Suriname

The problems posed by protected areas are not limited to Maroons living around the CSNR.

Compared to many other countries, nature conservation has a relatively long history in Suriname. Ten protected areas were created in 1954 specifically to compensate for resource exploitation in the coastal area. Currently, 16 protected areas have been established, including one nature park (Brownsweg) and one multiple use management area; six more have been proposed.

For Maroons in Suriname, treaties are hard-won symbols of freedom consecrated by the blood and power of our most powerful ancestors -- blood that guaranteed our existence as free peoples with autonomous territories and institutions.

The Maroons of Suriname and French Guiana (formerly known as "Bush Negroes") have long been the hemisphere's largest Maroon population.

In recent decades, small-scale gold mining has gained importance both as a source of income for the poor and as a cause of environmental degradation in low-income countries. Gold mining and its surrounding service economy sustain millions of households in the Amazon, and governments able to regulate mining in their countries earn urgently needed revenues. Gold miners, however, also attract violent crime, spread disease, remove wildlife and forest cover, and release mercury into the river ecosystem.

The last survivors of the once-powerful Carib people, the original inhabitants of most of the Lesser Antilles, now live on the two eastern Caribbean islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, and in Belize, Guyana, and Suriname. The Caribs' existence today, five centuries after the voyages of Christopher Columbus, is living testimony to their bold resolve to survive and to resist European colonial onslaught. The rugged terrain of both Dominica and St. Vincent provided the ideal conditions for protracted warfare against British and French incursions into what used to be their peaceful domain.

They dragged my 12-year-old son from a house and shot him. They shot my wife in the foot. She fell on the ground and begged the soldiers not to kill her...another woman, X, she was pregnant. She pleaded with the soldiers not to kill her and pointed to her belly. She was running away and they shot her in the back. She was dead. Another soldier grabbed a six-month-old baby and put the barrel of his gun in its mouth and laughed. The baby took it eagerly, like a baby bottle. The soldier pulled the trigger. The soldiers rounded up another group of seven people: six children and one woman.