Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

142 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
create restrictions of certain types of land use—including
forestry, agricultural production, tourism or lands designated
as the ancestral lands of indigenous peoples. The extractive
industries could be effectively banned from these designated
areas. This is an interesting idea, but of course there is a
potential clash here in saying that mining would, through
national policy be banned from indigenous lands. It is effectively
undermining the right of those indigenous peoples to
self-determination, even if it is removing development choices
that they would eventually not prefer anyway! 25
Finally, it is clear that any advocacy towards states to get
them to legislate for “responsible mining”—including establishing
specific policy frameworks that address the sustainability
of the mining sector—should refer to indigenous rights,
particularly the key provisions of the UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
2.2.3 Dealing with State Repression of
Protest
As we have seen in Chapter 1.1, legitimate protests against
extractive industry projects can far too often lead to the response
of rights violations and repression. Although some of
this may come from armed company security, more often than
not it will be the state, which is behind this (or even in the
case of company security, it will the state creating the enabling
environment for such abuses to happen).
In his 2009 Manila Conference presentation on Barrick’s
Porgera Joint Venture mining project in Papua New Guinea,
Jeffery Simon 26 explained that in response to the violence
(outlined in Chapter 1.1), the state was protecting the mining
company and ignoring the wishes of the affected people. The
state was supplying police to enforce security at the mine site,
particularly special mobile police squads at the time of evictions,
and declaring a state of emergency to suppress protest.
Specifically in March 2009, the Government of Papua New