The country’s most marginalised peoples continue to fight for recognition. Despite the UN’s call in 1996 and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, governments have failed to provide a legal and political framework to protect this community. The creation of the Maduru Oya National Park has devastated their habitat, forcing them to abandon ancient traditions and a self-sufficient life maintained for generations.
Colombo () – Despite the UN’s request to Sri Lanka in 1996, Sri Lanka’s indigenous peoples, known by the Hindi term Adivasi, have lived marginalized, without rights or constitutional or legislative recognition. They have been deceived by all governments. According to community leader Uruwarige Wannila Aththo, the Mahaweli Development Scheme (Sri Lanka’s largest irrigation-based agricultural development programme) has led to immense destruction of their habitat. In 1996, the United Nations demanded that Sri Lanka respect the rights of indigenous inhabitants following a speech by the leader to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, in which he asked that the community be allowed to “return to our traditional land, in particular to the Maduru Oya National Park.” He also argued about the legal status of the Sri Lankan Constitution, which guarantees the rights of indigenous peoples.
The relocation of this community away from their native lands and the prohibition of access to their forests, where they lived in harmony with nature, maintaining ancestral customs, traditions, rituals and practices, has led them to face serious problems. They cannot return to their self-sufficient lifestyle maintained for generations. Due to displacement, they have had to abandon their medical knowledge and treatments applied through a combination of plant and animal substances, ritual treatments and witchcraft passed down orally for generations. However, the question of whether the Adivasis are entitled to a favourable socio-economic and political framework to enjoy these basic rights remains valid, as they face more challenges and are more vulnerable than other communities in establishing themselves as citizens with equal rights.
The United Nations has internationally recognized the rights of indigenous peoples around the world through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted in New York on 13 September 2007, with a strong call to Member States to provide effective mechanisms for the prevention and redress of actions that have the purpose or effect of depriving them of their ethnic identity, dispossessing them of their lands and resources and discriminating against them on racial or ethnic grounds. According to the fundamental rights enshrined in Chapter III of the country’s Constitution, one must have “the right to equality, freedom of occupation and movement”.
Environmentalists Rajitha Wijesinghe and Dushni Malalasekara, who have been working with the Adivasi community for decades to safeguard the rights of indigenous communities, told that “in November 1983, the government converted their forest lands into the Maduru Oya National Park, preventing them from hunting and even collecting honey, and pushed them into the Mahaweli “System C”. The UN then urged the government to “cease all acts of repression”. The resolution was sent to then President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. In the 17 years since the adoption of the UNDRIP in 2007, Sri Lanka has been unable to adopt a national legal or political framework to implement the laws. Not even the provisions of the 1989 Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (No. 169) have been adopted in Sri Lanka’s legal or political framework”, they noted.
The Adivasi leader says, “I attended the Geneva human rights conference in 1996 and raised our problems. At the conference, 136 countries signed in favour of finding solutions to our problems. Since an agreement was signed, I thought things would go well. The agreement was signed between me and the Wildlife Conservation Authority and it allowed us to fish and hunt using traditional methods in specified watersheds, but it did not mention ‘specified watersheds’. Maahitiya, Ulhitiya, Kadupahara and Kandeganwila are the available watersheds, but we were not informed which ones were accessible because the agreement did not specify it. We were misled and prevented from accessing these places.”
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