by DGR News Service | Apr 21, 2014 | Repression at Home
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
At least 908 people were murdered for taking a stand to defend the environment between 2002 and 2013, according to a new report today from Global Witness, which shows a dramatic uptick in the murder rate during the past four years. Notably, the report appears on the same day that another NGO, Survival International, released a video of a gunman terrorizing a Guarani indigenous community in Brazil, which has recently resettled on land taken from them by ranchers decades ago. According to the report, nearly half of the murders over the last decade occurred in Brazil—448 in all—and over two-thirds—661—involved land conflict.
“There can be few starker or more obvious symptoms of the global environmental crisis than a dramatic upturn in killings of ordinary people defending rights to their land or environment,” said Oliver Courtney of Global Witness. “Yet this rapidly worsening problem is going largely unnoticed, and those responsible almost always get away with it. We hope our findings will act as the wake-up call that national governments and the international community clearly need.”
But as grisly as the report is, it’s likely a major underestimation of the issue. The report covers just 35 countries where violence against environmental activists remains an issue, but leaves out a number of major countries where environmental-related murders are likely occurring but with scant reporting.
“Because of the live, under-recognized nature of this problem, an exhaustive global analysis of the situation is not possible,” reads the report. “For example, African countries such as Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and Zimbabwe that are enduring resource-fueled unrest are highly likely to be affected, but information is almost impossible to gain without detailed field investigations.”
In fact, reports of hundreds of additional killings in countries like Ethiopia, Myanmar, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe were left out due to lack of rigorous information.
Even without these countries included, the number of environmental activists killed nearly approaches the number of journalists murdered during the same period—913—an issue that gets much more press. Environmental activists most at risk are people fighting specific industries.
“Many of those facing threats are ordinary people opposing land grabs, mining operations and the industrial timber trade, often forced from their homes and severely threatened by environmental devastation,” reads the report. “Indigenous communities are particularly hard hit. In many cases, their land rights are not recognized by law or in practice, leaving them open to exploitation by powerful economic interests who brand them as ‘anti-development’.”
As if to highlight these points, Survival International released a video today that the groups says shows a gunman firing at the Pyelito Kuê community of Guarani indigenous people. The incident injured one woman, according to the group. The Guarani have been campaigning for decades to have land returned to them that has been taken by ranchers.
“This video gives a brief glimpse of what the Guarani endure month after month—harassment, intimidation, and sometimes murder, just for trying to live in peace on tiny fractions of the ancestral land that was once stolen from them,” the director of Survival International, Stephen Corry, said. “Is it too much to expect the Brazilian authorities, given the billions they’re spending on the World Cup, to sort this problem out once and for all, rather than let the Indians’ misery continue?”
According to the report, two major drivers of repeated violence against environmental activists are a lack of attention to the issue and widespread impunity for perpetrators. In fact, Global Witness found that only ten people have been convicted for the 908 murders documented in the report, meaning a conviction rate of just 1.1 percent to date.
“Environmental human rights defenders work to ensure that we live in an environment that enables us to enjoy our basic rights, including rights to life and health,” John Knox, UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment said. “The international community must do more to protect them from the violence and harassment they face as a result.”
From Mongabay: “Nearly a thousand environmental activists murdered since 2002“
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 7, 2013 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By John Vidal / The Guardian
Human rights abuses in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo valley are said to be rampant, with tribal leaders imprisoned, dozens of people killed and troops cracking down on dissent ahead of the building of a massive dam, which is forcing the relocation of some of the most remote tribes in Africa.
The valley, a Unesco world heritage site renowned for its isolated cultures and ethnic groups, is home to 200,000 pastoralist farmers including the Kwegu, Bodi, Mutsi and Nyangatom tribes. These groups all depend on the Omo river, which flows through their traditional land on its way to Lake Turkana in Kenya.
But their way of life, which has remained largely unchanged in thousands of years, is now being devastated by the Ethiopian government’s plans to turn the Omo valley into a powerhouse of large commercial farming. Malaysian, Indian and other foreign companies have been allocated vast areas of land and water resources to grow palm oils, cereals and other crops.
So far, says US-based Oakland Institute in a new report, 445,000 hectares (1.1m acres) have been earmarked for plantations, which will be irrigated by the $2bn (about £1.3bn) Gibe dam. This is expected to eventually double the energy capacity of Ethiopia, storing water in a large lake that will feed irrigation projects.
More than 2,000 soldiers are said to have been drafted into the area downstream of the dam and most of the Omo valley is now off limits to foreigners. But evidence collected in the last few months by an Oakland researcher, suggests that relocations, killings and repression are now common.
“I was walking peacefully in my field when soldiers began shooting me for no good reason. I was shot with a bullet in my knee. That day 11 people were killed and the soldiers threw four bodies off Dima village bridge. They were eaten by hyenas,” one man said.
