The story below, written by Boston-based journalists Donna and Ed Bassett, was released to UPI on December 10, 1999
By Donna R. Bassett and Edward W. Bassett
BOSTON Dec. 10, 1999 (UPI) &emdash; The New Hampshire presidential primary coincides with the next forced relocation of American Indians while U.S. troops continue to block ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and the world's largest coal company prepares to expand its strip-mining of American Indian lands, according to published government documents and leading authorities.
Two presidential candidates, Democratic Vice President Al Gore and Republican Sen. John McCain, have stakes in the ethnic cleansing and strip mining issues. Spokespeople for both have declined to comment on the forcible relocation of Navajos or say if their candidates have accepted campaign contributions from the Peabody Coal Co., which calls itself the world's largest coal company and is already strip mining the Indian lands in northern Arizona.
McCain, the Arizona senator and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee who sponsored the 1996 Navajo-Hopi Relocation Act (Public Law 104-301), urged the use of force to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Gore, the leading Democratic candidate, has written a book, "Earth In The Balance: Ecology And The Human Spirit." Gore wrote that "Native American religions ... offer a rich tapestry of ideas about our relationship to the earth" in his chapter on "Environmentalism of the Spirit."
McCain's election campaign Internet page says, "we have a profound duty to be responsible stewards of the natural treasures that sustain us." He says that "to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land ... will result in undermining (in)the days of our children."
On February 1, 2000, the day of the New Hampshire primary, "321 households" (approx. 1,200 people) are scheduled to begin forcible relocation, according to an Oct. 1, 1999, report by the U.S. Office of Navajo-Hopi Indian Relocation (ONHIR), an executive commission that reports directly to President Clinton. Already, some 15,000 Navajo Indians have been forcibly relocated.
Asked if President Clinton could call a temporary halt to the relocations, Paul Tessler, the legal counsel to the ONHIR commission said, "I presume the president could direct us to do something or not to do something."
Because of the destructive impact of involuntary relocation on people who have strong religious and cultural ties to the land, "this is a case of ethnic cleansing," according to California Institute of Technology anthropologist Thayer Scudder, who has testified before Congress on the Navajo situation and has been recognized by leading international anthropological organizations for his 40 years of work in this area. "It's not intentional ethnic cleansing," he said. "It is due, primarily, to the ignorance, insensitivity, and arrogance in all three branches of the U.S. government," going back to 1848 when the U.S. government first took control over the lands now used for Indian reservations.
Unlike the phenomena in Kosovo, there have been no mass executions that grabbed international headlines. But a much larger part of the Kosovo situation were the hundreds of thousands of people forced off of their land. "Can you imagine," Scudder asked, "any circumstances where 15,000 (white) Americans living on Indian land would be forcibly relocated? Can you imagine any circumstances where 15,000 rural black Americans" would be forcibly relocated?"
"The Japanese relocation 1942 was larger," he noted, "but this is the largest forced relocation in the United States, in a rural area, since the Japanese war relocation. And it is just as unethical and just as much ethnic cleansing."
Noting that the relocation costs are now "over $350 million," and will probably escalate "to over $400 million," Scudder said, "imagine how that (money) could have been used for the joint development of Hopi and Navajo Indians."
Furthermore, a tangled set of laws now lets the U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) impound Navajo Indian sheep and arrest Navajos for simply repairing their homes. These laws also allow the government to bulldoze those repaired homes.
Although U.S. law has established that American Indians are citizens and have the right to vote, a 1974 U.S. Appeals Court ruling (Healing v. Jones) said that Hopis and Navajos "only have rights through their tribe," and not as individuals, according to former ONHIR Executive Director Leon Berger.
Instead of individuals owning property on Navajo and Hopi lands, the two tribal councils have the authority to lease lands on behalf of tribe members. Therefore, both tribal councils began to profit from mining leases after an estimated $10 billion in coal deposits was discovered in the area during the 1950s.
Peabody Coal now is "in a beautiful position because the government" is relocating the Indians, said Berger, who resigned from the NHIR because he felt "the commission did not work hard enough to achieve a compromise that the law made possible." Scudder noted, "it's much easier to mine land where there are no people."