James Pliny

Sign a petition to Peru's government!

2010-03-27T04:54:00.000-07:00

This is a petition with a difference: it is a poem (with several specific 'asks' at the bottom).

The aim is to encourage as many people as possible to sign the petition and then send it to Peru's president on the 5th of June.

It was on the 5th of June last year, near Bagua, northern Peru, that Peruvian police attacked indigenous protesters. Many people were killed, hundreds injured.

The petition/poem details the various excuses made and lies told by Peru's government in response to the events at Bagua.

It names the officials in power at the time: president Garcia, prime minister Simon, Minister of the Interior Cabanillas, and Minister of Justice Pastor.

The petition/poem is an adaptation of a poem called 'To whom it may concern' by Adrian Mitchell.

Click on the link above to read and sign it. Please share with as many people as you can!

To whom it may concern (Garcia? Simon? Cabanillas? Pastor?)

2010-03-27T02:22:00.000-07:00

'Free trade' shot me dead on the 5th of June.
Now I wear t-shirts made on the moon.
Say it was the Left who made them do it,
say the Church put them up to it,
say they didn't know why they were there,
say they were too stupid to care,
and exile them to Nicaragua.
Tell me lies about Bagua.

'Democracy' shot me dead on an Amazon highway.
Now I have my own party, vote my way.
Say it was them who attacked,
say the police just fought back,
say it was the Left who made them do it,
say the Church put them up to it,
say they didn't know why they were there,
say they were too stupid to care,
and exile them to Nicaragua.
Tell me lies about Bagua.

'Progress' shot me dead at the Devil's Bend.
Now I earn money I've nowhere to spend.
Say it was the US's fault, not yours,
say that was why you made the laws,
say it was them who attacked,
say the police just fought back,
say it was the Left who made them do it,
say the Church put them up to it,
say they didn't know why they were there,
say they were too stupid to care,
and exile them to Nicaragua.
Tell me lies about Bagua.

'Development' shot me dead, left me there to bleed.
Now I see a doctor whenever I need.
Say it was a crime to have protested,
say they should all be arrested,
say it was the US's fault, not yours,
say that was why you made the laws,
say it was them who attacked,
say the police just fought back,
say it was the Left who made them do it,
say the Church put them up to it,
say they didn't know why they were there,
say they were too stupid to care,
and exile them to Nicaragua.
Tell me lies about Bagua.

'Peru' shot me dead, took me away in a bag.
Now I know how to die for a flag.
Say you'll do a thorough investigation,
say you'll give them compensation,
say it was a crime to have protested,
say they should all be arrested,
say it was the US's fault, not yours,
say that was why you made the laws,
say it was them who attacked,
say the police just fought back,
say it was the Left who made them do it,
say the Church put them up to it,
say they didn't know why they were there,
say they were too stupid to care,
and exile them to Nicaragua.
Tell me lies about Bagua.

In memory of all those who died at Bagua, northern Peru, 5 June 2009 when police attacked indigenous protesters.

This poem chronicles the various excuses made and lies told by Peru's government in response to the events at Bagua.

The title names the officials in power at the time: president Alan Garcia, prime minister Yehude Simon, Minister of the Interior Mercedes Cabanillas, and Minister of Justice Aurelio Pastor.

This poem is an adaptation of 'To whom it may concern' by Adrian Mitchell.

What the BBC didn't say about Yellowstone

2010-03-04T11:21:00.000-08:00

Mark Thompson,
Director-General
BBC
PO Box 1922
Glasgow
G2 3WT

Dear Mark Thompson,

The BBC's recent programme about Yellowstone National Park in the US ('Yellowstone', BBC2, 24 February 2010) completely failed to acknowledge the fact that the creation of the park meant expelling 1000s and killing 100s of the people who used to live there.

I appreciate that wildlife was the focus of the programme, but its description of the region as a 'lost world' implied it was uninhabited before the park was created. This is false. The part of the programme called 'Yellowstone people' was an opportunity to mention those who had once lived there, but no such mention was made.

