B. Eastern Asia Sector Review

1. Overview

This section of the report examines the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the whole of South and South East Asia with a focus on four countries: India, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines where PeFoR has developed its projects and which were visited as part of this review. Within this region, the politically marginal and ethnically distinct peoples who inhabit the forests of the Asia-Pacific are in a phase of rapid social change, characterised by accelerating deforestation, dispossession of their lands and rapid integration into the market.

Their common experience of land loss, human rights abuse and economic and cultural impoverishment, has brought many of these peoples to realise that despite their diversity and differences they all share a common struggle. In the face of powerful outside interests — outside their villages and outside the region — which seek to profit from their forests and their internal political divisions, many of these peoples are in a phase of rapid reorganisation, linking up to create new institutions — local associations, national organisations and international networks — through which they can better project their demands and influence decisions that affect them.50

Deforestation has become a matter of global concern. Taken as a whole, the Asia-Pacific region, which has already lost more than half of its original forest cover,51 continues to suffer a startling rate of forest loss.52 The results have been a dramatic loss of biological diversity, a growing dependency in many countries on imported timber and other non-timber forest products, unpredictable and more severe floods and droughts, the loss of top-soil and farmland and the increasing vulnerability of forests to fires.

Until recently international, environmental standard-setting aimed at curbing these losses has tended to focus on the technical dimensions of natural resource management, while the social, economic and political aspects of the forest crisis have received relatively little emphasis.53 Happily, thanks to the increasingly outspoken voices of indigenous peoples, fisherfolk and non-government organisations, this situation is beginning to change. It is now becoming more widely accepted that environmental degradation often results from social injustice and political inequalities.54 Forests and reefs are now seen as contested resources over which many different sectors of society seek to assert control. Often, environmental degradation results when these conflicts of interest resolve in favour of urban elites rather than the rural poor, while those to suffer most in these struggles are the region's indigenous peoples.55

The most startling example of this process were the massive forest fires of 1997 and 1998, which are estimated to have resulted in the destruction of 5.5 million hectares of forest, mainly in Indonesia, although other countries in the region also had serious fires. The fires were a repeat of the massive burns of 1982/3, when Indonesia lost an estimated 3.5 million hectares, and of 1992/3, and were similarly linked to the 'El Nino' weather phenomenon. However, whereas in previous years the region's governments have always blamed these forest fires on the irresponsible behaviour of shifting cultivators, this time that excuse has not been credible. Satellite imagery has revealed clearly that the majority of the large fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra were started in major land clearing operations being promoted as part of the Government-directed transmigration programmes and for the establishment of oil palm, paper-and-pulp and timber estates. Poorly managed logging in neighbouring forests, which left the forest cover broken and therefore under-storey drier, and which strewed trash and unused tree-trunks across natural fire breaks, caused the fires to spread easily through the natural forests. The Indonesian Minister for the Environment was outspoken in his criticism of the forestry companies and noted how forest-dwellers had always been unfairly blamed for starting the fires:

"While the bosses of large plantations just walk into their air-conditioned offices if the situation becomes smokey, these voiceless people have to take all the blame and suffer from suffocating smoke."56

While economists tried to estimate the full costs of the fires — one estimate was of a total loss of US$4 billion — and environmentalists gave figures for the impact of the smogs on people in cities — according to the WorldWide Fund for Nature some 47 million people will have suffered temporary or long term health effects, little information has yet emerged of the impact of the fires on the indigenous peoples in the forests. Studies of previous fires suggests that these will have been severe; food crops are lost: game in burned over forests becomes scarce: rattan gardens are destroyed: while cash crops, like pepper, cloves, cinnamon and rubber, are also wiped out. Recovering from this damage takes years. Rattan gardens, for example, take at least seven years from being replanted to come into production. Preliminary Government assessments of the social impact of the latest fires in Kalimantan show that tens of thousands of Dayaks now face hardhsip and starvation from the combined effects of the fires and droughts.57 The lessons are clear: the simultaneous promotion of industrial forestry and plantations and the denial of indigenous peoples' rights, can lead to serious economic loss, environmental damage and impoverishment.

Rights and Definitions

The use of the term 'indigenous' is controversial in Asia. The term in its most literal sense only implies long term residence in a given area. Accordingly, many Asian governments have protested that the term does not apply well to their countries as the majority populations are clearly 'indigenous' in this sense, unlike the settler populations in the Americas and Australasia, whose origins are obviously distinct from the peoples' whose lands they have assumed.

However, as noted in the global overview above, in international debates the term indigenous has come to be applied to politically marginalised, territorially-based ethnic groups, culturally distinct from the majority populations of the nation states in which they now find themselves, who recognise themselves as 'indigenous'.58 In this sense, the indigenous peoples of Asia are more obvious and include, all or part of those groups that are officially distinguished from the society of the national majority, such as the 'scheduled tribes' of India, the 'hill tribes' of Thailand, the 'minority nationalities' of China, the 'indigenous cultural communities' of the Philippines, the 'isolated and alien peoples' of Indonesia, the 'aboriginal tribes' of Taiwan, the 'aborigines' of Malaysia and the 'natives' of Malaysian Borneo.59

In recent years, such peoples have begun increasingly to identify themselves as 'indigenous'.60 In part this is because the term 'indigenous' carries fewer pejorative connotations than terms like 'aboriginal' and 'tribal', with their implications of 'primitiveness' and inferiority. However, the main reason they have begun to adopt the term is to demonstrate their common struggle for recognition of their rights. By labelling themselves as indigenous, these ethnic groups at once affirm their solidarity with others using the same term and assert their rights to their territories and to self-determination, rights which are recognised in existing and emerging instruments of international law.61

The right to self-determination is a right enjoyed by all peoples,62 as clearly spelled out in the United Nations' International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, by claiming this right, Asian indigenous peoples are not necessarily asserting their will to secede from the existing nation states within whose boundaries they now find themselves. To a substantial extent, one can generalise by noting that the more oppressive are governments' relations with indigenous peoples, the more likely they are to demand secession from existing states. Thus, in extreme cases, where government-directed violence against indigenous peoples has been severe, the indigenous peoples have been seeking independence or statehood, such as in Burma, Nagaland, West Papua (Irian Jaya), Bougainville and the Moro of the Philipines.63 However, for most indigenous peoples, what indigenous peoples are striving for is not secession but rather the right to renegotiate their relationship with the State so that they have the degree of autonomy and self-governance that they need in order to maintain their distinctive social and political institutions, retain or regain control over their lands, territories and cultural heritage. They also seek control of the natural resources that underpin their daily lives.64

