UPI STORY:

By Donna R. Bassett and Edward W. Bassett

BOSTON Dec. 10 (UPI) - The New Hampshire presidential primary coincides with the
next forced relocation of American Indians while U.S. troops continue to block
ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and the world's largest coal company prepares to
expand its strip mining of American Indian lands, according to published
government documents and leading authorities.

Two presidential candidates, Democratic Vice President Al Gore and Republican
Sen. John McCain, have stakes in the ethnic cleansing and strip mining issues.
Spokespeople for both have declined to comment on the forcible relocation of
Navajos or say if their candidates have accepted campaign contributions from the
Peabody Coal Co., which calls itself the world's largest coal company and is
already strip mining the Indian lands in northern Arizona. McCain, the Arizona
senator and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee who sponsored the
1996 Navajo-Hopi Relocation Act (Public Law 104-301), urged the use of force to
stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Gore, the leading Democratic candidate, has
written a book, "Earth In The Balance: Ecology And The Human Spirit."

Gore wrote that "Native American religions ... offer a rich tapestry of ideas
about our relationship to the earth" in his chapter on "Environmentalism of the
Spirit." McCain's election campaign Internet page says, "we have a profound duty
to be responsible stewards of the natural treasures that sustain us." He says
that "to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land
will result in undermining (in) the days of our children."

.On February 1, the day of the New Hampshire primary, "321 households"
(approximately 1,200 people) are scheduled to begin forcible relocation,
according to an Oct. 1, 1999, report by the U.S. Office of Navajo-Hopi Indian
Relocation (ONHIR), an executive commission that reports directly to President
Clinton. Already, some 15,000 Navajo Indians have been forcibly relocated.

Asked if President Clinton could call a temporary halt to the relocations, Paul
Tessler, the legal counsel to the ONHIR commission said, "I presume the
president could direct us to do something or not to do something."

Because of the destructive impact of involuntary relocation on people who have
strong religious and cultural ties to the land, "this is a case of ethnic
cleansing," according to California Institute of Technology anthropologist
Thayer Scudder, who has testified before Congress on the Navajo situation and
has been recognized by leading international anthropological organizations for
his 40 years of work in this area.

"It's not intentional ethnic cleansing," he said. "It is due, primarily, to the
ignorance, insensitivity, and arrogance in all three branches of the U.S.
government," going back to 1848 when the U.S. government first took control over
the lands now used for Indian reservations.

Unlike the phenomena in Kosovo, there have been no mass executions that grabbed
international headlines. But a much larger part of the Kosovo situation were the
hundreds of thousands of people forced off of their land.

"Can you imagine," Scudder asked, "any circumstances where 15,000 (white)
Americans living on Indian land would be forcibly relocated? Can you imagine any
circumstances where 15,000 rural black Americans" would be forcibly relocated?"

"The Japanese relocation 1942 was larger," he noted, "but this is the largest
forced relocation in the United States, in a rural area, since the Japanese war
relocation. And it is just as unethical and just as much ethnic cleansing."

Noting that the relocation costs are now "over $350 million," and will probably
escalate "to over $400 million," Scudder said, "imagine how that (money) could
have been used for the joint development of Hopi and Navajo Indians."

Furthermore, a tangled set of laws now lets the U.S. Interior Department's
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) impound Navajo Indian sheep and arrest Navajos
for simply repairing their homes. These laws also allow the government to
bulldoze those repaired homes.

Although U.S. law has established that American Indians are citizens and have
the right to vote, a 1974 U.S. Appeals Court ruling (Healing v. Jones) said that
Hopis and Navajos "only have rights through their tribe," and not as
individuals, according to former ONHIR Executive Director Leon Berger.

Instead of individuals owning property on Navajo and Hopi lands, the two tribal
councils have the authority to lease lands on behalf of tribe members.
Therefore, both tribal councils began to profit from mining leases after an
estimated $10 billion in coal deposits was discovered in the area during the
1950s.

Peabody Coal now is "in a beautiful position because the government" is
relocating the Indians, said Berger, who resigned from the NHIR because he felt
"the commission did not work hard enough to achieve a compromise that the law
made possible." Scudder noted, "it's much easier to mine land where there are no
people."