2014-10-23
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Map showing the location of Inner Mongolia’s Zaruud Banner (county).
RFA
Hundreds of ethnic Mongolian herding families in China’s Inner Mongolia region are calling on the international community for help following their forced eviction from a huge area of their traditional grazing lands, local residents said on Thursday.
Several hundreds of people from Zaruud (in Chinese, Zalute) Banner demonstrated outside the offices of the nearby Tongliao municipal government on Sunday over what they said were forced and violent evictions from their homelands in June.
“After we returned to our grazing lands in June to graze our sheep and cattle, the [Arkund] township government dispatched large numbers of riot police and grasslands management officials,” the herders said in an open letter issued at the same time.
“They pushed over the herders’ yurts and snatched away their livestock, using violence to force 62 herders off their grazing lands,” the letter said, according to copy obtained this week.
“Herders who tried to resist were threatened and beaten up by police,” it said.
Dagula, a resident of Heyehua village in Zaruud Banner—the administrative equivalent of a county—said she was there at the time.
“On June 25, they forcibly evicted us,” she said. “They went into the sheep pens and started grabbing the sheep.”
“When we saw our property being snatched away, of course we couldn’t stand it, and we tried to stop them.”
“There were some clashes,” she said. “They behaved like bandits. They didn’t even produce any paperwork.”
‘Ecological recovery’
The evictions come as part of a widespread “ecological recovery” program under which officials cordon off thousands of acres of valuable grasslands and forbid herders to graze their animals there.
But overseas rights groups say the government’s ongoing land grabs have little to do with environmental responsibility and everything to do with exploiting the land for lucrative strip-mining and other natural resources.
Dagula said the trouble had started in the village five years ago when local officials ordered the herders to stop grazing the grasslands and move away.
“The policy at the time was that the grasslands should be rested for five years, and then we could graze them again,” she said.
“Those five years have now passed, and we have a 30-year contract to graze these lands still in force.”
Dagula said local people no longer believe in the “ecological” policy for managing the region’s fragile grasslands.
“They are just using ecological protection as a pretext for evicting us,” she said.
She said herders’ attempts to petition the Tongliao authorities on Sunday had come to nothing, however.
“They said our demands weren’t acceptable,” she said.
Greater compensation
One herder, Chenggal, was severely beaten and detained for five days, according to a report paraphrasing the letter on the U.S.-based Mongolian News website.
