Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

30 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
saw an excavator on our sacred mountain. The mines ignore the
people of Kazas and continue to tear our land to pieces. The blasting
operations are performed so close that we can see the stones flying.
They have not reached the village. Yet. Once abundant, the river has
grown shallow and silted like a stream. At its deepest, it is only 60
cm, at its shallowest 5-10 cm. When they pump the water from the
mines it flows on top of the ice and freezes. And this happens every
day. Through the winter, the ice grows so thick that water has to be
taken as if from a well, with a bucket on a rope.
Only a few people have stayed in the village. Once a large settlement
of 50 houses with large families, it has now died out. The mines have
killed a Shorts village that was over 100 years old. The villagers
never received anything in exchange for their treasures and have
gone silently to their graves. At the edge of the village another has
emerged—the cemetery. Today, there are six retired women, one
retired man and four families with children in the village.
The village has become unsuitable to live in, the people dream
only of modern apartments in town. Can the coal mines, extracting
millions of tons of coal from our land, not provide apartments for the
remaining people of Kazas village? Or is it the Shorts’ fate to die poor
and miserable on their land?”
The village of Kazas is part of Chuvashinsky national village council
(Selsoviet). In all, 520 Shorts live in six villages in the territory of this
Selsoviet and make up 65 percent of its total population. Three coal
strip mines operate in the territory: Sibirginsky, Mezhdurechensky and
Krasnogorsky. The mines’ activities have resulted in the destruction of the
Shorts’ lands of traditional natural resource use, the rivers are polluted,
the forest and wildlife destroyed. The indigenous population has received
no compensation either for the destroyed lands or for the impacts on their
traditional way of life. One village, Kurya, was totally destroyed in the
1950s and all its population (primarily Shorts) displaced by the town of
Novokuznetsk, without compensation.
As the local people reported when construction of Sibirginsky mine
began, neither Chuvashka village nor Kazas village was mentioned in
the government expert evaluation documents. The town of Myski was
specified as the nearest settlement to the mine—at a distance of 20
km. It means that these settlements are not mentioned in the design
documentation, and, consequently, their residents seem not to exist
at all. Today, Kazas village is surrounded by coal strip mines and coal