A/49/415/Add.1 English Page 23 world. This is equally true for the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the forest-dwelling peoples of the South and South-East Asia, African pastoralists, the ’northern minorities’ of Russia and such groups as the Bedouin of the Negev in the Middle East ... "Given the potential gravity of problems in some regions, it is surprising that the international community has been slow to grapple with the land rights dimensions of emerging conflicts. The absence of anything approaching a set of principles means that the international community has to adopt an ad hoc approach when tensions erupt into armed and ethnic conflict. At the time of writing Bosnia constitutes perhaps the most flagrant example, but there are many other similarly horrendous situations on the horizon. Notably in Africa, land has been a crucial factor behind ethnic tensions in such countries as Ghana, Burundi and Rwanda in the first months of 1994 alone. "Discrimination in land access can be an important factor fuelling ethnic tensions. It happens when a country is subject to conquest by a dominant group which is determined to exercise control over the most fertile lands and likely to secure a labour supply from the weaker groups by depriving them of equal access to the land. The colonial experience in developing countries usually involved white European minorities establishing one legal framework for settler groups and another for indigenous peoples. There have been more recent post-colonial experiences where an economically and politically dominant group has engaged in a clear pattern of discrimination, in both law and practice, against other population groups. In other cases land law and policies have favoured a politically dominant ’indigenous elite’ at the expense of other ethnic groups, which comprise a significant proportion of the national population. The weaker sectors may have no sense of a special relationship with the land, their major or even only demand being equality of rights with the dominant sector. "The main issue is often one of equal access to the land, particularly in the developing countries, where a large proportion of the population depends on land access for subsistence and livelihood. Despite a professed commitment to land reform by Governments and international donor agencies, the impetus for redistributive land reforms has been all but lost over the past two decades. In Latin America and parts of Asia and the Middle East there has been a steady trend towards greater rural landlessness, and in many cases a renewed pattern of land concentration. Ethnic or religious minorities comprise a large proportion of the rural landless. Many of them now earn their livelihood as casual labourers or seasonal migrant workers in agriculture. Their main demand is likely to be for access to the land as tenants or small farmers, or at least as regular agricultural workers with a minimum degree of social protection. Such demands are likely to be for affirmative action programmes of land and tenancy reform, perhaps targeted on the particular needs of vulnerable minorities ... "As the study has sought to demonstrate, land can be a key issue behind minority claims for protection in many parts of the world. In some cases there are long-standing grievances, with minorities claiming the /...