November 26, 1998
ICC wants emergency relief for Russian aboriginals
Some Russian aboriginal people are starving to death — and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference wants Canada to help them.
DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News
IQALUIT — Canadian Inuit are asking the federal government to provide emergency humanitarian aid for Russian aboriginal people impoverished by economic collapse and reported to be close to starvation.
The Canadian office of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference is finalizing a detailed proposal this week that could see a multi-million-dollar assistance package in place before Christmas.
ICC Canada proposing to use its contacts with Russian aboriginals to administer the special relief fund, with the help of well-known aid organizations such as the Red Cross.
It is the first time that the Inuit organization has offered to assist the foreign affairs department in an international relief effort.
"We know that if it becomes a government-to-government affair, it won't work," Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president of ICC Canada said, referring to the apparent inability of the Russian government to deal with the looming crisis.
Watt-Cloutier told delegates attending Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.'s annual general meeting in Cambridge Bay last week that Russian aboriginal people living in the Chukotka and Kamchatka regions are in desperate need of food, fuel, clothing and medicine.
There have been published reports of aboriginal people dying from starvation, and of the inability of regional governments to supply heat and electricity to remote Siberian villages.
The Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North first appealed to ICC Canada for help in a letter last month, blaming food and fuel shortages on corrupt regional authorities who have interfered with efforts to deliver supplies to remote communities.
In September, the crisis facing Russian Inuit was discussed at the Arctic Council meeting in Iqaluit.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy met with Russian officials in Moscow on Nov. 10 and 11 to discuss the ICC proposal, and the assistance program is now being studied by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
The cost of such an aid package for Chukotka and Kamchatka is estimated by ICC to be on the order of $5 million.
"The major concern in this project from our point of view has not been so much the amount, but the capacity to deliver, because we're looking at regions which are in some cases difficult to access," said Gilles Breton, the deputy director of CIDA's eastern European division said.