The Characteristic Broad Meanders of the B. Yugan in Winter
Today twenty-three indigenous peoples, tribal peoples, call Siberia's vast forests, swamps, mountains and tundra, their home. Some like the Eastern Khanty, who number around 5,000, survive on territory that has been their home for thousands of years before the Russians came. The Eastern Khanty are subsistence hunters and fishermen, sometimes reindeer herders, who still maintain their clan system, their native religion and language, and their traditional way of life in widely separated extended family settlements on traditional hunting territories, often a day or more by boat from telephones and electricity. Their culture was born in and is specifically adapted to the forest-and-swamp ecosystem of the middle taiga. Now, after millenia, their land, and with it their culture, is threatened with destruction.
In the late 1960s oil was discovered in the basin of the middle Ob' River, and the Soviet government and state oil monopoly began a virtually unregulated oil rush. By the early 1980's Samotlor, the name of the region's first major area of petroleum development near Nizhnevartovsk, had already become a mark of shame. Today throughout the area, oil spills and casual pollution blacken the wetlands, raised roads trap water causing flooding and ruining the forests, fires caused by oilworker carelessness and petroleum soaked debris send columns of smoke into the air, acid rain blights huge territories. Western Siberia, like the American Appalachian coal fields at the beginning of this century, became a national sacrifice area, and joined other Siberian regions that surrendered their life for the wealth of the state.
However it may be regarded elsewhere, the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is fair to say, has been devastating, socially, culturally, economically and ecologically for the Khanty and their land. Surgut, which in 1965 had less than 10,000 people, now has over 300,000, all tied to oil. The dissolution of the state oil monopoly turned production over to regional oil companies, each driven by a sense of quick profits. Some are now trading their shares on Western stock markets. A recently approved partnership between AMOCO and a regional oil company, co-financed by the World Bank, is planning to develop another large territory. At least seven of these regional oil companies now operate in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, the administration of which is supported financially by the sale of oil production licenses, which dispose of Khanty family hunting territories without the people's knowledge, let alone consent. Laws passed by both the Federal and okrug governments requiring the oil companies to obtain signed lease/compensation agreements from Khanty families before any work can be done are fraudulently implemented, signatures on leases are still being obtained by coercion, false promises, administrative intimidation, even forgery.
Recognizing early the extent of the destruction that might ensue, and pressured by Russian environmentalists and scientists, the Soviet government in 1982 authorized the establishment of the Yuganskii Zapovednik (Nature Preserve) in the territory embraced by the two arms of the Bolshoi and Mala Yugan rivers, to preserve some of this magnificent and unique middle taiga ecosystem from development. The Khanty families who live along these rivers in more than fifty extended family settlements, were compelled to sacrifice their winter hunting territories as land for the new zapovednik. Nature preserve legislation in Russia is strict enough, and the Yugan Zapovednik today continues to preserve the plants and animals of a major ecosystem. But what of the Khanty?
Some Khanty voluntarily removed themselves; others were forcibly relocated. The result is that after 5,000 years of occupancy, there are today virtually no traditional Khanty family settlements on Vakh, Agan, Salim and Vas-Yugan Rivers. Other river systems like Pim and Trom-Agan are heavily impacted and the Khanty marginalized. Only the Khanty families on Lamin and Yugan River systems have been minimally impacted.
There are approximately 850 Khanty on the Yugan, the last nearly pristine territory of native living in the region, and their traditional way of life is being overwhelmed by oil.
Since 1992, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, we have been working together in in Western Siberia, documenting the Khanty traditional way of life and assessing the impact of petroleum development upon it. We have made extensive fieldwork visits among the Khanty of the Yugan every year since then. It became clear that some urgent steps needed to to be taken. As early as 1993, it became clear to us that linking the Yugan Zapovednik with UNESCO's Biosphere Reserve Program could provide the basis for a strategy for protecting the Khanty culture and the environment on which it depended. In May 1996, at an international seminar in British Columbia, we formally proposed the creation of a Biosphere Reserve on the Yugan to GOSKOMSEVER, the Russian State Committee of the North, which sponsored the seminar and which has overall responsibility for developing and coordinating programs for the Russian North and Russia's indigenous peoples. The proposal was accepted. In July of 1996, after a site visit to the Yugan by a representative of GOSKOMSEVER found local support for the concept, we spent many days traveling by boat on the Boshoi and Mala Yugan Rivers, stopping at each family settlement to explain the nature of the Biosphere reserve concept and collect signatures to establish one in the Yugan region. Every adult in every family we approached signed eagerly. Working with local government authorities, leaders in the Khanty community, and Khanty families, we defined reasonable boundaries for the various areas in the proposed biosphere reserve.