“Here in Koka, the roads that we the Suri people have built were destroyed by the plantation’s trucks. Nothing is done to help us,” said another. “They diverted the water to their fields and there is nothing left for us to drink. We have no choice but to go to the mountains. It is dangerous now.”
The report is impossible to verify, but it reinforces other accounts of human rights violations in the area.
The government, which denies human rights abuses, claims that 150,000 jobs will be created by the plantations, but the Oakland researcher could find little evidence of people employed.
“In Suri, the government is said to have cleared much of the grass and trees to allow the Malaysian investors to establish their plantations. Water has been diverted leaving the Suri with nothing for their cattle,” says the report.
“Entire families had to leave their land. The elderly could often not walk any more, they were suffering so badly. We are threatened by famine, we have less milk, less maize. Without good pastures we are nothing. The military hunts us so we flee into the forest,” one tribesman said.
According to Kenyan NGO Friends of Lake Turkana, more than 60 Suri people were killed last May. “Following the violation of their rights, the Suri took arms an engaged the government forces. The government killed 54 Suri in the marketplace in Maji; it is estimated that 65 people died in the massacre. Suri people are being arrested randomly and sentenced to 18, 20 and 25 years in prison for obscure crimes.
According to the report, every bulldozer operated by a Malaysian plantation company is now guarded by several soldiers. This follows the alleged killing of 17 people near the plantation in October 2012.
“Four Suri chiefs were thrown into prison in August. Visits are forbidden,” one Suri tribesman told the researcher, who has asked to remain anonymous. “We fear the worst.”
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/07/ethiopian-dam-project-devastating-remote-tribes
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 11, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Survival International
Survival has received disturbing reports from members of several tribes in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, which describe how the government is destroying their crops to force them to move off their land into designated resettlement areas.
Those most affected by the land grabs are Suri, Bodi and Mursi pastoralists, and the Kwegu hunter-gatherer people.
Many families are now desperate as they have no sorghum, and their cattle grazing land is also being rapidly destroyed as the government continues to lease out their land for sugar cane and oil palm plantations.
Some Bodi communities are already being moved in to camps against their will. A Bodi man said, ‘They are taking our land by force. The bulldozer even cleared the gardens where our crops were growing. They went right through where our sorghum was growing.’
The Mursi have been told they must sell their cattle, and will be moved to the resettlement camps by the end of this year. One Mursi woman said, ‘The other day I went to the Omo River. I went to my grain stores to get the grain and it was gone. My grain stores had been thrown away (by bulldozers). I don’t like what they are doing. When I went I just cried. Our grain stores were gone. Now we will have big problems. We don’t know what to do. Maybe we will die.’
Access to the Omo River is being blocked as the government continues to clear land and build roads to the sugar cane plantations, which are part of the state run Kuraz Sugar Project.
The government is also leasing large tracts of tribal land to national and foreign investors. To the west of the Omo National Park, the Suri are protesting against a Malaysian company which is planting oil palm on some of their best cattle grazing land.
According to one Suri man, ‘The government went with soldiers and for two weeks tried to prevent the Suri from planting crops. This was to force the people to be hungry and accept moving into the resettlement site. Most of the Suri are afraid to go to the place where they plant crops. Only a few went. In one village near the Malaysian plantation, three houses were burned down, with grain stores inside. This was done by the plantation workers.’
Human Rights Watch recently launched a damning new report ‘What Will Happen if Hunger Comes?’ which documents how government security forces are driving communities to relocate from their lands through violence and intimidation, threatening their entire way of life with no compensation or choice of alternative livelihoods.
From Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8467
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 17, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying
By Rachel Nuwer / The New York Times
At a casual glance, Lake Turkana in northern Kenya may not seem a fount of milk and honey. The temperature around the lake hovers around 100 degrees, and tourists are warned not to approach the water because of the crocodiles and vipers lurking among the volcanic rocks.
Yet Lake Turkana, the world’s largest permanent desert lake, is regarded by many anthropologists as the cradle of humankind. Today it serves a vital purpose for local indigenous communities that depend on its waters for fish and other resources; in 1997, citing its rich biodiversity, Unesco listed it as a World Heritage site.
Ikal Angelei, 31, one of the six winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize, grew up playing on Lake Turkana’s dusty shores, chatting with old fishermen who sold their daily catch to her family and others. When she graduated from high school, she moved to the capital to study at the University of Nairobi, traveling later to the United States to earn a master’s degree in public policy and political science at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
Then she returned home and began working on community outreach for a group called the Turkana Basin Institute.
That’s when she learned about a proposed dam.
