. The right to continue to exist as a people: to speak, dance, sing, worship, educate, develop, and govern themselves as they see fit; that is what neoliberal economics and neoconservative militarism continue to violate on a daily basis.
Oppression of indigenous nations by Euro-American institutions in the form of centralized governments, organized religion, and corporatized economies--that deny indigenous autonomy and self-determination--is by definition genocidal in that by making it impossible to coexist, a de facto ethnic cleansing results.
Without getting into the local particulars of countries like Colombia, Bolivia, Nigeria, or Peru, the one fact that they share in common is that the rights of their internally displaced indigenous nations are--according to international conventions--human rights in their most elemental form. The right to continue to exist as a people: to speak, dance, sing, worship, educate, develop, and govern themselves as they see fit; that is what neoliberal economics and neoconservative militarism continue to violate on a daily basis.
Oppression of indigenous nations by Euro-American institutions in the form of centralized governments, organized religion, and corporatized economies--that deny indigenous autonomy and self-determination--is by definition genocidal in that by making it impossible to coexist, a de facto ethnic cleansing results.