It is exactly these rights which many of the region's governments contest since they covet the lands and resources in indigenous territories. They have thus sought to limit the rights which these peoples enjoy and frustrate the emergence of strong political organisations. At the international level, many Asian governments have thus insisted that the concept of 'indigenous peoples' does not apply in Asia because almost everyone is indigenous. In this way they hope to prevent emerging human rights standards on indigenous peoples from being applied to their countries. It is a rearguard action which is unlikely to stand the test of time. Already some countries like the Philippines have readily accepted that the international legal concept of 'indigenous' does apply to their own politically marginalised ethnic groups which are now officially referred to as 'Indigenous Peoples' or 'indigenous cultural communities'. In Nepal, too, the term indigenous is commonly applied to the distinctive ethnic groups in the Terai by forestry officials. In recognition that there are indigenous peoples in Nepal, in 1993 the national government even formed a National Committee on the International Year of Indigenous Peoples.65 In Mid-1999, the Nepali government explicitly recognised the existence of 61 indigenous peoples in Nepal, who make up some 60% of the population.

Some governments, like Bangladesh, which have protested to the United Nations that the term indigenous has no place in their national context have been wrong-footed when indigenous peoples have pointed out that the term 'indigenous' is already used in national laws.66 Likewise, in a landmark case for the Ainu of Japan, on 28 March 1997 a local court in Sapporo, Hokkaido, recognised the Ainu as an indigenous and minority people.

Nevertheless, summarising the view of many Asian countries, the Chinese government continues to reject that the concept of indigenous peoples applies to their national situation arguing that the term 'indigenous peoples' only applies to those peoples who have been dispossessed of their ancestral homes by European colonial policies.67 The statement, which is designed to deny the right to self-determination to China's 'minority nationalities', conveniently ignores the fact that in its early years the Chinese communist party had explicitly recognised exactly this right.68 A report by Cuban Special Rapporteur, Miguel Alfonso Martinez, presented to the Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Distcrimination and Protection of Minorities in 1998 has also argued that the term 'indigenous peoples' does not apply to ethnic groups in Africa and Asia, but only to those in countries which have suffered European colonisation and where the settlers have remained to become the politically dominant population.69 Asian indigenous peoples, who feel that they are suffering equally serious loss of rights due to their domination by peoples of non-European descent, have consistently objected to these discriminatory arguments. For example in 1991 a joint statement by the West Papua Peoples Front, Karen National Union, Jumma Network, Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines, National Federation of the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines, Lumad-Mindanao, Cordillera Peoples' Alliance, Ainu Association of Hokkaido, Naga Peoples' Movement for Human Rights, Homeland Mission 1950 for South Moluccas and Hmong People, argued:

"First and foremost, we want to bring to your attention the denial by some Asian governments of the existence of indigenous peoples in our part of the world. This denial... seeks to withold the benefits of the [Draft] Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] from the indigenous, tribal and aboriginal peoples of Asia. We hereby urgently request that peoples who are denied the rights to govern themselves, and are called tribal, and/or aboriginal in our region, be recognized, for the purpose of this Declaration, and in accordance with ILO practice, as equivalent to indigenous peoples."70

This argument is likely to drag out over several years at the United Nations, but as noted above the argument has been side-stepped in various ways by other specialised agencies in the United Nations' family of organisations.

Indigenous Peoples and Asian Values

The reluctance of many Asian governments to recognise indigenous peoples' rights to their territories and to self-determination sits oddly with these same governments' principled stand in favour of so-called 'Asian values', which they claim emphasise the social and economic rights of the community and the importance of social solidarity rather than the civil and political rights of the individual.71 If the community is to be given greater value in Asia, then why not value the distinctive cultural traditions of the region's indigenous peoples? Some proponents of so-called 'Asian values' have even gone so far as to question all international human rights standards on the grounds that these are based on individualist, western concepts which have no relevance to Asian societies.

Some observers believe that the real message being sent by Asian leaders, through their assertion of 'Asian values', is that they do not want any interference either by internal or external critics of their abuse of power. Indonesian author and ex-political prisoner Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose opposition to the authoritarianism of Indonesian leaders made his writings hugely popular, thinks that 'all this talk (of Asian values) is just manipulation to justify the violation of rights in order to preserve the personal interests of those in power.'72 Before his deposition and incarceration, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Anwar Ibrahim was equally skeptical and called it:

"a shame, although clever, to take Asian values as an excuse for authoritarian practices and the denial of basic civil rights... To say that freedom is western or un-Asian is an insult both for our own traditions and our ancestors, who sacrificed their life against tyranny and injustice... Honestly, we have to admit that we are still struggling to eradicate the remains of the so-called 'oriental despotism'"73

Numbers

According to the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs, almost two thirds of the world's indigenous people live in Asia and they recently published the following table summarising existing estimates of indigenous numbers in various Asian countries.74

Indigenous Peoples and Social Policy

Throughout Asia, an underlying objective of government policy towards indigenous peoples has been to promote their integration into the national society, while denying them their rights to exercise their customary law, to control the resources they depend on and to make decisions for themselves. Deeply held prejudices often underlie these disenfranchising policies. In Indonesia, for example, indigenous peoples are officially characterised as 'people who are isolated and have a limited capacity to communicate with other more advanced groups, resulting in their having backward attitudes...'75 In Thailand many of the 'hill tribes' are even denied Thai nationality and residence and the Thai armed forces have on occasion expelled long-settled communities into Burma at gunpoint.76

Indigenous systems of land use have been particularly despised. Environmentally sophisticated rotational farming systems have been widely condemned, not so much because they have been shown to be destructive but because they bring little revenue to the exchequer and require large areas of forest that are coveted by other interests.77 These prejudices have been directly expressed in national land tenure laws. With the important exception of Melanesia and, to a lesser extent western Pakistan and India's northeast, indigenous peoples' rights to the collective ownership of the lands have been systematically denied and only in the

are reforms in these policies just beginning. In Sarawak, for example, the State has recently given itself the power to alienate 'native customary land' not only in the 'national interest' but even in favour of private companies: a legalised expression of racial discrimination which holds indigenous peoples' property rights inferior to the property rights of other citizens.