This is an extract from a recently-published book by investigative journalist Mark Dowie about Yellowstone:

'For a few years after its (the park's) creation seven native tribes – the Shoshone, Lakota, Crow, Bannock, New Perce, Flathead, and Blackfoot – lived, hunted and fished there. But 'strict natural protection' combined with wilderness romanticism to change policy, and by 1877 all Indians were ordered to leave the park for good. Resistance to eviction led to the deaths of hundreds of Indians – three hundred Shoshones in one particularly lethal encounter.' (Dowie, Conservation Refugees, MIT 2009)

The reason why it is crucial to draw attention to this is twofold:

1) Indigenous people around the world are regularly made 'invisible' on their own land. This makes it easier for governments and companies to claim their territory and exploit its natural resources for their own benefit and wealth.

2) Indigenous people around the world are regularly expelled from their land to make way for national parks. The number of people affected, known as 'conservation refugees', is estimated to be in the millions.

As your programme stated, Yellowstone was the world's first national park. . . but it also created the world's first 'conservation refugees'. By failing to acknowledge this, the BBC has seriously misled the public about the region and its history.

Yours sincerely,
James Pliny

Why ‘Avatar’ really IS fantasy

2010-01-21T11:44:00.000-08:00

A number of commentators have noted how 'Avatar' is an allegory for modern times. That’s to say, a so-called 'primitive' tribe, in this case the Na’vi, has its land invaded by a company, the RDA corporation, eager to exploit a valuable natural resource, 'unobtanium', on its land.

This is a situation many indigenous people could relate to. All around the world, from Africa to Asia to the Americas, their territories are being invaded by companies with all the kinds of tricks and dirty treats that the RDA has up its sleeves - and many more.

So why, despite the allegory, is 'Avatar' a fantasy after all? Because the Na’vi win and the RDA loses: the 'unobtanium' remains unobtainable. Because more often than not, over the last 500 years or so, it is the tribe which has lost and the company that has won: the 'unobtainium' has been anything but.

This is a largely unwritten history which many people in western Europe and the US are completely unaware of. Millions and millions have been killed in the scramble for resources - and the killing continues today. This isn’t the history they teach us at school.

That’s not to say 'Avatar' can’t act as a wake-up call for citizens in countries where companies like the RDA are based. It can. And it’s not to say that indigenous people around the world don’t sometimes repel companies from their land. They do. Only not as 'simply' as the Na'vi do.

What the papers (didn't) say about the RBS chief

2010-01-15T11:24:00.000-08:00

Plenty has been written about the Royal Bank of Scotland chief's appearance at a UK Treasury Select Committee hearing this week and his acknowledgement that his parents wouldn't approve of his almost £10 million bonus package.

'If you ask my mother and father about my pay, they'd say it was too high,' Stephen Hester was quoted as saying in The Times.

Who else wouldn't approve? Try dozens of indigenous communities in Canada whose land and lives are being devastated by an RBS-financed project described by one Greenpeace campaigner as 'the biggest global warming crime ever seen'.

This is the 'tar sands', or 'oil sands', project in Alberta in which the RBS, according to the Rainforest Action Network, has invested more than £8 billion. None of the UK's national broadsheets managed to mention this.

To hear about the effects of the tar sands project, here is someone, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, from the region being devastated: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/29/tarsands-oil-rbs-canada

As Eriel points out, UK taxpayers must bear some responsibility for the 'tar sands' project because 84% of the RBS is now owned by the state. For the guilty, 'look no further than the mirror,' she says.

Almost £10 million for overseeing the 'biggest global warming crime ever'? When the Head of the Select Committee told Hester 'the sheer size of your package seems to be out of synch with what is happening out there', he was more right than he knew.

For more information see: http://blog.newint.org/editors/2009/12/22/head-in-the-sand/

'So very true. Thank you.'

2010-01-09T06:05:00.000-08:00

The world's largest Native American news source, Indian Country Today (ICT), published my poem 'They came' back in July. One ICT reader's response was: 'So very true. Thank you.'

