INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S WATCH
Indigenous
Groups
Decry 7 Years of IPRA Law
Dumagat, Remontado and Mangyan indigenous peoples from Southern Tagalog
picketed the office of the National Commission Indigenous Peoples (NCIP)
in Quezon City where they held a traditional blood-letting ritual of a
native chicken. The protest action was to condemn the enactment and
seven-year implementation of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA)
which they say is the “most-deceptive and anti-indigenous peoples law.”
BY MAY VARGAS
Contributed to Bulatlat
On Oct.
23, Dumagat, Remontado and Mangyan indigenous peoples from Southern
Tagalog picketed the office of the National Commission Indigenous Peoples
(NCIP) in Quezon City where they held a traditional blood-letting ritual
of a native chicken. The protest action was to condemn the enactment and
implementation of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) or Republic Act
8371, which they say is the “most-deceptive and anti-indigenous peoples
law.” IPRA is now on its eighth year.
Decrying
the appalling state of poverty suffered by the indigenous peoples in the
country, Mangyan leader Tony Calbayog pointed to the systematic and
worsening cases of landgrabbing as one of the major reasons. He said that
IPRA together with the NCIP is being used by the government to swiftly
entrench mining and other business corporations in their ancestral lands.
Calbayog,
who is also chair of the Bigkis at Lakas ng mga Katutubo sa Timog
Katagalugan (Balatik, literally indigenous people’s power in Southern
Tagalog), said foreign-owned development projects like mining and
mega-dams are seen by the state as the way out of the fiscal crisis. But,
he said, “the indigenous peoples are going to bear the brunt of the
further liberalization of these industries and will only lead to the
further plunder of our natural resources.”
More than
10,000 Agta, Remontado and Dumagats are bound to be displaced due to the
reconstruction of the ADB-funded Laiban Dam in Rizal province. More than
2,000 Igorot IP’s have been similarly displaced upon the operation of the
Japanese bank-funded San Roque Multi-purpose dam project in Pangasinan.
“When has
the IPRA law ever upheld our rights and protected us from aggravation?
Never. Instead, it has been totally toothless in defending indigenous
peoples’ rights,” said Calbayog.
Violation
Part of
the IPRA law is the issuance of Certificates of Ancestral Domain Titles (CADTs)
to indigenous groups who applied for recognition. But according to many
indigenous communities like the Balatik who refuse to apply for CADTs,
this feature of the law alone already violates their inherent rights to
their ancestral lands.
In a statement, the indigenous
tribes said pretty stationeries (‘magagarang papel’ in their language)
are inutile once foreign corporations come to dig and mine their lands or
when they inundate communities and rivers with mega dams.
“With the titling of ancestral
lands through the CADT of IPRA, ancestral lands become privately owned,
destroying our traditional communal practice of ownership and land use.
With private ownership, foreign companies can easily coerce or entice IPs
to sell their ancestral lands, because instead of getting the consent of
the whole community, only the consent of the individual the CADT is named
after is needed,” they said.
IPRA is indeed a viable tool
for the government to facilitate the entry of foreign projects in the
indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands “leaving us as squatters in our own
lands, threatened every now and then to be displaced. Worst it breeds
animosity and disunity among our people causing tribal wars over land
disputes. Such disputes were always easily resolved before through
traditional settlements but not during the IPRA implementation,” they also
said.
Calbayog said that while the
IPRA empowers the state to control and supervise exploration, development
and utilization of natural resources, it disempowers the indigenous
peoples from freely using the resources in their ancestral lands.
Subanons
Stressing this point further,
Calbayog cited the case of the Subanons of Mt. Canatuan in Siocon,
Zamboanga Del Norte, southern Philippines who are now threatened to be
displaced by the reactivation of the mining operations of Toronto Ventures
Inc., a Canadian-Filipino owned mining company. On June 12, 2003 President
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced the granting of the massive 8,213
hectares of CADT to the Subanons.
Calbayog said that the Subanons’
case of Mt. Canatuan is a glaring example among the many that proves that
the IPRA is but “an empty rhetoric and a most fraudulent law at that.”
On his
mission report from the Philippines on December 2-11, 2002, Special
Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of
the Indigenous Peoples, Prof. Rodolfo Stavenhagen said the right of the
indigenous peoples to their ancestral domains and lands and natural
resources found in IPRA is in fact limited by Section 56 which provides
that property rights within the ancestral domains already existing and/or
vested shall be recognized and respected.
“Thus, mining
companies licensed by the Government under the 1995 Mining Act continue to
operate in these domains despite opposition by indigenous communities and
organizations,” Stavenhagen said.
The UN
rapporteur further warned, “the controversial Section 56 of RA 8371 has
practically defeated all purposes of land ownership and protection for the
indigenous peoples which the law ostensibly adheres to.”
On the
same breadth, the Kalipunan ng mga Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas (KAMP),
the national federation of indigenous peoples organizations in the
country, has expressed staunch opposition to the IPRA law.
“IPRA
is not the solution to the Indigenous Peoples’ problems,” KAMP national
coordinator Nonoy Gobrin said. “Stripped of its avowed principles of Free
and Prior Informed Consent, we see nothing more in its substance and much
less in the manner it is being implemented. The seven -year implementation
of IPRA did nothing to help the Indigenous Peoples’ sorry plight. And
seven years is more than enough – experiences and lessons dictate that as
a matter of course, IPRA deserves to be scrapped.” Bulatlat
The author is with the
National Minority
Resource Center of the Tunay na Alyansa ng Bayan Alay sa Katutubo (TABAK).
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