Activist sees link between human and environmental rights
Source : Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
As he demonstrated against human rights abuses that included slavery and forced relocation of villagers near his native city of Rangoon in 1988, 17-year-old Ka Hsaw Wa saw two of his good friends shot and killed in front of him by soldiers in Burma.
Wa himself was tortured by police and had to flee into deep jungle to avoid worse; an estimated 10,000 people were killed when the military dictatorship of the southeast Asian nation cracked down on the pro-democracy protests. Unable to return home, he lived in the jungle for years, documenting the human rights abuses he saw and experiencing an awakening.
"I saw villagers forced from their homes by a company that opened a gold mine, others displaced or killed by logging firms and more forced to work carrying weapons and supplies on a pipeline project," Wa said.
"Slowly I came to understand that those abuses are all directly related to the exploitation of environmental resources in my country. I became an environmentalist."
Wa, now 30, was in Pittsburgh last week to kick off the Just Earth campaign by Amnesty International and the Sierra Club Allegheny Group.
The worldwide campaign, which joins two of the largest grass-roots activist organizations in the United States, is aimed at highlighting the plight of advocates imprisoned and tortured for their stands on environmental issues.
"Dividing human rights and environmental rights is a waste of time and plays into the hands of governments and multinational corporations exploiting both," said Wa, who has won the Reebok Human Rights Environmental Award and the Conde Nast and Goldman awards for his work documenting and exposing environmental human rights abuses.
The link between human rights abuses and environmental exploitation is not always obvious in the United States. But environmental activists are under attack in China, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Ecuador, Brazil, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mexico and Russia, as documented in a report recently released by Amnesty International and the Sierra Club.
One of the most prominent cases was settled earlier this month when the Russian Supreme Court dismissed charges of treason leveled in 1996 against Aleksandr Nikitin, a scientist and former naval captain who was subjected to four years of investigations and harassment, two trials and nine indictments for revealing nuclear safety hazards aboard aging Russian nuclear submarines.
Amnesty International and the Sierra Club mounted a three-year letter-writing and lobbying campaign on Nikitin's behalf that was instrumental in his release, said Ellen Dorsey, the director of Chatham College's Rachel Carson Institute and former director of Amnesty International's human rights and environment program.
"People in those countries don't have the right to demand something better, but a healthy environment is a human right," Dorsey said. "This campaign aims to help protect those on the front lines."
She said some of the most politically repressive and corrupt nations have the most severe environmental problems, and American policy and purchasing decisions can have an effect on both.
In Burma, to get foreign currency needed to maintain power, the military junta sold off the nation's fishing, logging, mining and gem collecting rights, as well as natural gas deposits to multinational corporations.
In the early 1990s, at great personal risk, the slightly built and self-effacing Wa traveled into militarized areas where logging, mining and pipeline construction were taking place. There he documented the arbitrary detentions, tortures, rapes, intimidation and execution of indigenous villagers, many of them ethnic minorities.
"Ethnic cleansing has happened," he said. "To get to the jade, the forests, the gold, the military did whatever it had to, to whoever it had to. It would even drive its own people out of an area."
Much of Wa's work focused on the human rights and environmental abuses surrounding construction of the Yadana Gas Pipeline Project, built by a consortium that includes UNOCOL, based in the United States, and Total, a French company.
The pipeline crosses the Tenasserim rainforest, inhabited by diverse peoples and home to tigers, Asian elephants, rhinoceroses and many other endangered species.
Wa successfully lobbied the World Bank to withdraw funding guarantees for a Thai power plant that was to use the Yadana natural gas pipeline. As a result, the power plant has not been built and the pipeline, though completed, is not pumping any gas.
"We've gotten the word out and exposed things to the world," said Wa, who now lives outside Washington, D.C,. and wants to return to Burma but can't. "That's started some reforms. We need to do more."