For centuries we have learned to live with this land, in hardships, but with a knowledge that allowed us to build our community, a relationship to a land and its waters that defines our very being. The languages of the land have taught us to how to cherish and harness the hill torrents brought by the rains to provide us sustenance. And in doing so we became the knowledge that allows this land to live and us to live as it.

Many people have passed through this land yet we have sustained this relationship with the land. These 'others' who came brought new languages and challenged us with their minds and methods - but they were others and we maintained our own.

Today we are challenged by the very people who claim that they are 'us' - from Lahore and Islamabad - with their one language, that of development. A development that ceases to learn from the land but believes that it can claim the power of nature and control the languages of the land, building dams and canals with the promise to control the flows of water and provide power and water for faraway, and near lands. These dams that they design and the canals that snake our lands refashion the very hills that shape the sky but they drink more than both the sky and the land can yield. Sucking the very life from these lands and ignoring the ways the land has taught us to catch and use its bounty.

Their brother in arms is the Bank in Manila. The dreaded Bank, with its army of consultants from across the globe, helped make this vision, this destruction, a reality.

The cost of the arrogance of such designs is being paid by our lives. The poverty of our being bears testimony to the height of this price. They moved us off our lands with promises of better lands and compensations. They tore us apart from the land that carries our blood, our history, our culture, our livelihood - ripping the Damaan into two, separating our peoples from each other as some gained and most lost. The Damaan now lies dormant, the floods cease to be our sustenance and water once cherished embattles our very survival as we are enslaved by the arbitrariness and corruption of those who to control the canal waters.

Our homes and our histories are now buried. And we are lost. There are no alternative lands. And we search for somewhere to go. There is no compensation. Abundant lies of abundances. And the biggest lie? The lie of development.

When we speak of our suffering, when we sit outside their offices and fast they claim to listen and burying us with their committees and their numbers and their calculations, they tell us we will be compensated - one wonders what compensation, price, will ever be possible for alienation from our very being. But nothing changes. And the Bank people travel the world espousing the religion of development, carrying pictures of us as testimony of the power of this religion, but they are silent pictures our voices of suffering are silenced.

And now we stand and refuse to be silent. We say enough.

We stand now to bring our justice to the perpetrators of the destruction that has been wrought. We take the Government and the Bank to our court, to hear them talk in our court, to answer our questions. To lay out the story('s) of truth in which they trampled their own false legalities and procedures and subsumed our beings to their exercises of Power.

We stand now to have our say in this game of development. We refuse to play. We stand to question the idea of development that has colonised so many minds and hearts, the idea that such monstrous dams and canals ease hardship and suffering, ours or of those in faraway lands - ideas that still animate vivid developmental imaginations inscribed on our lands with the Kachhi Canal and the Gomal Dam. In this court our voices will tell of the bankruptcy of a development that scars landscapes and mindscapes.

We stand now quiet simply to reclaim our beings - to reclaim our lands, our histories, our lives and our human futures.

And we invite concerned sisters and brothers to stand with us and share in our voicing.

Signed the Peoples of the Damaan