RIGHTS-ENVIRONMENT: Amnesty, Sierra Club Join Forces

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 11 1999 (IPS) - Two major US grassroots organisations announced Thursday that they were joining forces in campaign to defend environmental activists threatened by governments and corporate interests around the world.

On the eve of International Human Rights Day, US division of Amnesty International (AIUSA), and the California-based Sierra Club said they would co-operate in organising, advertising and lobbying to bring pressure on corporations and governments to cease abuses against environmental activists.

“It should not be dangerous to defend the earth in the world today – to speak out against environmental destruction, to protest when oil or logging companies jeopardise the health of citizens, to write about the dangers associated with the construction of a new dam,” said AIUSA president, Julianne Cartwright Traylor.

“In far too many places, such activism can mean risking – and losing – your freedom, your health, or even your life,” she said.

With a combined membership of more than one million volunteers across the United States, the two organisations have worked together in previous campaigns to protect environmental activists in Nigeria, Russia, and Cambodia. The new campaign marks a consolidation of that partnership, according to Michael Dorsey, a member of the Sierra Club board of directors.

As its first act, the new grouping – named “To Defend Those Who Give the Earth a Voice” – released a 31-page report on 10 of the most urgent cases of persecution of environmental activists around the world.

“Governments in both developing and developed countries are colluding with multinational corporations to protect profits at the expense of the environment, democracy and human rights,” said Taylor.

She said the campaign was directed at two goals: to influence individual cases of environmentalists who had been imprisoned or arrested; and to work together to develop government and corporate policies to secure long-term protection for human rights and the environment.

The new group’s report, ‘Environmentalists Under Fire,’ covered cases in Burma; Chad and Cameroon; China; Ecuador; India; Kenya; Mexico; Nigeria; Russia; and Cambodia.

Mexican attorney Digna Ochoa y Placido said her clients, anti- logging activists Rodolfo Montiel and Tedodoro Cabrera, were arrested last May by Mexican soldiers in the town of Pizotla, Guerrero, for alleged ties to a guerrilla movement.

Both men, who subsequently were beaten and tortured into confessing to the charges, were members of a local environmental group that had called for a ban on logging in nearby forests, which increased following the signing of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“American timber companies like Boise-Cascade have fled the United States to come to Mexico where they destroy our forests,” said Ochoa y Placido, who added that the Mexican government still had not begun an investigation into the army’s treatment of the two activists.

Julia Tchernova told reporters here how her father, nuclear engineer Aleksandr Nikitin, was charged with espionage by the Russian government after publication of his book which documented the problems of radioactive pollution from nuclear submarines based in Russia’s Northern Fleet.

Four years of constant harassment and persecution by the FSB, Russia’s internal security agency, had resulted in the physical break-up of the family, according to Tchernova, as well as the loss of many civil and social benefits.

“All my family is apart now,” Tchernova said, suppressing tears. “Last time I saw my Dad was a year and a half ago. The whole family has suffered from the FSB’s harassment.”

Other cases highlighted in the report include the forcible displacement of minority groups in Burma, where the western oil companies Unocal and Total have joined with the military government to build a gas pipeline; and the militarisation of the Oriente region in Ecuador, where Indian populations are defending their territory against the encroachment and ecologically harmful operations of US oil companies.

Similarly, the ongoing repression by government forces deployed to protect US and French oil installations in the Niger delta in Nigeria has been a cause celebre for both human rights and environmental groups, since even before the Nov 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists.

Despite the election of a new government in Abuja earlier this year, the violence in the region appears only to have worsened, especially in recent weeks.

In Chad, according to the report, at least 200 civilians reportedly were killed in the Doba oil region and the only member of parliament who opposed a multi-national oil project, led by Exxon, Shell and Elf, was imprisoned for 10 months for accusing another lawmaker of taking bribes from the oil companies.

In neighbouring Cameroon, where the same pipeline project threatened the Atlantic Littoral Forest, activists who demonstrated against the pipeline had received anonymous threats, according to the report.

In China, activists opposed to giant infrastructure projects were being harassed and persecuted. In one case, a writer who published a book criticising the huge Three Gorges Dam project, Dai Qing, was imprisoned for 10 months and banned from publishing.

In India, tribal and other demonstrators opposed to the construction of the Narmada Dam continued to face repression, including arrests, beatings, and intimidation, by security forces, according to the report.

Activists in Kenya, who had tried to save the country’s remaining public forests from development, were attacked, arrested and beaten, it noted.

In Cambodia, the Sierra Club and AIUSA won a major victory by successfully pressing the government to drop charges against two activists who were arrested for allegedly inciting riots over the import and dumping of toxic wastes from Taiwan.