In Peninsular India, where collective land rights are denied, legal protections that are meant to prevent 'tribal' lands being sold to non-tribals and a policy of positive discrimination that reserves a proportion of educational and administrative positions to tribal and outcaste groups, have proved ineffective. As the Commissioner for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes noted in his Twentyninth Report, owing to the 'complete non-recognition of the rights of the people over resources' the country's 52 million tribal people have been condemned to 'the very dustbin of development', through a five-stage process of degradation, which commenced under colonial rule and intensified since independence, that deprives tribal peoples first of their communal rights, then of their individual plots of land, degrades them to underpaid and then bonded labour depriving them finally of their very dignity, leaving them fatally resigned to endure further suffering.78

Indigenous Peoples, Forests and the State

The assertion of legislation denying indigenous territorial rights was initiated during the colonial period, when new tenure regimes were imposed to facilitate the collection of taxes.79 The process of alienating indigenous lands intensified when the colonial authorities perceived the need to secure control of forests with the twin aims of preventing environmental degradation and assuring a supply of timber to strategic industries - timber for the colonial navies and sleepers for the railways. Classical forestry, as developed under the British and Dutch, involved the establishment of a network of forestry reserves to be managed according to the tenets of 'scientific forestry' under the control of forestry departments. Imposing this policy brought the colonial governments into immediate conflict with native rulers and indigenous peoples, who felt they had prior rights to these forests.80

Indeed, almost immediately after these reserves were created in India colonial officers began curtailing the tribal peoples' privileges81 and when in the 1920s the authorities began to establish a network of hunting reserves and conservation areas, still harsher restrictions and penalties were imposed.82 The result, in India and throughout most of the region except Melanesia, was the arrogation of huge areas of land to the Crown; lands which were passed to the State at independence.83

In India today, fully 22% of the national territory is under the control of the forestry departments where local communities' rights to land are denied. Exactly these areas are those most densely inhabited by indigenous peoples. In Indonesia, 74% of the national territory is run by the Forest Department based in Jakarta. Between 30 and 65 million people live in these forests. In the Philippines, the forest reserves cover 55% of the country and include almost all the ancestral domains of the country's 6.5 million indigenous people. In Thailand, the 40% of the country managed by the 7,000 staff of the Royal Forest Department includes almost all the upland areas inhabited by the country's 700,000 members of the 'hill tribes'.84

The most obvious result of this 'scientific forestry' has been the catastrophic degradation and loss of the region's forests. Forest reserves were established to regulate and tax developing forest industries, but the politically connected logging companies that have gained rights to the forests have become so rich and powerful, they soon overwhelmed any capacity or intention the state may have had to restrain the exploitation.85 Even conservation zones, established to try to salvage some forest from destruction have only caused yet more areas to be alienated from indigenous control.86

To the degradation of forests caused by logging have been added other overwhelming pressures. Mining, hydropower and other infrastructural developments have displaced indigenous peoples and flooded and destroyed large areas of forest, while access roads have encouraged settlers to enter and occupy indigenous domains. Plantation schemes, of soft-woods for pulp and paper and of cash crops such as palm oil, rubber, tea and cloves, have been another major motor for the annexation of indigenous lands. For example, in late 1997, Iban Dayaks, one of the most numerous indigenous peoples in the Malaysian State of Sarawak, protesting plantation companies that began bulldozing the indigenous peoples' crops without negotiation or compensation were shot at by armed police, with one fatality.87

Many of these industrial-scale cash-cropping projects have been supported by resettlement schemes which have sought both to concentrate dispersed indigenous communities into centralised settlements under Government supervision and encourage large-scale settlement of indigenous lands with 'surplus people' from other areas of the national territory. The aim of these projects is both to free up land for use by non-indigenous settlers and bring about the administraive annexation of previously autonomous indigenous communities. Indonesia's transmigration programme is the best known but similar colonisation schemes in Nepal, Bangladesh and Malaysia have also targeted indigenous lands.88 Likewise, in Vietnam, the post-war communist government has promoted a massive colonisation of the central highlands, outnumbering the area's 700,000 indigenous people who had been led to believe the area would be set aside as autonomous provinces.89

More broadly, the indigenous peoples of the region have experienced rapid social change due to their incorporation into expanding market economies. Monetarisation and the intensification of indigenous economies have radically reshaped both the way indigenous peoples relate to their environment and to each other. While some of these changes have undoubtedly been beneficial others have been socially and environmentally damaging. The assertion of cash values in place of other long-cherished norms has eroded previous traditions of sharing, exchange and mutual support, meaning growing disparities in wealth and health.90

The creation of land markets has posed particular problems to peoples who lack both political connections and experience in handling large sums of money. In western Bangladesh and neighbouring India, the Santal, once the exclusive occupiers of the area, now own less land per capita than the invading Bengalis.91

Logging and forest loss have affected indigenous peoples severely. The loss of land, destruction of game, pollution of rivers, fouled drinking water, destroyed fish stocks and depleted forest products have all meant serious impoverishment for Dayaks in Borneo for instance.92 Women have suffered particular hardship as their societies become increasingly enclosed and subject to the legal and cultural impositions of outsiders. In India, for example, tribal women have lost control of land and are excluded from any effective participation in decision-making.93

Prejudices Against Shifting Cultivation

For many centuries the conventional view of indigenous systems of forest management has been that they were backward, wasteful and destructive. Underlying this prejudice lies a deep mistrust of peoples who are neither subject to government control and taxation systems nor contribute substantially to the market economy.95 The Dutch characterised shifting cultivation in what was to become Indonesia as the 'robber economy' and in India, the British classified areas of shifting cultivation areas as 'wastelands' not because the practice laid waste the forests but because it provided no revenue to the Empire.96 As pressure on natural resources has intensified, such systems have, in addition, been criticized as being environmentally destructive.97 A failure to distinguish between traditional forest farmers, who may have developed complex systems of forest management and incoming settlers who have moved into the forests and adopted less sophisticated slash-and-burn techniques has led many governments and development agencies to assert that shifting cultivation is the principle cause of forest loss in the region.98

