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Adivasi pleas and UN prompting set rights work in motion
View(s):Indigenous people of Sri Lanka have lived like outcasts without rights and their leaders have said they have been cheated by every government. They have not had constitutional or legislative recognition.
Much destruction was caused to them under the Mahaweli development scheme, a project they say was the main cause of their problems.
But, in 1996, the United Nations asked Sri Lanka to respect the rights of indigenous inhabitants following an address by Warige Wanniya to the UN Working Group on Indigenous People in Geneva, where he pleaded for the community to be allowed to “go back to our traditional land, specifically the Maduru Oya National Park’’.
He argued for legal status in the Constitution as indigenous peoples.
In November 1983, the government turned the forest territory they had used into the Maduru Oya National Park, preventing them from hunting and even collecting honey, and they were driven into Mahaweli ‘System C’.
The UN also urged the Government to “cease all acts of repression’’. The resolution was sent to then president Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.
Last month, a briefing was held about the legal developments in Dambana.
For 17 years since the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, Sri Lanka has not been able to adopt a domestic legal or policy framework that puts the laws into effect. Provisions of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169) have not been adopted in Sri Lanka’s legal or policy framework either.
The UN Declaration’s Article 2 affirms their right to live without discrimination, while Article 7 recognises the right to decide on their own development, beliefs, culture, and health. Their cultural rights are recognised in Article 9 and Article 10 ensures land rights.-KB
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