Diversity & Discrimination

There is an International day of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples on the 9th August - Who knew?   

Indigenous peoples face high rates of poverty and acute socio-economic disadvantages. It is only recently that their importance to the whole climate change emergency has come to the forefront. Living in harmony with nature, indigenous peoples help safeguard 80% of the world's biodiversity and hold many of the solutions to the climate crisis, despite constituting less than 5% of the global population. They have the traditional knowledge of their ancestors. The important value of that knowledge simply cannot be overstated

https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/international-day-of-the-worlds-indigenous-peoples-2021.html

Yet all over the world indigenous people have been & are discriminated against. Historically you only have to think about the Native American Indians V white settlers, Mesoamerican Indians V Spanish colonists, Antipodean Maori & Aboriginals V Imperial settlers, Africa V European colonists.

Today nothing much has changed. Amnesty identifies "370 million Indigenous people around the world  spread across more than 90 countries. They belong to more than 5,000 different Indigenous peoples and speak more than 4,000 languages. The vast majority of them – 70% – live in Asia".

https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/indigenous-peoples/

Human Rights day is on the 10th December, commemorating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/ListOfIssues.aspx

Yet we have numerous Human Rights issues in the world today. Two prime examples being the Uyghur discrimination in Xinjiang China & the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. But they are not alone - Syria, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan...We seem to be going through a battle between good & evil in human behaviour.

 

Human beings have the capacity for all the positive & negative traits of behaviour. There is a very fine  balance between the two. Approaching a new year & my 77th birthday I wonder which will win.