1　アジアの「先住民族」概念とその人権運動―――その概念構築と現状分析に関する一考察

抄録

In Asia, many governments have clearly denied the existence of indigenous peoples for the past few decades. This is because the concept of indigenous peoples has been an unfortunate offspring and they have been real victims of European imperialism and colonialism. In particular, according to some Asian governments’ views including China, India, and Bangladesh, in Asia, all the peoples would have been the indigenous peoples like all the original peoples of American countries and Oceanian ones. In other words, it means that there are no indigenous peoples in Asia.

Regardless of the governmentsʼ views, in Asia, many ethnic groups have declared themselves to be “indigenous peoples”, and have actively campaigned for enjoying their indigenous peoplesʼ rights in every country and in international society. The indigenous peoples of Asia have successfully built their national organizations in Taiwan, the Philippines, Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia since the 1980s. Since the 1990s, some regional organizations of Asia have been established in order to struggle for protecting indigenous knowledge and their rain-forests, and utilizing the UN human rights bodies and mechanism. As a result, some indigenous experts of Asia have played an active role as members of the UN bodies such as the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII) and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) established in 2002 and 2008 respectively.

The concept building of indigenous peoples of Asia must include reviewing the national history and the “geo-body (space recognition)” of the modern nation-state from the perspective of two terms, “effective rule” and “tribute system”. In pre-modern Asia, a country had a sense of boundary of its “effective rule” area, but on the outside of the area there was a vast world of smaller countries and peoples which had a relationship with it in a “tribute system”, a unique diplomatic system of Asia. That is to say, the pre-modern Asian countries had no sense of a “border line” that was clearly invented by European countries. In the border-line negotiations among modern nation-states in Asia, many of them suddenly started to insist on their right to territory of the outside countries and peoples. For example, the Ainu people and the Ryukyuan/Okinawan people had traditionally lived on the outside of Japanese “effective rule” area until 1869 and 1879 respectively. Besides the Thai border police first contacted the indigenous mountain peoples in Northern Thailand in order to rule them effectively in 1953. The indigenous peoples of Asia had originally lived in “horizontally remote areas” or “vertically remote areas (mountain or high land areas)” on the outside of the “effective rule” area of the modern nation-state for a long time. And since “effective rule” reached their own territories, they have been forced to be under colonialism and a forced assimilation policy, deprived of their land and resources, and denied their own culture, social system and their existence itself under discrimination. This is the proper reason why they declare themselves to be indigenous peoples in the international context.