The chairman of the institute, Richard Leakey, approached her with a document outlining the plan for the dam, on the Omo River in Ethiopia — one of Lake Turkana’s lifelines. “He said to me, this is your people, your lake, your problem,” Ms. Angelei said in an interview. His words stirred her, she said, and she began researching the dam project in her spare time.
If completed, the Gibe 3 Dam() would be the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa and provide increased electrical power to Kenya and Ethiopia. But in a region more desperate for food than electricity, the dam would take a significant toll on water levels and thus on fisheries, potentially worsening relations between disparate communities that are already enmeshed in resource-based conflicts.
“At first, I thought, it can’t be real,” Ms. Angelei said. “I couldn’t imagine the area without the lake.” Reflecting on her father’s own anti-dam activism in the late 1980s, she began making phone calls, sending e-mails, and broadcasting appeals from a local radio station.
Day by day, her campaign gained resonance as more and more people from divided and marginalized local communities shared their stories with her. In 2009 she founded a grass-roots organization, Friends of Lake Turkana, to provide a unified voice for the peoples of the lake.
Together they demanded that the Kenyan government and investors in the dam halt the $60 billion project. To Ms. Angelei’s surprise, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank all withdrew their financing. Last year the Kenyan Parliament mandated that the government commission an independent environment assessment from Ethiopia.
“The feeling that the actual construction had lost its funding was amazing — it gives me hope that we can go on,” Ms. Angelei said.
The struggle is not quite over. China, the last big investor, is still pushing for construction. Ms. Angelei believes that ultimately governments will have to step up to put the Gibe 3 Dam to rest. “China may have green policies they’re trying to implement, but as long as there’s not a format for holding Chinese companies and banks accountable, then the policies do not work,” she said.
Taxpayers in Western countries could help by holding their governments responsible for backing flawed development projects, she added.
Although she has frequently been discouraged, Ms. Angelei said, witnessing the struggles of local families and women helped her keep her goal in sight. Often she was approached by strangers who could offer her little more than blessings and encouragement, she said: “It was seeing the look in people’s eyes that kept me going.”
For her efforts to protect her community, Ms. Angelei was awarded the Goldman Prize in the African regional category; each year, the prize is also awarded to a recipient in Asia, Europe, an island nation, North America and South or Central America. Each honoree receives an award of $150,000. (The program was initiated in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman, civic leaders and philanthropists in San Francisco.)
“These are people who normally go unrecognized but do so much of the work,” said Lorrae Rominger, the deputy director of the prize program. “Hopefully, when they go back to their country, people will look, listen, stop and want to know more about what they’re doing,” she said of the recipients.
As a young woman living in an an area where violence is out of check, Ms. Angelei stood out for “taking this risk upon herself and making such a big difference,” Ms. Rominger said.
Ms. Angelei said that struggling to make a difference is not easy but that not trying means becoming part of the problem. Her father often cited the adage that “it’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,” she said. “Even if you don’t win, at least you’re opening the platform for others after you.”
From The New York Times: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/to-fight-a-dam-rather-than-live-on-your-knees/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 31, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Survival International
New photographic evidence proves Ethiopia’s controversial plantations scheme is killing the Lower Omo River, a lifeline for 100,000 tribal people.
The Omo River downstream from the notorious Gibe III dam is now being diverted into a newly-dug irrigation canal, one of several which will feed a massively ambitious plantations scheme for state and private investors.
These manmade canals are key to Ethiopia’s plantations plan, which is already having a hugely negative impact on UNESCO’s Lower Omo World Heritage site.
The government has revealed virtually nothing about the plantations program, but an official map obtained by Survival shows the enormous scope of the project.
One local person, speaking to a Survival researcher who recently visited the area, said, ‘I’ve never seen the river this low. During the dry season, like it is now, you can usually cross by foot, and water reaches your knees. Now I could cross without my feet getting wet.’
The Gibe III dam, 200 kms upstream, will interrupt the river’s natural flow and deprive thousands of tribespeople of their most valuable agricultural land by stopping the annual flood.
The flooding of the Omo River feeds the rich biodiversity of the region and ensures tribes such as the Bodi, Mursi and Dassanach can feed their cattle and produce beans and cereals in the fertile silt left behind.
There was a flood last year, but most Bodi and Mursi were not able to use it for cultivation because of the irrigation project. There will be no flood this year, as the dam reservoir starts to fill, nor in succeeding years. The people have been told they will be given food aid in compensation.
Indigenous communities are also suffering from violent human rights abuses, as plans are implemented forcibly to resettle those who stand in the way of the government’s plans, and to take away their cattle.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘Ethiopia’s government is destroying the Lower Omo Valley and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of indigenous people – all in the name of ‘development’. However the human cost cannot be ignored. Re-directing a water lifeline is irresponsible and reckless.’
From Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8228
