ENVIRONMENT:
LIBERIAN AMONG ACTIVISTS AWARDED 'GREEN NOBEL'
(English IPS News Via Thomson Dialog
NewsEdge)by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -- Six grassroots activists -- including three who, at great
personal risk, exposed illegal logging in their home countries of Liberia,
Brazil and Papua New Guinea -- have been awarded this year's prestigious
Goldman Environmental Prize.
The $125,000 award, sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize for the Environment,"
will also be given to activists for their work in Ukraine, China and the United
States at a gala ceremony in San Francisco on Monday.
The common denominator of all six, who were chosen from each of the world's
major geographical regions, was both their effectiveness and relative anonymity.
"These six winners are among the most important people you have not heard
of before," said Goldman Prize founder Richard Goldman. "All of them have
fought, often alone and at great personal risk, to protect the environment
in their home countries. Their incredible achievements are an inspiration
to all of us."
The six include Silan Kpanan'Ayoung Siakour, who exposed illegal logging
authorized by then-Liberian president and accused war criminal Charles Taylor;
Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, a Brazilian who has worked to create the world's
largest area of protected tropical forest regions in a remote part of the
Amazon; and Anne Kajir, a lawyer in Papua New Guinea who also exposed illegal
logging fueled by government corruption.
In addition, they are Yu Xiaogang, who has spent his adult life promoting
watershed management programs that protect the interests of local Chinese
communities, as well as river ecology; Olya Melen, a Ukrainian lawyer who
worked to halt construction of a potentially disastrous canal across the Danube
Delta; and Craig Williams, a Vietnam veteran activist who organized local
communities to persuade the U.S. Defense Department to halt plans to incinerate
old chemical weapons stockpiled around the country.
"It is humbling for me to be in the presence of my fellow recipients and
to learn of their accomplishments," Williams said Monday in a statement released
by the grassroots group that he directs from his home in the southeastern
state of Kentucky, the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG).
Williams, a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation in
1980, a major part of the international anti-landmine campaign that won the
1997 Nobel Peace Prize, has led a largely successful 20-year campaign to
ensure that destruction of old chemical weapons stocks was carried out in
ways that were understood and agreed by local communities and did not pose
undue hazards to human health and the environment.
Of the six recipients, Liberia's Siakor and Brazil's Feitosa have almost
certainly faced the greatest danger in pursuing their work.
Siakor, the director of the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) in
Monrovia, collected evidence of illegal logging by Taylor-approved timber
companies in one of the last remaining closed-canopy tropical rainforests
in West Africa. His group also monitored abuses committed by company militias
against the local inhabitants.
Taylor, who was arrested last month by Nigeria and flown to The Hague for
eventual trial, used the profits from these transactions to subsidize not
only the costs of his side in Liberia's brutal, 14-year civil war, but also
to sustain rebel militias in neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea until going
into exile in 2003.
Siakor, now 36, submitted evidence of Taylor's dealings to the United Nations
Security Council, which eventually imposed a ban on timber exports from Liberia
that remains in effect despite growing pressure to lift it, notably from
China and the new government of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
In her first presidential order, however, Johnson-Sirleaf canceled all
of Liberia's forest concessions and has vowed to carry out major reforms of
the timber sector, including some promoted by Siakor's SDI, to ensure the
forests' sustainability and the participation of local communities in decisions
regarding their use.
Feitosa, the leader of a grassroots coalition of local communities, also
investigated and disclosed illegal logging and human-rights abuses in a remote
northern region of the Brazilian Amazon where several of his colleagues --
most recently U.S.-born nun Dorothy Stang -- have been assassinated in recent
years.
Working with the Catholic Church and the Movement for the Development of
the Transamazon and the Xingu, Feitosa, 35, played a key role in gaining government
protection for areas of rainforest that, together with existing indigenous
lands, make up the world's largest area of protected tropical forest.
In 2001, he tipped government officials about a major illegal logging operation
that resulted in a high-profile raid that seized some 6,000 felled mahogany
trees, but he has also organized smaller protests in which local communities
have barricaded rivers to prevent barges from carrying logs downstream.
Kajir has also faced considerable personal risks in her nine years of mounting
legal challenges to logging operations in Papua New Guinea. She has been
physically attacked more than once.
In 1997, her first year of law practice, Kajir won a judgment forcing the
logging industry to pay damages to indigenous landowners. Now 32, she is
the director of the Environmental Law Center in Port Moresby and the lead
attorney in a pending Supreme Court case aimed at stopping foreign timber
companies' large-scale logging practices in what is the largest remaining
intact block of tropical forest in the Asia-Pacific region.
Of particular concern in Papua New Guinea, until recently one of the most
forested countries in the world, has been the impact of Malaysian companies,
particularly Rimbunan Hijau, a conglomerate with logging operations in China,
Brazil, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and Vanuatu.
Kajir's career has been devoted to upholding the land rights -- guaranteed
by the country's constitution -- of traditional forest communities in the
face of widespread government corruption that has permitted timber interests
to act as a law unto themselves. In some cases, companies have directly threatened
community leaders in order to get them to sign over their rights.
Since his student days, Yu, 55, has been devoted to studying the socioeconomic,
as well as the environmental impacts, of large dam projects which have long
been a priority in China's galloping economic development.
In 2002, he submitted a report to the central government on the social impact
of the Manwan Dam on the Lancang (Mekong) River, which prompted Beijing to
substantially increase resettlement funding for local communities and contributed
to its decision to require social impact assessments in the decision-making
process for all proposed major development projects.
He has also educated local communities about the negative impacts of major
dam projects, such as one that was proposed in 2003 for the Nu River in Yunnan
Province that would displace some 50,000 people and could indirectly affect
the livelihoods of millions of people living downstream in China, Burma and
Thailand.
Largely as a result of Yu's work, especially in encouraging local villagers
to make their voices heard in the decision-making process, Premier Wen Jiabao
suspended the Nu River project in 2004.
"Mr. Yu has been a torch-bearer for healthy,
free-flowing rivers in China," said Aviva Imhof of California-based International
Rivers Network. "This award is a testament to Mr. Yu's incredible work in
leading a citizens' movement to protect China's rivers and people from the
impacts of dams."