However, many detailed studies of Asian forest-dwellers' economies made since the 1950s suggest a quite different conclusion. Hunters and gatherers, such as the Penan of Sarawak, who explicitly see themselves as passing their lands unharmed to the generations that follow,99 consciously manage their resources to ensure sustained yield.100 The idea that present generations are merely stewards who hold the lands of the ancestors in trust for future generations is echoed in many indigenous cultures throughout the region, as in New Guinea where the people refer to future generations as 'our children who are still in the soil'.101

Studies of shifting cultivation reveal not only their extreme variability and complexity but the enormous reserve of vernacular knowledge on which they are based.102 Practices to conserve resources, restore soil fertility, mimic biodiversity and protect watersheds have been widely documented throughout the region. Equally, studies reveal the immense reserve of practical lore in forest-based societies concerning their environment: to the knowledgeable the forest is an immense store-house of medicines, drugs, herbs, spices, fruits, oils, resins, gums, dyes, basts, rattans, horn, ivory, bird's nests and much else.103

Complementing this practical knowledge, these forest-dependent peoples have also developed complicated customary rules regarding land tenure, land management and resource rights. For example, in common with many other indigenous peoples of the region, in Borneo, the Dayaks' systems of forest management is based on a complex web of overlapping rights, duties and mutual obligations, in which individual or family rights to use of farmland, forest trees, fishing areas or hunting zones overlay communal areas owned by the community. In many Borneo societies these rights are inherited equally by men and women.104

For indigenous peoples', their ancestral territories do not just provide the economic base for their daily lives but are intimately bound up with their cosmologies and identities as communities and as peoples. The landscape that they occupy is pervaded by their history, their millennial experience and is at once their home and the abode of the spiritual beings whose invisible presence explains the functioning of the visible world. The land is not just economically important to indigenous peoples, it is sacred to them. Moreover, this connection with the land is maintained through traditional land use systems like rotational farming (and see box). The Karen of northern Thailand note:

"the rotational farming system is integral to the concept of being a Pgkenyaw. It is the physical manifestation of the lifestyle, beliefs, culture and history of the people as a whole and if it was to be abandoned a large loss would be felt throughout the people."105

Much of this is obscure to administrators and other outsiders. Common property systems have been seen as open-access areas, in which competition between individuals for resources inevitably leads to over-intensive use and environmental degradation — the so-called tragedy of the commons. However, as Michael Cernea of the World Bank has pointed out:

"The term common property has been largely mis-understood and falsely interpreted for the past two to three decades. Common property regimes are not the free-for-all that they have been described to be, but are structured ownership arrangements within which management rules are developed, group size is known and enforced, incentives exist for co-owners to follow the accepted institutional arrangements, and sanctions work to insure compliance. Resource degradation in developing countries, while incorrectly attributed to 'common property systems' intrinsically, actually originates in the dissolution of local level institutional arrangements whose very purpose was to give rise to resource use patterns that were sustainable."106

This is not to say that indigenous systems of resource use are flawless and inherently sustainable. On the contrary, as indigenous societies undergo rapid change, the balance they may have maintained between societies and their environments can be upset. In the first place, many indigenous peoples have lost much of their ancestral territories to outsiders and this had led to too many people being concentrated on too little land, upsetting traditional patterns of land ownership, management and use. Rising indigenous populations have likewise increased local pressure on the environment. Increasing demands for cash, some externally imposed and some internally generated, also place a heavier burden on local economies and environments to produce a marketable surplus.

New technologies, like steel tools, chain saws, shotguns, agricultural machinery and transportation, new crops and agrochemicals, may radically change land use. At the same time traditional value systems, social organisations and decision-making processes may be transformed and not just as a result of outside impositions. All these forces tend to upset indigenous peoples' relations with their environment and may result in over-intensive land use and environmental degradation.108

The Indigenous Peoples Movement in South and South East Asia

Social movements by native and tribal peoples in Asia have a very long history. Resistance by indigenous groups to the takeover of their lands, the expropriation of their labour and the imposition of taxes long predates the establishment of colonial states. During the colonial era uprisings of indigenous peoples against further impositions and exploitation were commonplace and often had to be put down with considerable violence. In the post-colonial era, liberation struggles of indigenous peoples have also flared up again in a number of countries. However, it is only relatively recently that these peoples have begun to explicitly identify themselves as 'indigenous' and made demands based on existing and emerging standards of international law.

One important event that prompted the entry of Asian indigenous peoples onto the 'international' stage was the struggle of the Igorot peoples of the Central Cordillera of the Philippines to halt the construction of a series of World bank-funded dams in the mid-1970s. The project threatened to displace some 80,000 Kalinga and Bontoc people from their ancestral lands and was imposed at a time of hardening opposition to the Marcos dictatorship.109 When locals protested against the project, the Marcos regime tried to undermine resistance with bribery and obfuscation. However, resistance hardened and the people resorted to civil disobedience to prevent surveyors getting access to the area. Engineers' campsites were dismantled and roads were blocked, prompting the government to send in the army and initiate a campaign of violence.110 The Igorot leader Macli-ing Dulag was assassinated and many people took to the hills and joined the New Peoples Army in defiance of the imposed development programme.111 The conflict endured long after the World Bank pulled out and the project was cancelled. Local villages were repeatedly bombed and subjected to counter-insurgency programmes as a result.112 An important consequence of this debacle and similar major problems with World Bank-funded projects in India and Brazil, was the World Bank's adoption of a policy on 'tribal peoples' in 1981 (see above). At the same time, international human rights organisations like Survival International launched public indignation campaigns, based on the letter-writing model developed by Amnesty International, in support of indigenous rights.

A major impetus to the internationalisation of the Asian indigenous rights movement came with the setting up in 1983 of the UN's Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which has met almost annually in Geneva ever since. Representatives of indigenous peoples from India and the Philippines began to attend the Working Group from 1984 onwards and soon identified that they shared a political platform with indigenous peoples from the Americas, Northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand in pushing for their rights to the ownership and control of their territories and to self-determination. At the same time, Survival International began to activate the ILO's complaints procedures by documenting serious human rights abuses in Bangladesh and India amounting to government violations of their commitments under ILO Convention 107. The complaints were taken very seriously by the International Labour Conference and by the ILO's expert panel on compliance. The Panel found that Survival's allegations that the resettlement plan of the World Bank-funded Sardar Sarovar dam in India contravened India's obligations to recognise adivasi land rights were prima facie correct. The ILO also sent two investigative missions to Bangladesh to look into the human rights group's allegations of genocide.