'They came' condemns our silence to speak out against the genocide of indigenous people around the world over the last 500 years.

To date, it has been published in a number of countries: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, India, Peru, Spain, the US and the UK.

To read the poem see: http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/50046577.html

Here comes the pesticide

2009-11-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

'Civilization', 'progress', 'development', 'modernity'. . . These are all concepts and practices that have been used and abused to justify removing indigenous people from their land.

The reason? More often than not, it has been to access and exploit the natural resources on or under indigenous territory. These resources include gold, silver, rubber, oil, gas, timber, water etc.

But how do you remove people from their land if they refuse to go? Over the years, governments, companies and others, or those doing their dirty work, have found all kinds of ways:

- imprison them
- beat them
- torture them
- rape them
- hold them to gunpoint
- kill them
- bomb their homes
- destroy their crops
- poison their rivers
- spread diseases among them

And the latest? Or rather, the latest to attract the mainstream media's attention? Buzz them with light aircraft and spray pesticide.

That has just happened in Paraguay. The Ava Guarani have been sprayed with pesticide after refusing to leave their land - wanted by Brazilians to grow soya.

'An aeroplane arrived and sprayed directly above their homes with what are believed to be pesticides normally used on soya crops,' said Amnesty International.

According to reports, more than 200 people were affected: nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, and loss of consciousness.

See this CNN story for more details: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/11/10/paraguay.pesticide.attack/index.html#cnnSTCText

WANTED: Ray Hunt, in person, in the Amazon

2009-11-24T10:45:00.000-08:00

Published at Intercontinental Cry:

http://intercontinentalcry.org/wanted-ray-hunt-in-person-in-the-amazon/

When not shooting the 'natives' is not acceptable

2009-11-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

Ansel Adams's photographs of Yosemite National Park are well-known: striking, ethereal prints of streams, rock-faces, flowers, waterfalls, and trees.

But there's something missing from these photos. Or rather, someone.

I mean the people who called Yosemite home. The people who had lived there for at least 4000 years. The indigenous Miwok.

Adams deliberately avoiding photographing them, even though they were rarely out of his sight when he was in Yosemite valley and he knew they had lived there for a long, long time. The reason? According to a new book by American journalist Mark Dowie, called Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, it was because he didn't think they belonged there. For Adams, Yosemite should be a 'pristine', unspoilt 'wilderness': no room for any people.

Why does this matter? Principally because this view of 'wilderness' has led to at least 5 million, and probably millions more, indigenous people around the world being driven off their land to make way for parks and reserves in the name of 'conservation'. Ergo: 'conservation refugees.'

How could this have happened? According to Dowie, Adams's view of 'wilderness', a 'fiction' he 'fed' by shooting Yosemite in the way he did, was shared by many American conservationists and later exported globally so there are now 110,000 'protected areas' worldwide.

Time and time again, people lost their land and homes. Sometimes it was to conserve 'megafauna' like lions, tigers and gorillas. Sometimes conservation served as an excuse for other, more nefarious reasons.

Some of these 'protected areas' are very famous. Yosemite is just one. The Serengeti and Maasai Mara national parks, on traditional Maasai land, are others.

The last Miwok left Yosemite in 1969, but the evictions started 100 years before that. Their crops were destroyed. 'Paramilitary' forces shot at and killed them.

'So few of us know what 'had to be done',' writes Dowie, with heavy irony, 'to create the national parks and wildlife refuges we truly believe are ours to enjoy.'

The irony is important. One of Dowie's central arguments is that the conservationists laboured under a misapprehension: saving the 'megafauna' did not, and still does not, require removing the people who live in the 'wilderness' with them.

Worse, Dowie writes, it is still happening today. It is still 'having to be done.' Let's make sure that if we visit a park we're not increasing the number of the world's refugees, or no one's being shot so we can shoot our own photos, like Adams, with no one in them.

