Defending the earth's defenders

[moe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Defending the earth's defenders 
Sierra; San Francisco; May/Jun 1999; B J Bergman; 

Volume: 
                 84
Issue: 
                 3
Start Page: 
                 69
ISSN: 
                 01617362
Full Text:
Copyright Sierra Club May/Jun 1999


"When I fled Burma in 1988, I knew nothing about the environment," said Ka
Hsaw Wa.
During 11 years of exile, he has risked his safety by returning repeatedly
to his homeland to
interview victims of the military dictatorship's brutality. "More and more,
these people are
talking about issues that directly implicate the environment as well: the
woman whose baby
was killed when a soldier kicked her into a fire during a forced relocation
for the pipeline;
the boys and girls who were forced at gunpoint to labor on the logging road;
the fisherman
who lost his traditional livelihood when international trawlers forced him
out of the sea." 

Ka Hsaw Wa, slight and boyishlooking, could easily pass for the college
student he was
more than a decade ago. Now, though, he understands both the "deadly
partnership"
between multinational oil magnates and the Burmese generals-who are leveling
forests for a
massive naturalgas pipeline-and the "intimate connection" between human
liberty and
ecological health. "We have a chance to join hands and stop the abuse at its
sources," he
said. "Those who have been previously committed to protecting human rights,
and those
who have focused on the environment, must recognize that we work at
crosspurposes if we
do not work together." 

Ka Hsaw Wa, who now lives in Thailand, spoke at the Sierra Club's San
Francisco
headquarters in January to bless an alliance between the Club, the nation's
largest
grassroots environmental organization, and Amnesty International USA, its
counterpart in
the human-rights arena. At his side was Dr. Owens Wiwa, whose brother, Ogoni
leader
Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed with eight others by the Nigerian military in
November
1995 for speaking out about toxic oil spills and government repression. Wiwa
fled days
later, and now lives in Toronto. 

The Club and Amnesty, which together have nearly a million members in the
United States
alone, have previously collaborated on behalf of the Ogoni and Russia's
Alexander Nikitin,
charged with espionage for blowing the whistle on dangers from
decommissioned nuclear
submarines. Their three-year "Defending the Defenders" campaign will bring
more such

cases of persecution to broader attention via first-person accounts by
indigenous activists
on the Internet and annual "Environmental Defender" reports, and through
the two
organizations' extensive communications and activist networks. 

There is, sadly, no shortage of worthy candidates. William Schultz,
Amnesty's executive
director, noted that just days earlier, 1991 Goldman Prize winner Wangari
Maathai,
coordinator of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, and other protesters had been
hospitalized
after being clubbed for trying to plant seedlings at the gates of a forest
slated for
development. As a participant in a morning roundtable discussion observed,
however, "We
don't have to go abroad to find examples of corporate abuse." To cite just
one, Navajos
are struggling to defend their sacred homeland in the Arizona desert against
expansion of
Peabody Coal's Black Mesa mine. 

The "Defending the Defenders" campaign aims to turn up the pressure on the
U.S.
government for its part in human-rights abuses. Carl Pope, the Club's
executive director,
criticized Democrats and Republicans alike for supporting a foreign policy
he described as
"see no evil, hear no evil." Appearing at a news conference to announce the
campaign, he
promised to "press our government to insist that corporations based here,
marketing here,
and raising money here, develop and implement credible human-rights and
environmental
protection policies wherever they do business." 



"It should no longer be acceptable," said Pope, "for corporations to say,
`we have
complied with the law where we are doing business,' if that law does not
recognize basic
environmental and human rights." 

The San Francisco-based Goldman Fund is underwriting the Club/Amnesty
alliance and is
also providing support for a variety of other advocacy groups to stop
human-rights abuses
and hold corporations accountable. In the previous two weeks, Wiwa said, the
Nigerian
junta had killed at least two dozen activists in its reign of terror on
behalf of multinational oil
interests there. By defending the defenders, "this coalition will help
ensure that such things
never happen again." 

"If anything happens to us, we will not die in vain," Wiwa said, unavoidably
evoking the
memory of his martyred brother. "A lot of people are watching."