This morning, 8th of August, I got the chance to say some words to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton at a press conference near Flagstaff.
I handed out an open letter to her and copies of more than 5.500 signatures from Germany against relocation of the Dineh people.
The letter and the signatures were initiated by the FIAN groupe in Hamburg (an international Human Rights organisation) and Harald Ihmig, Hamburg.
Please read the text of the open letter:
Harald Mueller, Wustrow/Wendland (Germany)
08/08/01
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Gale Norton
U.S. Department of the Interior
1849 C. Street N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20240
Dear Mrs. Norton,
Many people in Germany and in Europe as a whole observe with alarm the abuses to which the Dineh/Navajo are subjected in a country that considers itself a leader in human rights.
As testimony, we send you 5568 signatures against relocation of the Dineh people.
For more than 25 years
these people, to whom the ancestral land surrounding Big Mountain is sacred,
have been uprooted or driven below subsistence level. Continuing reprisals are
designed to crush their
resistance: ruling their presence illegal, impounding livestock, blocking access
to pasture land, springs, and wells, and subjecting them to capricious acts
of rangers and BIA agents. The so-called Bennett Freeze has halted construction
and prohibits even the most urgent repairs of dwellings. Most of the more than
12,000 Dineh already relocated have been settled in conditions where they are
exposed to the impact of disastrous radioactive contamination and without sufficient
opportunity to earn their living either by traditional livestock raising or
through income-generating work. This is a violation of fundamental human rights.
Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
stipulates "the right of everyone to an
adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food,
clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions."
Though the United States regrettably has not signed this treaty, it is bound
to article 25.1 of the General Declaration of Human Rights, which states the
same right.
Quite recently, the Sundance
ceremony-which has been practiced for years at Big Mountain-was severely obstructed
by Hopi police. Water was shut off, and several Dineh women were arrested and
maltreated. Measures against participation of guests from outside, who had been
invited and welcomed, demonstrated a strategy of isolation against Dineh people
put under foreign jurisdiction. All this proves that the ccommodation
Agreement of 1996 (P.L. 104-301) does not work. Even free exercise of religion,
which is guaranteed by Article 18 of the General Declaration of Human Rights
as well as by Article 18 of the International Covenant
of Civil and Political Rights and by the American Constitution, is violated.
The legal basis of all these obvious violations of human rights is the so-called
Relocation Act of 1974 (P.L. 93-531). It adopted the story of a centuries-old,
implacable land dispute between two Indian tribes. The
real motive has proven to be the evacuation of a region for the sake of economic
interest. Stripmining the most extensive U.S. coal deposits at Black Mesa is
destroying an integral indigenous culture and has severe
environmental effects. Extreme water waste by a slurry line is depleting the
N-Aquifer, the only source of drinking water for this region. Both Dineh and
Hopi elders have opposed the division of land and the policy
of exploitation of resources. While the tribal councils, who profit economically
from the arrangement, approved the division of the territory, which made a great
number of Dineh trespassers on their own land, they did so over the heads of
the people affected.
So we urge you in the name
of the signers to bring your influence to bear on a thorough revision under
constitutional and international human rights law of the procedures that led
to forced relocation and the
mentioned encroachments on religious, personal, and land rights of Dineh people,
including the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute Settlement Act of 1974. Meanwhile, responsible
agencies should redouble efforts immediately to
improve health, education, and welfare standards for American Indian people
in general and the Dineh in particular.
We remind you of the European
Parliament's resolution on February 17, 2000, titled "Native Americans
in the U.S. - Dineh" and of the detailed comment sent by the expert Judith
Nies to Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright on July 4, 2000; and of FIAN International's intervention, directed
to the President, on March 6, 2000.
Although the Dineh People of Big Mountain are a small minority, these signatures testify that the wrong done to them personally and to their culture is observed by many people in the world. Their case is a historical test of whether the centuries-old maltreatment of first nations will be stopped and how the USA respects human rights in its own territory.
Harald Mueller
Black Mesa Indigenous Support
P.O. Box 23501
Flagstaff, Arizona 86002
Message Voice Mail: 928.773.8086
Email: blackmesais@yahoo.com