Eco-Murders: Enemies of the State

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

January 17, 1996

OVERVIEW & SOURCE

Kim Goldberg comments on the rise in murders of environmental

activists. The story illustrates how "closely environmental

protection is intertwined with human rights." Worldwatch

Institute notes "Guaranteeing basic civil rights such as free

speech and free assembly is the best defense against both violent

repression and environmental damage." This was found in the

usenet conference < alt.save.the.earth >. Note this item is

copyrighted and you have just received a photocopy for personal

informational purposes only.

g.b.

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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

From: at491@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Kim Goldberg)

Reply-To: at491@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Kim Goldberg)

Newsgroups: talk.environment,alt.save.the.earth,alt.org.earth-

first

Subject: Enemies of the State (Eco murders)

Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 08:01:49 GMT

Organization: The National Capital FreeNet

Message-ID: <DLBFn2.8Gv@freenet.carleton.ca>

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Originally published in the Nanaimo Times

Nanaimo, British Columbia

Tuesday, January 2, 1996, page A5

Author holds standard copyright

Do not republish without negotiating reprint fee with author

Kim Goldberg: at491@freenet.carleton.ca

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Enemies of the State:

Saro-Wiwa is the latest in a string of environmentalists

to be murdered for their activism

The November execution of Nigerian environmentalist Ken

Saro-Wiwa and eight of his fellow Ogoni tribesmen sparked a

global public outcry, with Vancouver Islanders adding their

voices to the protest.

In Nanaimo, Georgia Strait Alliance returned a $5,000

donation from the Shell Environment Fund due to the oil

company's destruction of the Ogoni homeland which Saro-Wiwa

and the others were working to protect, and for which they

were killed.

In Courtenay, activists staged a demonstration in front of

the local Shell gas station.

Sadly, Saro-Wiwa's execution for the crime of

environmentalism is but the latest in a long line of similar

murders targeting key environmental activists whose work poses

a significant threat to corporate profitability.

The 1988 assassination of Chico Mendes, who led the

protest against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, is

perhaps the best known case of an environmentalist cut down

for his work, although it was just one of more than 1,000

land-related murders documented in rural Brazil that decade by

Amnesty International.

The 1995 murder of environmentalist Janeth Kawas in

Honduras occurred just a few days after she revealed that two

agribusiness companies planned to invade 15,000 hectares of an

ecological reserve. She was shot twice in the head while

doing paperwork for the ecological foundation she ran.

One year earlier, a journalist in Cambodia was murdered

two days after police warned him to stop investigating the

military's illegal involvement in the country's timber

industry.

In an age when national agendas are dictated by the needs

of transnational corporations, citizens protecting the natural

resources those corporations must exploit have become the new

enemies of the state.

But the activist-victims of this frightening trend are not

limited to developing nations.

In 1993 Leroy Jackson, a prominent Navaho

environmentalist, was found dead in his van at a highway rest

stop shortly before he was scheduled to turn over evidence of

illegal logging on his reservation to the Department of the

Interior in Washington, D.C.

In 1990, environmental activist and labor organizer Judi

Bari was car-bombed in Oakland, California.

Bari began receiving a string of death threats after she

brought a coalition of millworkers and environmentalists

before local government and demanded that the county seize a

logging company's timberlands and operate them in the public

interest. One month later she was bombed.

Miraculously, Bari survived and continues to organize,

despite the FBI's suspicious cover-up and mishandling of

crucial evidence at the bomb scene. The bomber was never

caught.

Each of these cases (and scores of others like them)

reveals how closely environmental protection is intertwined

with human rights, which has finally led activists from each

of those movements to begin building coalitions.

"Guaranteeing basic civil rights such as free speech and

free assembly is the best defense against both violent

repression and environmental damage," states the Worldwatch

Institute in a recent report linking human rights to the

environment.

"If all the vulnerable members of society - the

impoverished, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, women,

children - had access to environmental information and could

exercise their right to free speech, then potential polluters

and profligate consumers would no longer be able to treat them

as expendable, and would have to seek alternatives to their

polluting activities and their overconsumption," says the

report.

And perhaps if that happens we will finally see an end to

this anti-democratic spate of lethal violence against citizens

working to preserve some tiny fragment of the natural world.

Kim Goldberg is a Nanaimo Times columnist.

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