The elevation of the issue of indigenous rights into an international concern and the elaboration of revised human rights standards recognising their rights, encouraged many Asian peoples facing government repression to appeal to the international community for redress. Increasingly, 'tribal', 'native', 'aboriginal' and 'ethnic minority' groups from various Asian countries began to identify themselves as 'indigenous' and linked up to form networks and alliances to push for their rights. In the late 1980s, the various indigenous movements in the Philippines linked together to form a national federation of indigenous organisations with a small office in Manila financed by the Ford Foundation. In 1988, sixteen indigenous organisations from India, Indonesia, Japan, Nepal, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand met in Chiang Mai to analyse their common cause and different strategies for achieving self-determination and set up the 'Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact' to help coordinate their future work.113

Many of the Asian Indigenous organisations in turn formally linked themselves up to the wider international indigenous movement at a meeting in Penang in Malaysia in 1992. The conference participants, indigenous peoples' representatives from Central and South America, Central Africa and Asia, elaborated a 'Charter of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests' and formed an 'International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests'. This Alliance has functioned ever since, with regular regional meetings of its members, six-monthly meetings of its coordinating committee made up of representatives from each of the Alliance's eight regions and by means of a small indigenous-run international secretariat based in London. The Alliance has been intensely active, seeking to ensure that global environment policy-making takes full account of indigenous rights. It has involved itself actively in processes being driven by agencies such as the World Bank, Commission on Sustainable Development, FAO, UNDP, GEF and CBD. Global Conferences are held every two or three years to thrash out the Alliance's own policy and to programme future work.

However, the Alliance has not been without its problems. As Dayak activist Raymond Abin of Sarawak noted in a fax message sent to the 3rd International Conference of this International Alliance, held in Nagpur, India, in May 1997, after he was prohibited from travelling to the meeting by the Malaysian authorities:

"With this message I would like to take the opportunity to inform you of the appalling situation facing the indigenous peoples of the Bahasa region [Indonesia and Malaysia]. The destructive development policies and programmes of the governments, which place great emphasis on natural resource exploitation and acquisition of lands, have caused acute problems for the indigenous communities. Our human rights as indigenous peoples are continuously being suppressed, harassed, intimidated and violated in our efforts to protect and defend our cultural heritage, resources, land and environment. Our peoples are being deprived, evicted, culturally assimilated, economically marginalised, and live in poverty and malnutrition as a result of development activities within our lands and territories.

The governments are still issuing timber licences over our forest in spite of our strong protest against logging operations within our territories. Deforestation is carried out intensively and extensively in Sarawak, Sabah, and Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, and in Sulawesi, Yamdena Island, Irian Jaya and various parts of the archipelgo. In Sarawak, the Dayaks are strongly resisting the targetting of their native customary lands for large-scale oil-palm plantations....

The Orang Asli communities in peninsular Malaysia are continuously being displaced by various mega-development projects including highway construction, highland resorts, parks and plantation schemes. Their rights to land are totally denied by the government. The aggressive promotion of tourism is another threat to indigenous peoples throughout the Bahasa region, leading to widespread cultural disruption, child labour and the exploitation of women in the vice trade."114

The fact that indigenous peoples are actively resisting some outside interventions has given many the false impression that the are static and conservative societies, opposed to all change. But this is just to create another pretext for outsiders to intervene in indigenous peoples' lives 'for their own good'. The reality is that very many indigenous peoples are actively seeking change, on their own terms, at their own pace and under their own control. As a Tinggian resisting the logging of their pine forests by the Japanese-owned Cellophil Corporation in the Cordillera of the northern Philippines eloquently stated:

"Don't mistake us. We are not a backward-looking people. Like others we want development and we want to improve our lives and the lives of the next generations; we want better education, better health and better services. But we want to control this development in our land and over our lives. And we demand a share both in decision-making and in the benefits of development."115

Awareness of the issue of indigenous rights has begun to spread throughout Asia. Regions that were previously isolated from these international currents of thought have begun to take note, such as Pakistan, Burma and Indochina.116 Indonesia has witnessed a huge up-welling of indigenous activism, since the fall of the Suharto and the weakening of military control. Whereas the Indonesian government considers that some 1.5 million people can be classified as 'suku suku terasing', the newly emerging indigenous movement which formed itself into a archipelago-wide alliance at a major conference in Jakarta in March 1999 estimates its own numbers at around 65 million. This means that the great majority of Indonesians not living on the central islands of Java, Lombok, Madura and Bali, now consider themselves to be indigenous peoples and wish to regain control of their lands and destinies.

2. Local Experiences: Issues and Lessons

As described in section A of this report, many international development agencies have adopted specific policies on Indigenous Peoples aimed at ensuring that their aid programmes are adjusted to suit local circumstances. However, despite these policies and the calls for change made by national indigenous movements, there is surprisingly little evidence that any of the donors have funded projects with national governments aimed at national policy reform towards indigenous peoples. For example, the World Bank, in violation of its policy commitment to ensure that borrower government policies towards Indigenous Peoples coincide with the Bank's, has persistently shied away from insisting on such reforms.117 Despite numerous World Bank projects in India, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, which have affected Indigenous Peoples, policy reforms have been avoided. In fact, with the exception of the Philippines, this review has come across very few projects, which have targetted Indigenous Peoples for assistance. This finding reinforces the conclusion drawn in Part A of this study that bilateral and multilateral agencies find it very hard to intervene on behalf of Indigenous Peoples because of the awkward position this then puts them in with their government counterparts.118

In the main it has thus fallen to national and international NGOs — some with funds from the development agencies — to support Indigenous Peoples more directly in their struggle to recover recognition of their rights to their lands. Moreover, most of this support work has been through local level projects with 'grassroots' NGOs and indigenous communities, with relatively little funding being directed to national level policy reform. In recent years, PeFoR has played a prominent role in providing this kind of community-level support.

This section of the study reviews experiences in this area.

