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ENVIRONMENT: LIBERIAN AMONG ACTIVISTS AWARDED 'GREEN NOBEL'(English IPS News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)by Jim Lobe WASHINGTON, Apr. 24, 2006 (IPS/GIN) -- 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." |