Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

164 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
subsidiary of ERAMET SA (still majority-owned by the French State,
despite a partial privatization in 1994); Vale-Inco Nouvelle-Calédonie
S.A., a subsidiary of Vale-Inco; and Société des Mines du Pacifique Sud
(SMSP), which is majority owned by a New Caledonian state entity, the
Northern Province.
Mining has created a legacy of red scars on the landscape, increased
water and air pollution, endangered coral reefs, released asbestos
fibers, and general encroachment on the island’s biodiversity. Authorities
and nickel industry officials say publicly that they are committed to
safeguarding the environment, but they are under increasing pressure
from local ecological, political, and cultural groups to keep their word.
The Kanak people, however, remain the primary victims of the mining
industry, having been impoverished and displaced to accommodate the
mining companies. The Kanak indigenous peoples have been expelled
from their traditional land and parked in reserves, mostly in the deep
valleys at the feet of the mountains that will soon be mined for the nickel
ore. They have also become a minority in their own country as convict
labor gave way to imported labor from Japan, Indonesia and Indochina, as
well as France.
A Kanak leader living around Thio laments that:
“After 137 years of operation, SLN helped ERAMET to become a
world-leading producer of nickel, high-performance alloys, while we
have lost our traditional lands. Our villages have been destroyed. Our
cemeteries and our grandparents graves have disappeared buried
under the stones and gravels coming down the valleys. Today, we
inherited rivers of rocks to irrigate our yam fields.”
Although they fought for France during the two world wars, at the end
of the second world war, the Kanaks remained very much second class
citizens. A whole framework of administration and police regulated and
defined their separate and subordinate status. They were not part of
the industrial workforce for this role was taken by Asian immigrants.
Those Kanaks who were part of the industrial labor force were generally
excluded from social benefit schemes, reserved for whites. The Labor
Code restricting child and female labor covered neither Kanaks nor
Asian workers. Even the legislation on industrial accidents providing
compensation and pension schemes was not applicable to Javanese or
Kanaks.
The Kanaks remained a marginal people. They were peasants, excluded
from the mining labor force, and denied the opportunity to gain educational