Mapping as a Tool for Tenure Reform and Community Management

The use of geomatic mapping technologies by Indigenous Peoples to demonstrate their relationship to their lands and to mount land claims is a relatively recent phenomenon. Once the basic idea and the technology was introduced into the South East Asia region, the technique has spread rapidly. Community level mapping exercises are now underway in the India, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Thailand.119 PeFoR deserves much of the credit for the rapid dissemination of the technique, through support for local level projects, national and regional workshops and exchange programmes.

At their best, mapping projects directly involve community members in the survey of the land use and boundaries of the own domains. The technologies used vary widely. At their simplest, as used in Thailand, maps may be hand-made 3D maps, made by cutting shapes along contour lines derived from government base maps enlarged to a 1:15,000 scale. Vegetation zones, roads, land use data, village sites and the boundaries of land claims can then be painted onto the models. These maps have proved to be useful tools for community mobilisation and village level discussions of land claims and natural resource management planning. Other mapping exercises are using geomatic (mainly GPS) or traditional surveying techniques to locate data on maps. Although these techniques do allow community members to decide what is put into the maps, they do, however, generally rely to some extent on trained personnel from outside NGOs to prepare the base maps, record the field data directly on the maps, or in the computer, and print up the final maps. Higher technologies, such as sophisticated Global Information Systems, while allowing much more subtle use of colours, layers and data sets, increase the conceptual distance between those with the indigenous knowledge in the communities and those who make the maps. Community control and a sense of ownership of the maps can be attenuated accordingly and there is a risk that the technical NGOs consider themselves and not the villagers to be the owners of the maps.120 The study detected a tendency for support NGOs helping Indigenous Peoples with mapping, to adopt progressively more sophisticated systems driven by their own thirst for knowledge, fascination with the technology and a will to get ahead of and outwit government administrators. The risk is that the mapping process becomes more and more remote from indigenous priorities and in the end becomes yet another form of administrative annexation, this time by NGOs, against which the Indigenous Peoples have to struggle. Clear mutual agreements on who has the intellectual property rights to maps — they should be vested with the communities not with the NGOs — and greater investment in training the indigenous leadership in the manipulation of data and the new technologies are part of the answer to this emerging problem.

In the field, there are a number of other difficulties that mapping exercises have to overcome. The first is that they tend freeze what are in reality fluid boundaries and systems of land use. Hard lines are drawn where fuzziness and ambiguity may, in fact, prevail. Mappers in Mindanao, in the Southern Philippines, for example, find that traditional areas of land use expand and contract seasonally. In Borneo, communities move around as lands in the immediate vicinity become 'used up'. Boundaries are hunting grounds shift accordingly. Secondly, the maps do not just include — more or less successfully - the concepts of the community mappers, they exclude the concepts of those who are not involved, both people within the communities (often women) or areas in question (often lower caste or status groups) and those outside them or on their boundaries (neighbouring communities). Successful mapping initiatives depend on both adequate community preparation within the area to be mapped and on prior agreement with neighbouring groups on the boundaries between villages or ethnic groups. This problem can be exaggerated however and a common solution where inter-community boundaries are disputed is to map the boundaries that extend around all the communities and leave resolution of the disputes of the internal boundaries to the future, preferably according to customary law and procedures.

Within the region, the process of mapping Indigenous lands has probably gone furthest in the Philippines, where something like 700,000 hectares of community lands have been mapped out of a total of 2.9 million hectares so far registered with the government as Ancestral Domains. The experience there has revealed a number of additional problems. One is that customary areas and boundaries frequently do not coincide with existing administrative boundaries. Villages can thus find that they are subject to several barangay, district or even provincial jurisdictions, which entails complicated negotiations if the regularisation of tenure is then sought. Unusually, in the Philippines NGO-made maps can be accepted by the local administration as authoritative documents on which to base land claims and not just as advocacy tools, which is the way they are used in many other areas. In this case, increasing precision in the survey techniques is called for, requiring more specialised training of mappers and implying a closer interaction with the local administration. However, PAFID's experience with differential GPS suggests that community mappers are able to deal with this level of technical complexity given the right preparation.

A common finding of this review, was the need for an emphasis on preparation, training and community-level capacity building. Preparatory meetings, workshops and visits are crucial for the long-term success of the mapping exercises themselves. Establishing community consensus and agreement on the goals and practices of the project is a crucial first step and some NGOs make consensus decisions a pre-condition to their involvement in helping to map any area. Community control and sense of ownership depends not only on formal agreements — which are vital — but also on quite detailed training of community members to ensure that at least some in each mapped community are comfortable with the details of the technology and the way it is being used to represent local knowledge. Unduly abbreviated training was the main weakness I observed in many projects. Since maps are just tools in a much longer process of establishing a community's control over its lands and natural resources, the long term usefulness of mapping projects also depends on adequate capacity-building and community mobilisation. A frequent complaint heard in the course of this review is that outside donors tend not to provide enough funds for this element, as they seek quick and visible results and are wary of creating dependency — a legitimate concern.

Participatory mapping is here to stay as part of the tool-kit used by the Indigenous movement. Communities have discovered that it is powerful as much for community organising, strategising and control as for communicating local visions to outsiders. Mapping can build community coherence and reaffirm the value and importance of traditional knowledge, recreating respect for elders and customary resource management practices.

Perhaps one of the most important benefits of the mapping movement is that it has provided a tool for the indigenous leadership to address community-level concerns, thus helping them maintain ties with their constituents as they engage in political negotiations at the national level. Maps have also proved vitally important tools to indigenous communities confronting the impositions of logging, mining, plantation and conservation schemes. By use of maps, communities and NGOs have been able to demonstrate conclusively the overlaps between indigenous lands and imposed concessions. They have also been used to expose the incompetence of different line ministries, whose maps are so very often erroneous and have created horrendous confusions in the overlap between different jurisdictions and concessions.

Initial enthusiasm for community-mapping led to it being considered a 'magic bullet' that could resolve land conflicts and promote sustainable natural resource management, in one shot. Experience has quickly taught most of those involved that mapping is just a tool — a very powerful tool in the right hands — in a much longer struggle to reform land ownership systems, indigenous self-governance and government systems of administration. To be effective, mapping exercises need to be integrated into long term community strategies and be clearly linked to broader strategies for legal, policy and institutional reforms. The charge that the mapping 'craze' has diverted attention away from other pressing issues — like political organisation, tenure reform, legal changes and national policy reforms — has some weight. However, the lessons are being learned fast and a more skilled and mature movement is emerging as a result.

