China is trying to force 1.2 million nomads of the People's Republic to settle until 2015

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) in Göttingen sharply criticizes the Chinese government's plans to force at least 1.2 million nomads in the People's Republic to settle until the year 2015. "If the nomads are forced to settle in newly built villages, an age-old way of life will arbitrarily be destroyed", said the STP's Asia-consultant, Ulrich Delius, on Tuesday. In a petition submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, the STP warns that many nomads will become alms-receivers because the authorities are deliberately destroying their basis of existence. At the end of May 2012, China's government had passed the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan", according to which 246,000 nomadic families in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are supposed to be forced to settle until the year 2015.

In the petition, the STP emphasizes the fact that – after a visit to China in January 2012 – UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, advised China not to force the nomads to settle. Such a move would violate both international law and international conventions such as the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on Biological Diversity, which were also ratified by the People's Republic. Also, their food supplies would be affected. "The nomads could no longer live off their animals – and the new villages offer neither a sufficient infrastructure nor jobs for the new settlers, not even in other economic sectors," said Delius. "Hopelessness is spreading among the nomads. Some of them committed suicide by self-immolation – just most recently, on last weeks Wednesday, a mother of three children."

The Chinese government justified the proposed settlement with environmental concerns, as the herds of the nomads allegedly cause desertification. But even Chinese scientists now admit that the advance of deserts can only be fought effectively if the cattle occasionally graze on the remaining grasslands. If the Chinese authorities do force the nomads to settle and make them use certain grazing-areas for decades, the desertification will even increase – because then the former nomads would let their animals graze there until no vegetation is left and even the roots of the plants are destroyed. A forced settlement of the nomads would therefore cause new ecological problems.