International News
The Bundys’ fight against ‘tyranny’ in U.S.
From a rising China to a fading Russia and violent Islamists, challengers to U.S. power are many these days, but the Bundys fall in a category of their own. The rancher family of 71-year-old Cliven Bundy (in picture) and his sons are facing multiple cases for organising a militia that stared down federal law enforcement agencies that tried to impound their cattle from federal grazing land in April 2014. The Bundys have defined their struggle against the federal government as one of freedom, property rights, and against tyranny. “We are not servants or slaves to the government,” Ryan Bundy, one of the sons, argued before the jury recently. In the “land of the free and the home of the brave”, the Bundy trials are turning out to be an extraordinary fight for freedom and show of bravery.
Prosecutors have charged Mr. Bundy, two of his sons and a third follower — an Iraq War veteran — with conspiracy and assault among other offences in the latest trial. The case is about a confrontation between them and federal law enforcement near Bunkerville, 120 km northeast of Las Vegas in Nevada.
The case is as follows. Sometime in 1993, the senior Bundy “fired” the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from the management of 5,87,000 acres of federal land adjacent to his 160-acre ranch. He had been paying grazing fees for his cattle roaming the expanse until then, but then suddenly decided that these payments were illegal and discontinued them. The BLM secured several court rulings against him, but he held them illegal too. As unpaid grazing fees accumulated to $1.2 million, in April 2014, federal agents hired private contractors who rounded up 400 head of cattle from the public land. The Bundys put up an armed resistance and supporters, comprising white nationalists and far-right constitutionalists from other parts of the U.S., joined the family. At gunpoint, federal agencies withdrew from the scene.
The Bundys argue that it was a protest, protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. It is the federal government — not his family — that broke the law, Ryan Bundy argued, by trying to steal their cattle. As for the grazing fees, they say, the federal government has no authority to demand that. According to their interpretation of the U.S Constitution, the land belongs to the State of Nevada. If any fee has to be paid, it has to be paid to the State or the county. And in any case, no government can revoke the grazing permit, because the family had owned it for 141 years. “In America, sovereignty lies with the people,” Ryan Bundy told the jury, in an emotional opening statement. What is freedom if they need licence to rear cattle, the family asks. The jury could be sympathetic to the Bundys and federal prosecutors have a tough time. “This case is not about protesting,” U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre argued. “This case is about violence…”
More protests
With the inability of the federal agencies to enforce the law in 2014, similar protests erupted in other places also. Ryan Bundy and brother Ammon Bundy were acquitted last year in a similar but separate case arising from the armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. The stand-off that lasted six weeks made national headlines for days, and the father and sons ended up in jail after that. Though the case represents, among other things, the rural-urban divide in America, the Bundys have a noticeable campaign in their support on the Internet and it become a rallying point for white nationalist groups.