Land Titling

A detailed treatment of the formidable and varied legal complexities confronting Indigenous Peoples seeking to secure unambiguous recognition of their rights to own and control their lands is beyond the scope of this paper.121 As noted above, throughout the region, national laws have for long ignored or denied indigenous land rights or provided legal processes which are neither secure nor appropriate for their cultures and customary systems of land use. Their customary systems of inheritance, land ownership, natural resource management and use are poorly understood and fit badly into the national legal and administrative systems. For those indigenous peoples living in official forest reserves the situation is, in many respects, even worse. Lands are considered to be owned by the State and the rights of indigenous residents are almost wholly curtailed.

Confronted with this situation and facing the rapid takeover of their lands by other interests, many Indigenous Peoples throughout the region are demanding recognition of their right to own their lands and, where relevant, have them excised from the jurisdiction of the Forestry Departments. For many, the mapping projects, summarised in the preceding section, are principally conceived as ways of pushing for ownership titles. Unfortunately, a finding of this review is that many indigenous organisations, especially those in Indonesia and India, are very unclear about just what kind of title they actually want.

A land title, as many jurists have observed, is really a 'bundle of rights' and the components of the bundle vary widely from law to law and from one legislation to another. There is therefore a pressing need for indigenous rights activists to look long and hard at the components of the 'bundles' on offer. Which components suit their interests and which do not? Can laws and constitutions be refashioned so that the 'bundles of rights' which indigenous people secure really suit them and their future development?

In many other parts of the world, Indigenous Peoples have made similar demands and then faced similar dilemmas. In many countries, either due to pressure from Indigenous Peoples themselves or due to the more-or-less benign intentions of administrators, laws have been specially modified to try to promote indigenous interests. However, many Indigenous Peoples have found that legal recognition of their rights, while desirable in principle, may entail further problems. These may arise because the new laws do not accommodate the flexibility of indigenous systems. Another set of problems arises because land titles may parcel up lands into saleable lots. Land titling can thus have the effect of placing indigenous lands in land markets and can facilitate the break up of ancestral domains.122

At the international level, Indigenous Peoples have responded to this challenge in a number of ways. Some indigenous spokespersons have rejected the notion of land ownership as a western imposition. 'We don't own the land, the land owns us' has been a common affirmation. Other indigenous spokespersons have, however, decided that they do need legally secured ownership rights and the challenge has then been to find forms of title which best accommodate indigenous customs. In Latin America, one of the most widely favoured solutions, which has been accepted in some national laws, has been to qualify Indigenous Peoples' land titles as 'inalienable, un-leaseable, and un-mortgageable'. In this way, while rights of ownership are secured, the lands cannot be sold or otherwise removed from indigenous control, either by the actions of the State or third parties, or, and this is equally important, by elements in the indigenous society itself. Making land un-transferable in this has some major advantages in assuring the continuity of the indigenous land base. However, there are some disadvantages too. In particular, it means that land cannot be used as collateral to secure loans from banks for development purposes.

Land titling can also entail other problems. Indigenous peoples have noted that their attachment to their lands while strong is also fluid. Settlements move, break up, coalesce and reform. Access to land and other resources may be reallocated as families grow, move or diminish. Rigid legal titles provided to individuals, families or communities may freeze these systems preventing the reallocation of rights according to customary law. A widely favoured solution chosen by many Indigenous Peoples is thus to assert rights to the communal ownership of a wide territory, thus allowing people within the collective territory to apportion rights according to custom independently of the law.

Indigenous Peoples' rights to own, control and manage their territories are now recognised in existing and emerging international law.123 However, national laws may make no provision for indigenous systems and many governments are reluctant to recognise indigenous rights to large blocks of land, which may be coveted by other interests. The dilemma for Indigenous Peoples is thus two-fold. First to assess which type of land title best suits their present and future needs and second to work out tactics for securing this kind of title given the legal and political context in which they work. Holding out for optimal legal reform may not be an option for peoples facing immediate threats to their land base, yet overhasty acceptance of sub-optimal land titles may create serious problems in the long term.

Un-transferable titles may not be suitable for all individuals, communities or peoples. In particular, many Indigenous Peoples may have a long experience of land markets and private ownership and may not favour communal systems. Effective control of large territories embracing many settlements implies the existence of effective indigenous institutions able to oversee and coordinate land use in mutually acceptable ways.

Exactly these problems are now being faced by the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines, where the recognition of indigenous rights has advanced further than in any other country in the region excluding Melanesia. Under the revised Philippines constitution of 1992, the concept of indigenous peoples' rights to ancestral domain gained some recognition. In 1993, an Administrative Order was passed which allowed the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to recognise, in a preliminary way, these rights, by the issuance of Certificates of Ancestral Domain Claims (CADC).124 The issuance of CADC to a community is supposed to afford them interim protection against unilateral expropriation or exploitation until such a time as ownership of the area can be adequately determined. However, the communities had to wait another four and half years, until the very last minutes of the Ramos government's term of office, before a law was passed, the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997, which provided a mechanism for fuller recognition of ancestral ownership rights. This confusing law establishes a number of procedures for recognising both individual and communal ownership of 'ancestral domains' and 'ancestral lands'. Strong points in the law are that:

• it clearly recognises the principal — if not the practice — of indigenous ownership and control of their territories;

• it accepts the exercise of customary law in the adjudication of disputes and for community decisions about resource management and land allocations;

• it establishes the principal of 'free and informed consent' before lands can be alienated or communities relocated;

• it places certain bureaucratic trammels and defences in the way of third parties wishing to exploit indigenous lands;

• it insists on the 'full participation'125 of indigenous peoples in the establishment of protected areas and watershed management regimes on their lands.

The law also suffers serious deficiencies and shortcomings. These have been discussed in detail by the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC) in the Philippines and include:

• the problematic distinction between 'ancestral lands' and 'ancestral domains' which may encourage the fragmentation of indigenous territories;

• the effect of bureaucratizing the administration of lands and thus weakening community control and unity;

• the facilitation of legalised access to indigenous lands by third parties especially mining interests.126

Since the law was promulgated, the LRC has noted that the land titling has in some areas facilitated access to indigenous lands by loggers and miners. Two of the three types of title that can be acquired under the IPRA allow the alienation of lands and it has proved easy for outsiders and individuals within the community to dodge or manipulate the obligation to gain 'free and informed consent' from the community as a whole. The law has, in effect, commoditised lands and given more power to outsiders to re-allocate indigenous resources, while at the same time encouraging the emergence of indigenous entrepreneurs bent on privatising the indigenous commons.