'When Dead Aid is Dead Fashionable'

2009-07-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

Did anyone happen to see Tatler's June edition, page 49? It was the usual Tatler spread: people standing around and smiling at the camera, looking very pleased with themselves, many of them with hands clamped around large tumblers of white wine. This was the 'Party Scene' feature.

You could be forgiven for thinking they were celebrating something. Lord de Rothschild's birthday? A minor royal's engagement? A polo match? Something, anything, to do with Cartier? Actually, the publication of a book called 'Dead Aid', by Zambian Dambisa Moyo.

I doubt I'm the only one who thinks there's something rather outrageous about all these people getting together like this to mark the publication of a book which has such a devastating message - if all they're going to do is smile and say cheese. Or eat plenty of it.

The book's thesis is simple. Aid to Africa isn't working. Aid to Africa is actually Making Things Worse. It's making Africans poorer, it's slowing economic growth.

Just how much aid are we talking about here? $300 billion since 1970.

That makes the title of this feature, 'Money talks', particularly difficult to take. The point is, money doesn't always talk. At least, not in the way you want it to.

I understand the book is needed. And I understand the book needs to be promoted. But if these people are going to do no more than smile for Tatler, if they don't seriously engage with the issue and work to find legitimate ways of improving the lives of people in African countries, then all they're doing is using the book, using African poverty, using aid's failure, to promote themselves.

It's not enough just to have your photo taken.

So what are you doing about African aid, Mr Jamie Allsopp?

What are you doing, Mr Lucas Wurfbain?

What are you doing, Miss Josephine Daniel? Mrs Dorian Prosdocimi?

Un llamamiento a la reflexión y a la acción!

2009-07-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

'Vinieron'

Primero vinieron por la tierra de los indígenas,
dijeron que estaba vacía y la robaron,
pero no lo denunciamos porque no eramos indígenas,
y nuestras leyes lo promovieron.

Luego vinieron por el subsuelo de los indígenas,
dijeron que era rico y lo explotaron,
pero no lo denunciamos porque no eramos indígenas,
y nuestra economía lo necesitaba.

Luego vinieron por la cultura de los indígenas,
dijeron que era primitiva y la destruyeron,
pero no lo denunciamos porque no eramos indígenas,
y nuestra propia cultura lo confirmo.

Por último, vinieron por los indígenas mismos,
dijeron que no eran seres reales y los mataron,
pero nosotros seguimos callados porque no eramos indígenas,
y nuestra ciencia lo demostro.

¡Ya basta!
¡Ahora queremos denunciarlo!

James Pliny 2009

N.B:

Este poema se centra en el fracaso de la denuncia del genocidio indígena alrededor del mundo en los últimos 500 años.

Lo publico ahora porque quiero marcar los trágicos sucesos en junio en Amazonas en el norte del Perú.

'Vinieron' es una adaptación de un poema, con mismo título, del pastor alemán Martin Niemoller.

A call to thought and action!

2009-06-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

'They came'

First they came for the tribes' land,
said it was empty and stole it,
but we did not speak up because we were not tribesmen,
and our laws encouraged it.

Then they came for what was under the tribes' land,
said it was rich and dug it up,
but we did not speak up because we were not tribesmen,
and our economy needed it.

Then they came for the tribes' culture,
said it was primitive and destroyed it,
but we did not speak up because we were not tribesmen,
and our own culture confirmed it.

Finally, they came for the tribes themselves,
said they weren’t real people and killed them,
but still we did not speak up because we were not tribesmen,
and our science proved it.

There was no need to come for us
because we were on their side.

No longer!
Now we will speak up!

James Pliny 2009.

Note:

This poem is published to mark the violence in the Peruvian Amazon earlier this month when peaceful indigenous protests were violently broken up by Peruvian special forces.

The poem criticises the failure of people in my part of the world - that's to say, western Europe - to speak out against the genocide of indigenous peoples around the world over the last 500 years. It is an acknowledgment of what has happened in the past, and a call to thought and action for doing what we can to stop it from happening in the future.

It is a re-working of a poem with the same title, attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemoller.