Subject: CNN DEMONSTRATION REPORT - ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Mining prompts protest

Placards at CNN: Group demands coverage of Navajos dispute with Peabody Coal.
Will Anderson - Staff
Sunday, December 5, 1999
A small group of Native Americans demonstrated in Atlanta Saturday against
what they called "ethnic cleansing" of Navajo ancestral lands.

Members of the Southeastern Native American Alliance carried placards
outside the CNN Center in protest of what they characterized as the
national media's failure to report on mining on an Arizona reservation that
has displaced thousands of Navajos.

"They're being forced off their land so that the Peabody Coal Co. can
continue its strip mining," said Al Swilling of Cleveland, Tenn., who
founded SENAA. "The only alternative they're being offered is to move on to
contaminated land."

Swilling and others claim the U.S. government is in large part responsible
for the problems on reservations in northeastern Arizona, where Congress
tried to settle a land dispute between Navajo and Hopi tribes in the 1970s.
Some contend the dispute was inspired by profits that both tribal
governments make from allowing mining to continue.

But Swilling disputes claims that conflict between the two tribes is
responsible for reservation problems. His group blames the Bureau of Indian
of Affairs in material that demonstrators handed out Saturday.

"The so-called tribal governments are puppet regimes installed by the
administration in Washington and do not speak for the people," the material
says.

Only five demonstrators appeared in Atlanta Saturday; and although they
arranged to hold the event at 11 a.m., they waited until after the end of
the annual Christmas parade, which started on Marietta Street at Centennial
Olympic Park, across from the CNN Center. Similar demonstrations were
planned in New York and Los Angeles.

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