on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of MinoritiesForty-ninth session
8 August 1997
Indigenous people will play an active part in efforts to reform the United Nations to meet the challenges of the next millennium. That was the message contained in a statement read out on behalf of Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the morning as the Subcommission marked International Day of the World's Indigenous People.
The United Nations system was actively building partnership with indigenous peoples and organizations to develop programme activities to address their concerns and to bring about improvements in conditions, said the Secretary-General. He listed United Nations efforts on behalf of indigenous people, including the current International Decade of the World's Indigenous People and the undertaking to draw up a declaration on indigenous rights as soon as possible. Furthermore, the proposal by the 1993 Vienna human rights world conference to establish a permanent forum for indigenous people within the United Nations was under serious discussion, he added.
In the statement delivered on his behalf by Erica-Irene Daes, Chairperson-Rapporteur of the Subcommission's Working Group on Indigenous People, the Secretary-General also urged the international community to acknowledge the injustices of the past and move towards a more understanding future.
The International Day of the World's Indigenous People is officially observed on 9 August, in honour of the first meeting of the Subcommission's Working Group on Indigenous Populations on August 1982.
Prior to the morning' commemoration, during which representatives of the Manchineri people of Brazil and the Matwa people of the Great Lakes region of Africa also took the floor, the Subcommission had resumed its debate on the question of human rights violations throughout the world. During that discussion the panel heard statements from the observer delegations of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, China and Tunisia, as well as from members Clemencia Forero Ucros, David Weissbrodt, Marc Bossyut and Claire Palley. Chairman Jose Bengoa and member Miquel Alfonso Martinez delivered statements on indigenous people.
Experts of the Subcommission wall into the group's fourth day of discussion of alleged human-rights violations anywhere in the world, expressed divergent opinions in the afternoon on whether the panel should focus on problems in specific countries.
Subcommission member Louis Joinet said he was concerned that some of his fellow experts were going beyond what the Commission on Human Rights had agreed upon for Subcommission consideration of such matters, and in fact they wanted no resolutions on countries at all. He said the Subcommission would become a hollow shell if it were not able to adopt resolutions on countries.
By contrast, member Mohammed Sardar Ali Khan said country resolutions injected politicization into the Subcommission, and that such resolutions were essentially political acts which should be left to inter-Governmental bodies like the Commission on Human Rights and the General Assembly. The Subcommission was an expert body, a think tank, not a "complaints chamber sittingin judgement on Governments", he said, and its role should be to aid the search for constructive and practical solutions to humanrights difficulties.
Meanwhile, member Lucy Gwanmesia remarked that since the creation of the Subcommission in 1947, wonderful speeches were delivered year in and year out, yet the main aim behind the creation of the United Nations was treated with contempt all over the world -- in the cases of ex-Zaire, of Burundi and Rwanda, of Kenya, of Chechnya, and of other places, who was selling and transporting arms to these countries? she asked. What was the aim of those carrying arms to these warring zones? Did those who were doing so care about the citizens of those regions?
In addition to statements from various experts, the meeting heard addresses from a number of national delegations of Jordan, Azarbaijan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Colombia, Armenia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia.
Also providing addresses were Subcommission members Sang-Yong Park and Osman El-Hajje.