WE WANT LIVING TOWNS, NOT ETHNOLOGICAL MUSEUMS!

On September 15th the second wave of evictions and demolitions of towns affected by the Itoiz dam will begin. This time the villages sentenced to death are Artozki and Muniain. These villages, like those already destroyed, reflect a way of life enjoyed by our ancestors, based on respect for the natural environment upon which they depend. The destruction of these villages and the alternative proposed by the powers that be clearly represent the development model that they want to impose on us.

The beautiful houses, built stone upon stone, which have stood for centuries, will be replaced with concrete pre-fab bungalows for urban tourists. People will come from the cities to relieve their stress on golf courses fed from the waters of the Itoiz dam and built upon the ghostly remains of what was, in its day, a place full of life.

The fields, worked for many generations with natural compost, will be replaced by massive monoculture plantations on the Mediterranean coast - chemical fertilisers sucking the life from the land and the water, both privatised by agri-business multinationals.

The peaceful life that they breathed in these villages will become compulsive consumerism, stress and individualism. Gone the self-sufficiency, communial ties and respect for your fellow villagers and environment. In its place a violent and aggressive way of life which exploits people and increases inequalty and injustice in everything it touches. Of all that which once was they will save only a few vestiges, dissected remains to be shown to tourists in the ethnological museums - the only remaining testemony to a once vibrant way of life.

In Cancun the multinationals and powerful governments are conspiring, through the WTO, to sweep millions of small farmers and indigenous peoples from their path. These campesinos hold the key to the people's power to feed itself. They are a real barrier to global business whose sole concern is to increase the profits of the few, condemning millions to hunger. Likewise, in Navarra, the tyrannical neo-feudal government is destroying villages which are the guarentors of the people's right to produce its own food and to live in harmony with nature and without exploiting anyone.

The Spanish National Hydrological Plan, of which the Itoiz dam forms a part, will be the biggest ecological, economic and social disaster in the history of the Spanish State. It will exacerbate the already serious territorial imbalance, creating more depopulation of the interior areas, if that were possible. Meanwhile the coastal areas lose what little is left of their ways of life, to prostitute themselves to tourism and the urbanising plague which, little by little, is annhilating the essence of both people and places.

We are also fighting against the Itoiz dam because it is a death threat to the people who live down river. According to an internal document of the Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro, geological subsidance and recent filtrations in the rocks make the failure of the dam a very real danger.

We demand life in the Irati valley, with development in harmony with nature and the peculiar way that woman, man and river have forged an existence here amidst the mountains for thousands of years. We are calling for a future for this valley without interferences, without impositions and without death sentences. So far this is all that we have received from theives such as the Urralburus, Aragones, Burgos, and Sanz, all of whom have clear intersts to be served by the dam and by the Navarra Canal. This latter infrastructure project does not justify the destruction in Itoiz, on the contrary, it will mean expoitation of
Navarra for decades to come.

These private interests have bypassed everything and destroyed the hopes of the Irati valley to have a dignified future as part of Navarra. We cannot let them take this from us. This is why we are mobilising and we will keep mobilising until sanity wins over the concrete monstrosities and bottomless pockets.

We want to save the River Irati so that she always runs free. We want living villages and rivers, not skeletons and mummies.

NO MORE DEMOLITIONS
NO TO THE CLOSING OF THE ITOIZ DAM
DEFEND MOTHER EARTH
FREEDOM FOR IÑAKI

Solidari@s con Itoiz