The Arctic is melting and is being plundered - indigenous peoples are suffering under the climate change and the mining of resources

The climate change provides already a massive threat to the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but now many of the 400,000 native inhabitants are since the start of the run on the minerals of the Arctic literally at the end of the road. This is the result which has been reached by the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) in a 105-page human rights report, which the human rights organisation presented on Thursday at a press conference in Hamburg with the Polar researcher Arved Fuchs and people affected from the Arctic. At the same time GfbV members drew attention to the dramatic situation of the native inhabitants in 38 cities and towns.

The GfbV called for Germany, which in January 2007 is taking over the chair over the G-8 states, to make sure that the richest industrial countries of the world observe the basic human rights of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Their rights to food and clean water, to respect for their traditional culture and their land rights must no longer be violated. The native inhabitants must also be adequately involved in all decisions concerning them.

In the report the GfbV documents how mineral oil and natural gas companies and mining enterprises throughout the whole Polar region are trampling on the rights of the indigenous peoples. In the past few months an unprecedented run has set in on the resources of the Arctic and Subarctic. So all the leading international energy concerns are literally "queueing up" in the Barent Sea to profit from the mining of the minerals. In the north and east of Siberia too the plundering of the oil and gas reserves is threatening the survival of the native peoples. Germany in particular is called upon to take a stand because a large part of its natural gas is obtained from the land of indigenous peoples in Siberia. For this reason Germany must make sure that their rights are also being respected.

The report of the GfbV describes in detail the varied environmental, health, social economic, cultural and military consequences of the plundering has for the Inuit, Sámi, Itelmens, Nenzen and other native inhabitants of the Arctic. So the human rights organisation warns, in the light of a steadily increasing rearmament of the Arctic and the growing number of border disputes, of new conflicts over the resources in the Polar area. Parts of the Arctic are with their gigantic atomic waste deposits turning into atomic sewers with unforeseeable results for the native population. A floating atomic power station at present being built in Russia shows that the atomic threat to the Arctic is lot just limited to the incorrect storage of atomic waste.

The climate change has a powerful effect on the health of the indigenous peoples. The Arctic Ocean is now so strongly contaminated that it is dangerous for the native inhabitants to eat raw fish, which they could previously do without hesitation. Mothers´ milk is now so contaminated that Inuit women in Greenland are advised not to breast-feed their children. People living in the immediate neighbourhood of mines are drinking polluted water, eating poisoned fish and breathing contaminated air. This leads to pulmonary illnesses and cancer, states the GfbV in its report.

Throughout Germany volunteers in the following cities and towns are providing information with GfbV banners and campaign-stands in the pedestrian zone, in front of churches or town-halls on the threat to the indigenous peoples in the Arctic:

Achern, Bad Säckingen, Bergisch Gladbach, Berlin (02.12.), Brunswick, Bremen, Chemnitz, Coburg, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Eichstätt, Engen (02./03.12.), Erlangen (16.12.), Frankfurt/Oder, Fulda, Göttingen, Griesheim, Hamburg, Hockenheim, Ilshofen, Karlsruhe, Kassel, Koblenz, Kronberg, Lahnstein, Leipzig, Lüneburg (2x, 2.12.), Munich (2x, 08.-10.12.), Münster, Nuremberg (2x), Potsdam (Anfang 2007), Rastede, Reichenbach (02.12.), Rheinfelden, Seesen, Singen, Sprendlingen, Wiesloch