DURBAN, South Africa�They are called by many names�Aborigine, Dalit, First Nations, Native American.

They live in the four corners of the globe�North America, South America, Southern Africa, Northern Africa, the Mediterranean region of Europe, Northwest Asia, Southeast Asia.

Their individual plight is the same�landlessness, dispossession, and attempted genocide committed against them.

They are the indigenous people, and in ways that never happened before, they have raised their voices at the World Conference Against Racism meeting here. They have won the world�s attention to their cause, and they have received pledges of solidarity.

At this conference they have heard their claims articulated by the top UN and world leaders, as well as by grassroots participants.

pt> Dalits of India are among the most successful here at rallying the opinions of delegates attending the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Forum�which occurred prior to the official opening of the Racism Conference�with their expressions of anguish and their voices raised in anger and protest.

They are better known as the "Untouchables" and they number as many as 200 million in India, and as many as 260 million throughout South Asia. They are the victims of caste discrimination.

Similarly, the Australian Aborigines, the Roma people of Europe, and the First Nations in North and South America have been able to call attention to their conditions, despite indifference, and sometimes open hostility from their own governments which are also participating in the official UN deliberations.

"It is our cry of appeal to international bodies to recognize untouchability as a blatant form of aggression � and to bring this heinous crime of caste discrimination under the UN Convention on Racial Discrimination," the Dalits wrote in a "Black Paper" concerning their "betrayal" and the "broken promises" of the government of India.

"In India, most of our people have this Black skin," explained Pravin Rashtrapal, Congress Party Member of Parliament, to The Final Call. "We don�t have fair skin. � We identify with Blacks only. You go to (the) south of India, see our brothers sitting here, they�re as good as Blacks. It is very easy to distinguish," he said, explaining that Aryans on horses conquered their people who were on foot, more than 3,000 years ago.

The conquerors imposed their Hindu religion with its rigid castes on them, and forced them into lives of subjugation and suffering. "We are outcasts in the Hindu religion hierarchy. We are untouchable. It is according to religious belief," said Mr. Rashtrapal.

Dalits proclaim that they are among the original inhabitants of India and that successive waves of generational violence that has been inflicted on their rights, culture and history has yet been unable to erase their identity, nor fade their roots in their homeland.

"We do all dirty work�removing dead animals, removing dead cat, dog, cleaning the toilets," he continued. "That is the work done by Dalit class, Untouchables. We are discriminated (against) because of our work."

The Aborigines are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent. The Maori are the original inhabitants of neighboring New Zealand. Aborigines have never conceded their claim of sovereignty over their homeland, despite more than two centuries of European domination.

Australia, they claim, is one of the last countries in the world that still has a racially discriminatory Constitution, as well as several laws about which the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has issued an early warning and an urgent action appeal, according to Ben Taylor, a Nyoungah Elder who spoke with The Final Call.

The disputed Native Title Acts of 1998, among other things requires the traditional owners of the Aboriginal nations to actually "prove their Aboriginality," according to Mr. Taylor. The current "coercion" by the government for rapid development attempts to extinguish Aboriginal rights in favor of non-Aboriginal vested interests.

Indigenous Land Use Agreements seek to utilize land at the expense of the environment and against the wishes of the Aboriginal custodians of the land, he insisted. Those developers are "illegal occupants of this continent, so all negotiations and contracts are not legal and binding." Aborigines assert their right to veto mining, other development and sales of their land to foreign investors and absentee landlords.

They call this an "apartheid system that enables genocide with a clear intent to destroy a race of human beings who are the oldest cultures known on Earth." These human rights violations at the hands of the British empire and its constituents have gone on since 1788, they claim.

But they remain defiant. "The indigenous people of this country will not dance on our ancestors� graves. We must live as our ancestors have lived and obey the Sacred Lore that has been left in our care," they insist.

Like Australia, Canada is one of the world�s richest and largest land masses. But representatives of more than 600 First Nations Peoples in Canada complain that more than 1 million members of Indian and Eskimo nations suffer the same kinds of abuses inflicted upon the First Nations Peoples of Guatemala, South Africa, and Australia.

"Thousands of our people are dying each year as a result of lower life expectancy, community overcrowding and homelessness, over-incarceration, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV, suicide, mass poverty and unemployment, and gasoline fume sniffing by our children," Chief Matthew Coon Come told reporters Sept. 1 at the WCAR, citing his research done by the Canadian government itself and the UN Human Rights Commission.

The condition amounts to a "clear instance of structural racism in a member state of the UN," he pointed out, complaining that his government had attempted to muzzle his protests by criticism of his outspoken remarks and veiled threats, "using the vulnerability and dependence of our peoples on (the) government."

There are benefits that come with participating in these deliberations even by poor groups, NGO forum organizers contend. The financial costs are high, however. One organizer from Sri Lanka told The Final Call that his agency could employ 20 full time workers for a full year, with the money it used to send a six-member delegation to this conference for just two weeks.

In addition to gaining recognition for their cause on the world stage, NGO participants are equipped with tools they can use to change their political realities at home. "I look at the NGOs who have been here all week, dealing with the issues," attorney Elaine Jones, executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, told a session sponsored by the Black Leadership Forum.

NGOs representing groups such as the Dalit, the Aborigines, the First Nations Peoples, and others have been diligent, Ms. Jones pointed out, "trying to make sure that the World Conference, at least in the document, recognizes our struggle. And you will not stop unless and until that recognition is enshrined in the document, so we can later use it in law."

The document eventually adopted by the World Conference can provide activists with the power to leverage a change in the laws in their home countries which have permitted their disempowerment.