Professor Pons Benagan of the Philippines Center for Social Science notes how, whereas under most traditional systems in the Philippines rights were not traditionally transferable outside the community, IPRA now allows this. The communities' legal defences against expropriation lie in IPRA's provisions for free and informed consent and the exercise of customary law. However, where community organisation is weak and awareness of the law insufficient, it has proved all too easy for the unscrupulous to manipulate these provisions to their advantage. The lesson that Benagan draws from this experience is that indigenous land titling should come with unbiased institutional support, legal training and capacity building to enable communities to manage their lands and make decisions in ways that ensure genuine consent.

Problems with Legal Personality

Questions regarding the scale and nature of titles thus relate directly to the question of which indigenous institutions should be recognised as having legal personality — that is the right to negotiate and enter into contracts with the government or third parties. Who speaks for the group? In which indigenous polity are land and resource rights to be vested?

Western laws favour a number of options, encouraging persons to enter into contracts as individuals, corporations or other legally registered associations. Indigenous Peoples however often demand the recognition of the legal personality of their own customary institutions. Yet, where they have secured collective title to lands, they often then have serious problems dealing with outsiders in mutually acceptable ways. Divisions within the communities often result from lack of agreement or clarity about legal personality.

For example, in Papua New Guinea, 98% of the national territory is recognised as being owned by the traditional land-owners but the law is imprecise about which indigenous institutions have rights to manage these lands and negotiate rights of access to the resources on them. These imprecisions have allowed local elites within the communities to register as associations, gain control of notionally communal lands, enter into deals with logging and mining companies and other interests and make large personal fortunes at the expense of the rest of their group. Similar problems have arisen among some indigenous communities in the Philippines, where control of communal lands has been vested in village chiefs or 'dato'. Lack of customary checks and balances on these leaders have allowed them to enter into deals without the consent and contrary to the best interests of members of the communities they lead.127

In North East India, where collective land ownership is recognised in law, indigenous people report that deforestation of their communal lands is a severe problem. Many villages have felt pressured by poverty, lack of services and by timber companies to sell off the timber on their lands. Many villages have been exploited by unscrupulous timber merchants as a consequence and the practice of timber sales has lessened as the villagers have seen how the costs outweigh the benefits. Logging has now been prohibited in some areas. However, the problems in the villages remain unresolved and the sale of firewood from communal lands continues to be one of the main sources of income for the indigenous communities. Government efforts to ban these sales, on environmental grounds, were halted after fierce protests from the communities. Yet, the benefits from these sales are not being shared equally in the communities and the NE is witnessing the emergence of an indigenous elite of 'mini-capitalists'.128

The problem may arise in a number of ways. In the first place, customary institutions may have evolved in entirely different contexts from those in which they are operating today. In the past, communities may not have needed complex controls on traditional leaders charged with mediating inter-ethnic trading of, say, salt and iron in exchange for cloth and game. Only once these same leaders are expected to mediate trades in land, timber, minerals and cash do the lack of institutional controls emerge as a problem. At the same time, customary law and value systems may be eroded or transformed by increasing interaction with the national society, with the consequence that leaders no longer perform according to traditional norms.

The failure of traditional institutions to take decisions in the collective interest has led many outside observers to condemn indigenous rights advocates as romantics blind to the inherent divisions within indigenous societies. For their part, many indigenous peoples have responded by establishing new, more equitable, accountable and transparent institutions to regulate communal lands and their relations with outsiders. They have recognised that customary institutions may need to be revived, reformed or replaced to meet new pressures and demands from within and outside their communities.

The lesson from these experiences is that there is a need both for precision about which institutions should be empowered to make decisions for the group and for effective measures to ensure broad community involvement in decision-making.129 In some circumstances, customary institutions may have evolved to deal with social and economic circumstances quite different from those they now have to address. The dilemma remains that local traditions, institutions, experiences and circumstances are so varied that prescriptive solutions are very problematic. Yet legal clarity is nevertheless necessary if unrepresentative groups are not to gain control of communal lands and resources.

Custom and Change

The assertion of customary law and institutions as modern and viable alternatives to imposed government laws and administration continues to inform the indigenous movement. Yet as these ideas gain currency and are put into practice it is becoming increasingly clear that custom too needs to be flexible and to change in order to deal with new circumstances. Indeed anthropologists' studies clearly show how, in the past, customary law and institutions did change rapidly as circumstances changed. Leadership patterns changed rapidly as new crops and trading networks spread through the Indonesian archipelago, for instance.130 In Sarawak, Iban concepts of territoriality have changed over time as population density has increased and settlements have ceased being so mobile. In the past, the collective territory, menoa, used to embrace the lands and hunting grounds of several villages. Today, in Iban custom, most villages have their own menoa, each one clearly bounded and distinguished from those of neighbouring villages.131

Unfortunately, in some regions, this traditional flexibility in custom has been lost. The substitution of state imposed institutions has caused custom to atrophy. In some areas the problem dates back to the imposition of colonial rule. During the era of Dutch rule, in Indonesia, for example, steps were taken to formalise and freeze adat. Formerly dynamic and evolving processes of self-governance and natural resource management were typologised and codified. These measures may have given an unreal appearance of permanence to what had previously been quite fluid processes. After independence, although some laws have recognised adat, many rights previously exercised by customary institutions were curtailed or overridden by centralised policies, laws, institutions and development plans. As a result in many areas adat became 'folklorised', dealing with religious and ritual aspects of community life while leaving decisions about land, livelihoods and political issues to the individual and the imposed institutions of the State. Reviving the scope and authority of adat will be challenging in these circumstances.

Many indigenous peoples in other parts of the world are working through similar dilemmas and are reviewing and reworking their traditions to fit new circumstances and values. For example, at the international level, sustained advocacy by indigenous representatives has been effective in securing recognition in international human rights law for the right of Indigenous Peoples to exercise their customary laws. At the same time, indigenous spokespersons active at the international level have, for their part, agreed that the exercise of customary laws should not lead to violations of international human rights standards.