Biosphere Reserve is a designation given by UNESCO to areas protected by national governments. The concept of Biosphere Reserve, developed within the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, was adopted by UNESCO as the foundation of their "Man and the Biosphere" (MAB) Program in 1970. Where national parks and nature preserves are designed principally to monitor and protect natural ecosystems, Biosphere Reserve programs monitor the interaction between natural and human forces. They do this by creating a second, buffer zone around the nature preserve, specifically for human activity, especially non-industrial traditional ways of life. Well-known examples include the Orinoco-Casaquiare BR in Venezuela, home to the Yanomani tribe, the Yabot BR in Argentina (Guarani tribe), and the Organ Pipe-Alto Golfo de California BR, a binational reserve on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, home to the O'odham tribe, and there are others, including two being developed in Canada. A third type of zone, called the transition zone, can be used for monitoring the effects of limited nontraditional activity. The plan for the Yuganskii Khanty Biosphere Reserve calls for a similar tripartite zonation (see Map 5).
The plannedYuganskii Khanty Biosphere Reserve is not just another nature preserve. While a number of zapovedniks (Federally-designated nature preserves) in Russia have been awarded Biosphere Reserve status, none approaches the model of cooperation between indigenous people and conservationists outlined in the IUCN/UNESCO documents, although a modified form of the buffer zone concept under the name of "polygon" was introduced by Academician E. E. Syroechkovskii and incorporated into Russian law.
Several positive factors make the Yugan an ideal choice for this ecological and cultural conservation strategy, which has proven successful elsewhere. First, in the center of the region lies the large Yuganskii Zapovednik. Staffed by a small, but dedicated scientific team which would welcome the new biosphere reserve status and is eager to cooperate with the local Khanty, the Yuganskii Zapovednik provides a solid scientific basis (the only suitable one in Western Siberia) for a biosphere reserve. Second, the zapovednik is encircled by the broad limbs of the Bolshoi and Mala Yugan Rivers, along which cluster the homes of more than 800 Khanty, whose family hunting territories branch out from both rivers creating a natural buffer zone to embrace the zapovednik. Moreover, the Yuganskii Khanty are effectively organized into an obschinne, or community structure, called "Yagun Yakh [People of the River]," which is prepared to provide the organ of self-government, economic development and scientific cooperation required under the biosphere reserve management plan.
Third, despite the fact that a number of license areas have been defined in the Yugan region, they are being sold slowly, because of logistical difficulties with petroleum development in the region, and occur only on the margins of the territory. Finally, faced with rapid loss of territory for Khanty traditional living, the increasing politicization of native people, and growing international attention to the social and ecological situation in West Siberia, the Russian government seems prepared to acknowledge the need to set aside an area in the region for Khanty cultural conservation in the same way it earlier set aside an area for nature conservation.
The Yuganskii Khanty Biosphere Reserve thus represents a initiative of great importance for Russia. For indigenous people in a country which has no tradition of recognizing indigenous peoples' sovereignty, nor as yet has any laws recognizing the unique status of indigenous people or providing for private, individual or communal land ownership, the biosphere reserve provides a legal basis for local self-government and control of land use on their traditional territory. For conservationists, it represents the first opportunity to effectively monitor with the close cooperation of the local population the human impact on a complex ecosystem shared both by the zapovednik and the territory of traditional land use and together to manage its sustainable development. Now Is The Critical Moment Although the Khanty community and the zapovednik scientific staff have strongly expressed their support for establishing the Yuganskii Khanty Biosphere Reserve, sucessful achievement of this goal now depends principally on the will of regional and central goverment authorities, specifically, the Head Administrator of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Alexander Filipenko, who is also responsible for the sale of oil licenses. Though the financial costs of production are extraordinarily high on the Yugan, to say nothing of the tragic and irreversible human cost to the Khanty, pressure from oil companies continues, and tracts of the Yugan, which the Khanty use to feed their families, are still being sold out from under them without their knowledge or consent. Filipenko's approval would be a sign that Russian government officials are not willing to continue ignoring environmental costs and human rights in developing this fragile ecosystem.
For Russia--a country with many nature reserves but a poor record of protecting the environment and sustaining the internationally-acknowledged rights of indigenous peoples--the proposed Yuganskii Khanty Biosphere Reserve represents a unique initiative.
