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Re-printed from THE EDMONTON JOURNAL, Saturday, September 7, 1991
LETTERS
LUBICON CASE BETRAYS PM ON HUMAN RIGHTS
As a member of an organization concerned about the human rights of aboriginal
people, I have been monitoring the worsening plight of the Lubicon people
since 1984. Recently I obtained a copy of a speech given by Prime Minister
Brian Mulroney on April 24 to the Asian Development Bank. Along with growing
numbers of other Europeans, I am forcibly struck by the significant
discrepancy between his verbal support for human rights in speeches to the
international community and his government's oppression of aboriginal people.
In his remarks, he said:
"...The truth is that in a world where power is diffuse, economies are linked
and problems are related, isolation delivers neither peace nor prosperity.
The truth is, also, that the old distinction between "internal" and "external"
matters is being eroded. The principle of a national sovereignty no longer
automatically prevails over all other principles enshrined in the UN Charter
and international law. A country's human rights practices are no longer a
domestic issue; they have become an external matter of legitimate interest to
all people. Democracy has become an external matter...
"...That means investing more faith in multilateral institutions and ensuring
they have the resources they need -- legal, human and financial -- if they are
to become the instruments of order we now say they are. That applies not
least to the United Nations, the singular universal instrument of peace and
security. If we want that body to work, not just talk, we must equip it to
act, ask it to act, and expect it to act.
"...But (official development assistance given to Third World countries)
itself cannot bring economic development. It requires sound domestic economic
policies and the freedom of people to exercise their creativity and their
capacity for enterprise."
Given the Mulroney government's well-documented treatment of the Lubicon
people, these statements raise a number of basic questions:
*If "a country's human rights practices are no longer a domestic issue," then
why did the Canadian government do everything to block the Lubicons from using
the UN human rights committee to adjudicate Lubicon human rights complaints
against Canada?
*Why did the Canadian government argue that the Lubicon complaint should not
be heard by the UN committee because the human rights of the Lubicons are an
"internal" Canadian matter?
*Why did the Canadian government deliberately distort, play down, dismiss and
ultimately deny altogether, the UN human rights committee decision that Canada
was in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
in its treatment of the Lubicons?
*Why did the Canadian government interfere in the democratic process of the
Lubicon Lake nation by creating an artificial new Indian band (the Woodland
Cree) and by manipulating the referendum on the proposed Woodland settlement
agreement?
*Why does the Canadian government not allow the Lubicon people "the
freedom....to exercise their creativity and their capacity for enterprise?
As an Austrian forester, I am also very concerned about the related issue of
the huge new Daishowa pulp mill in Peace River, to which the Alberta
government has sold the trees from a huge 29,000-square-kilometre area which
blankets the unceded traditional Lubicon territory.
>From what I have seen with my own eyes it's clear that Canadian government has
little concern for managing the forest as a renewable resource; what's being
done with the forests in Canada is more like exploiting a non-renewable
resource such as coal. How else can one understand construction of a $500-
million government-subsidized 1,000 metric-tons-a-day Japanese-owned pulp mill
without any kind of adequate environmental impact study?
What kind of economic policy is it to simply sell off natural resources for
secondary processing elsewhere? That's not development of the Canadian
economy, that's development of the Japanese economy.
Is it true that Daishowa is only paying $2 a cubic metre for softwood and only
28 cents a cubic metre for hardwood? Canadians should know that the stumpage
fee in Austria for softwood (spruce/fir) is around $27 per cubic metre and
that the stumpage fee for hardwood (beech) is about $22 dollars per cubic
metre.
Lastly, there's a very real question about who owns the land traditionally
used and occupied by the Lubicons. Normal practice legally, politically and
historically, is that the resource rights can only be sold when title to the
land is clear. In the Lubicon case, ownership of the land is, at the very
least, contested.
It would only be fair to postpone logging and other resource exploitation
activities in the traditional Lubicon area until a mutually satisfactory
settlement of Lubicon land rights has been reached between the Lubicons and
the Alberta and Canadian governments. These questions, inconsistencies,
contradictions and facts pose a very real challenge to the international image
which Mulroney seeks to create.
More and more people, not only at the UN, or associated with human rights
organizations, or involved with the environmental movement, but average people
in Europe, are becoming increasingly aware that it is not in the area of human
rights where Mulroney is providing international leadership, but in the size
of the discrepancy between his international human rights pronouncements and
actions of his government.
Peter Schwarzbauer, Assistant Professor, Institute for Forestry, Industrial
Economics and Economic Policies, Vienna, Austria