1 February 2006Ben Dowell
John Pilger and the BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson are heading a campaign aimed at ending the portrayal of tribal people as "primitive".
The campaign, which is being supported by the tribal people's charity Survival International, aims to encourage members of the public who see an article or hear a report using the term "primitive" or "Stone Age" to send the editors of publications or news programmes concerned an eye-catching campaign postcard.
The campaigners, who also include the BBC's Baghdad correspondent Caroline Hawley, former ITN News reader Sandy Gall and journalists George Monbiot and Christopher Booker, insist that the use of such terms leads to the persecution of tribal people and the development of their lands.
Mr Simpson said: "There is nothing primitive about tribal peoples except our view of them. Their intricate societies, their extraordinary abilities to exist in and use the environment around them, are things for us to wonder at."
Botswana bushman Roy Sesana, who is working with the campaign, said: "We are not primitive. We live differently to you, but we do not live exactly like our grandparents did, nor do you."
Survival's director Stephen Corry said he was "delighted" to have the support of prominent journalists.
"We're aiming to make it just as unacceptable to use these kinds of derogatory terms to describe today's tribal people as it would be to describe any other minority group," he said.
"The argument that tribes are 'backward' or 'primitive' leads directly to their persecution, and is frequently used to justify dispossessing them of their land or forcing them to 'develop', supposedly 'for their own good'."
The postcard can be downloaded from survival-international.org/stampitout.php
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