Carol S. Halberstadt, January 5, 1999

Following today,s front page story by Walter V. Robinson in the Boston Globe,
headlined &McCain pressed FCC in case involving major
contributor8*&Agency gave
senator a scolding response," I,ve written this, below, and sent it to the
Boston Globe and several other journalists. Other members of the press and
other people may want to follow this up:
____________________________________________________________________________
______________________

McCain pressed Justice Department and Department of Interior for action
against
Navajo Indians while denying and sidestepping knowledge of their ongoing
struggle to stave off forced expulsion and save their homeland from strip
mining
coal and water aquifer destruction

Three weeks before the New Hampshire primary on February 1, Senator John
McCain
continues to deny, evade, or minimize knowledge of the pending forced eviction
of Dineh (Navajo) Indians in his home state of Arizona*an expulsion process
scheduled to get officially under way by the Justice Department on February
1*although he is the sponsor of the bill that set this deadline.

What special interests*coal slurry mining and strip mining, uranium, water
access, cattle ranching*is he possibly protecting here?

McCain has pressed the Justice Department and the Department of the
Interior to
act on the bill he sponsored in 1996, which almost everyone with knowledge of
it, including the President of the Navajo Nation, Kelsey Begaye, has called
&harsh and terrible8 and a violation of the religious freedom and civil
rights
of the Indian people to which it has been applied. Even Joe Lodge, the U.S.
Attorney in Phoenix who will be officially initiating the eviction process
against the Navajo on February 1, said to me on December 23, 1999, about the
McCain-sponsored 1996 &Accommodation Agreement,8 &I agree that it,s a
difficult
document.8

On April 22, 1999, McCain made a point of writing to Janet Reno, Attorney
General, and Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior, about this. While
expressing his &concern8 about the &safety and well-being of these Navajo
families, he stressed his desire to see action about carrying out the eviction
process, saying: &I ask that you submit in writing to me the actions that the
Department of Justice will take in the coming months to ensure compliance with
P.L. 104-301.8

At the same time, McCain has consistently refused to respond to press
inquiries
about this issue. In a story filed with UPI and Reuters on December 1, by
Donna
and Ed Bassett, they write:

&Two presidential candidates, Democratic Vice President Al Gore and
Republican
Sen. John McCain, have stakes in the ethnic cleansing and strip mining issues.
Spokespeople for both have declined to comment on forcible relocation of
Navajos
or say if they have accepted campaign contributions from the Peabody Coal Co.,
which calls itself the world's largest coal company and is already strip
mining
the Indian lands in northern Arizona.8

Leon Berger, Executive Director of the Navajo-Hopi Land Commission (ONHIR)
resigned in 1982, saying: "The forcible relocation of over 10,000 Navajo
people
is a tragedy of injustice that will be a blot on the conscience of this
country
for many generations." On February 1, this commission, which reports
directly to
the President, will hand over to the U.S. Attorney the names of Navajo Indians
who face forced expulsion from their ancestral homeland, clearing the way for
expanded stripmining and draining of the water aquifer that is the drinking
water source for both the Hopi and Black Mesa Navajo. In the Bassett story of
December 1, it was reported that:

&On Feb. 1, the day of the New Hampshire primary, +321 households,
(approximately 1,200 people) are scheduled to begin forcible relocation,
according to an Oct. 1, 1999, report by the U.S. Office of Navajo-Hopi Indian
Relocation (ONHIR), an executive commission that reports directly to President
Clinton. Already, some 15,000 Navajo Indians have been forcibly relocated.

Asked if President Clinton could call a temporary halt to the relocations,
Paul
Tessler, the legal counsel to the ONHIR commission said, "I presume the
president could direct us to do something or not to do something."

In addition to pressing the Justice Department and Department of Interior to
carry out the evictions, McCain has never answered any of the thousands of
letters, emails, and phone calls from Americans and people all over the world
who have contacted him asking him for help in this tragic situation. He has
never met with the Navajo on Black Mesa*many of them elderly grandmothers*to
hear their voices, despite repeated invitations and requests.

When voters do succeed in asking him a direct question he is evasive and
disingenuous. For example, in December, at a house gathering in Durham, NH,
Stuart Leiderman (a doctoral student in the natural resources program at the
University of New Hampshire) asked what the Senator would do about the
plight of
Native Americans who were scheduled to be evicted on the same date as the New
Hampshire primary. Mr. Leiderman also said that he had learned that week that
energy experts in Tucson were hosting a major sustainable energy summit for
African countries so that &the African countries wouldn,t burn up their
future
with unsustainable energy, for example, fossil fuels.8 But, he continued,
&at
the same time in your state, we were stripmining Arizona to air condition Las
Vegas.8 When Leiderman pressed McCain, asking: &Is this too hot an issue
for you
as a presidential candidate to wade into?8 McCain,s response was only to say
that the 19th-century stripmining laws ought to be reexamined. In other words,
he evaded the question by making it sound like an unimportant and minor
legislative matter, rather than the internationally recognized human rights
and
environmental issue that it is. This minimizing brushoff of a human and
environmental tragedy unfolding in Arizona is not what is expected of a U.S.
president.

An even more &I,ve never heard about( will look into it8 kind of
response was
given to a voter question in San Francisco in September and two weeks later
at a
demonstration I was part of in Boston (September 24, 1999, at Borders
Bookstore
where McCain was signing his new book). WBZ-TV covered this and aired it three
times on news that day at 5 p.m. and twice on Sunday.

WHAT SPECIAL INTERESTS IS MCCAIN POSSIBLY SHIELDING OR ADVOCATING FOR HERE?

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