AP Worldstream

August 3, 2001; Friday

SECTION: International news

DISTRIBUTION: Europe;Britian;Scandinavia;England

BYLINE: JONATHAN FOWLER

DATELINE: GENEVA

 

BODY:

 

The U.S. government told a U.N. committee Friday that it had scored successes in the fight against racial discrimination, but campaigners said the report ducked real issues from the rights of American Indians to residents of Washington, D.C.

 

''There is considerable good news emanating from the century-old struggle of the United States against racism and bigotry,'' the Justice Department's newly confirmed civil rights chief Ralph Boyd Jr. told a U.N.

panel on racism.

 

Boyd said that African-Americans ''serve in significant numbers at the highest levels of government, police our communities ... manage large corporations, and report the news.''

 

That contrasts with census figures of six decades ago that indicated many were ''unskilled laborers, sharecroppers or domestic servants,'' he said.

 

Boyd presented a 104-page report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, an 18-member panel that oversees compliance with a global treaty to halt discrimination. Twelve U.S. rights groups critical of the government have presented their views to the committee.

 

Members of the Western Shoshone people accused U.S. authorities of trying to chase them off their ancestral territory.

 

Timothy Cooper, director of Washington, D.C.-based Democracy First, said the government report ignored the issue of political representation for residents of the nation's capital. The denial of full congressional representation in a 75 percent minority

city is a violation of the U.N. convention, Cooper said.

 

''The United States government has continuously denied citizens of Washington, D.C. the right to equal participation in their own national legislature,'' he said.

 

The half-million District of Columbia residents are entitled to vote for president, but their congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, is not allowed to vote on the House floor. Other Americans are represented by two senators, but Washington residents have none.

 

Some 67 percent of the district's population are African-American and 8 percent are Hispanic.

 

The Supreme Court in October upheld a ruling that the district's residents are not entitled to voting membership in the House.

 

Past efforts to amend the Constitution to provide voting representation have failed blocked, Cooper said, by Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats who feared the district's support for liberal, Democratic candidates in congressional and local elections.

 

The Western Shoshone said the U.S. government has authorized the use of environmentally damaging cyanide for gold mining and approved military testing and nuclear waste storage on Shoshone lands.

 

The tribes numbering about 6,600 people live mainly in central Nevada and parts of California, Idaho and Utah.

 

Tribal elder Carrie Dann has been a focal point of the dispute since the government sued her in 1974 for grazing livestock on federal acreage at her Nevada ranch.

 

She remains locked in a dispute with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights.

 

''The United States is very racial, the Supreme Court is very racial,'' Dann told The Associated Press. ''They don't look at the context. They don't want to know about our culture. Ninety-eight percent of the indigenous people died during the colonization of the West.''

 

At issue is the so-called 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley between the Western Shoshone and the United States which took 23.6 million acres (9.44 million hectares) of land away from the tribes. Tribal leaders argue that the treaty simply granted the United States limited access to the land and did not cede it to the federal government.

 

They have rejected a long-standing government offer of dlrs 121 million in compensation, saying the land was never given up.

 

Dann said the committee should call on U.S. authorities to halt legal proceedings against the Western Shoshone, block mining and nuclear tests, and reaffirm the 1863 treaty.

 

Boyd did not mention the land rights issue, but said the Bureau of Indian Affairs had worked hard to increase school registration among American Indian children which had risen by 25 percent since 1987.

 

The U.N. committee is expected to continue considering the U.S. report Monday, and issue an opinion on U.S. compliance with the discrimination convention several weeks later.