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 Feb. 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."