Environmental reporters threatened, beaten, sued, jailed, crippled and disappeared

[pscot]

This report was released this week by reporters without borders.



http://www.rsf.org/IMG/rapport_en_md.pdf

Guinean journalist Lai Baldé has been threatened.
Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk has
been sued. Russian journalist Grigory Pasko
has just spent four years in prison. His Uzbek
colleague, Solidzhon Abdurakhmanov, has just
been given a 10-year jail sentence. Mikhail
Beketov, another Russian journalist, has lost a
leg and several fingers as a result of an assault.
Bulgarian reporter Maria Nikolaeva was
threatened with having acid thrown in her
face. Filipino journalist Joey Estriber has been
missing since 2006… What do these journalists
and many others have in common? They
are or were covering environmental issues in
countries where it is dangerous to do so.
There is a lot at stake in the environment. The
first step in protecting nature is to carry out
a detailed survey of the state of the resources
and the way they are used. On the basis of
this analysis – in which the press plays a significant
role – political decision-makers can
then establish rules and norms for economic
actors and the public. The gathering of information
alone is threatening for many companies,
organised crime groups, governments
and the various kinds of intermediaries that
profit from misuse of the environment.
Environmental concerns complicate their
plans. As a result, investigative journalists and
environmental activists are seen as an unwanted
menace and even as enemies to be physically
eliminated.
In many countries – especially, but not only,
those that are not democracies – journalists
who specialise in the environment are on the
front line of a new war. The violence to which
they are subjected concerns us all. It reflects
the new issues that have assumed an enormous
political and geostrategic importance.
The conflicts between journalists and polluters
are too many and too varied to be listed.
Sometimes a crisis can be sparked by no more
than a journalist’s arrival at a sensitive location
where his presence is not wanted. In southern
China, for example, foreign journalists
have been chased out of villages where most
of the world’s discarded computers are stripped
apart in an environmentally disastrous
manner.
In other cases, it is the publication of a detailed
press report, with names and facts, that
sparks an act of physical aggression or coercion.
This is what happened to Mikhail
Beketov, who was beaten nearly to death by
local government thugs who did not like his
coverage of a plan to build a motorway
through a Russian forest.

The assailants are not always who you might
expect. In most cases, the violence is the work
of thugs in the pay of criminal entrepreneurs
or corrupt politicians. But in some countries,
as Reporters Without Borders has found, the
local population paradoxically often supports
those responsible for deforestation or polluting
factories although it is the most direct
victim. The reason is nonetheless obvious.
Those who get rich by despoiling resources
are able, in the process, to provide work to
those in most need. As a result, combating
deforestation and pollution is often difficult
and thankless work.

The fight is all the more unequal for usually
being waged in countries where all the machinery
of state seems to be an accomplice to
the crimes and where the judicial apparatus,
when it exists, does not play its role. Most
cases linked to the environment never reach
a conclusion in the courts. You can even say
that most journalists are on their own when
it comes to defending themselves. Hence the
importance of making this struggle known
and mobilising public opinion in its support.
Depletion of natural resources –
a sensitive issue everywhere.

Natural resources are not inexhaustible.
What is true underground is also true on the
surface. The forest can regrow, but the forests
that man is replanting today will never be as
biologically rich as the primary forests that
are hundreds of thousands of years old.
Hence the importance of conserving them.
That is what Lúcio Flávio Pinto, the founder
and editor of Jornal Pessoal, a Brazilian
bimonthly based in Belém, in the northern
state of Pará, tried to do. He published a
series of reports about deforestation in the
Amazon. As a result, 33 lawsuits were brought
against him. Lai Baldé, radio Bombolom-.....

[pscot]

1. Mybad. Hatrack beat me to the punch.

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