Defender los bosques

Environment and Human Rights di Paola Ramello

The Global Vision section of CinemAmbiente 2006 focuses on the relation between human rights and the environment. Recognizing the tight interconnections between the affirmation of human rights and the protection of the environment, the festival starts reflecting on these issues with the collaboration of the Italian section of Amnesty International.

In the process of recognizing human rights, three stages or “generations” are generally identified: the first, concerning civil and political rights; the second, socio-economical and cultural rights; and finally the so-called third generation rights, which include the right to environment, to peace, and to development. The right to the environment is therefore fully recognized among the inalienable human rights.

More and more often, when environmental emergencies occur, human rights are seriously violated at the same time. There are numerous environmental activists, in different parts of the world, who are harassed and persecuted by their governments because of their struggles – and sometimes they are even killed in extrajudicial executions.

The events of this section of the festival are dedicated to these people and to the crucial link between a commitment to the environment and the defense of human rights: international figures and witnesses who have contributed to the environmentalist cause with their action, at risk of their own life.

The work which opens this section, therefore, could not be anything but a film on Chico Mendes, perhaps the most famous case of an assassination as a consequence of the commitment to the defence of the environment and the rights of indigenous people: killed in 1988 because of his activity as chairman of the movement of the seringueiros, he has become an icon of the struggle against indiscriminate deforestation on industrial scale.

Another leading character in the defence of the Amazon forest has been killed in 2005 in Brazil: Dorothy Stang. In this apparently naive documentary, directed by a young English director, we get to know the 73 year-old American catholic missionary shortly before she was assassinated by seven gunshots. She had been working for over twenty years with the farmers and the landless, in defense of their land and their rights in the forest.

In South America, 5 million hectares of forests were lost each year between 2000 and 2005. From 1996 to 2006 Latin America has lost 37 million hectares of wood. This savage deforestation impoverishes the lands and leads their inhabitants into serious poverty.

Felipe Arreaga Sanchez, an environmentalist and human rights defender in Mexico, denounces the nefarious interdependence between environmental destruction, poverty, and denied rights. Founder of the Environmentalist Organization of Sierra del Petatlan, he has been leading a nonviolent campaign to oppose illegal logging in the mountains since 1998. Arrested in 2004 on unsubstantiated charges, he was adopted by Amnesty International as prisoner of conscience; he was finally released after nearly one year of worldwide mobilization of environmentalist and human rights organizations.

In other countries in Central America, too, the fight of indigenous communities in defense of their lands clashes with powerful economical concerns. Sipakapa no se vende documents the experience of a bottom-up democracy carried out by the local communities through a referendum, which rejected a Canadian gold-mining project in Guatemala. Many countries in Central America are the targets of mining exploitation operations by trans-national companies that do not care about the impact they have in the surrounding areas, such as environmental destruction, corruption, militarization, and repression.

The case of Alexander Nikitin – presented in the video Secret Ecology – shows clearly how daring to express one’s opinions on environmental issues can indirectly lead to human rights violations. Nikitin, nuclear engineer and former submariner, contributed to the Bellona report concerning nuclear accidents aboard Russian nuclear submarines and about radioactive contamination in the Northern Fleet. In 1996, The Russian Security Service (former KGB) charged him with espionage and state treason. After 5 years of legal battle, he was acquitted of all charges. His case raised the concern of Amnesty International and of many other human rights organizations around the world.

Another former Soviet republic, Turkmenistan, presents a serious situation for human rights: its internal policy is based on the systematic repression of any political dissent, and the restriction of freedom of press, of expression, and of religion (cinemas have been closed down and all media outlets are strictly controlled). This situation is witnessed by Farid Tukhbatullin, a civil society activist and ecologist, adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience and released as the result of immense international pressure.

In Total Denial, winner of the Vaclav Havel Award for Human Rights 2006, the protagonist is Ka Hsaw Wa, an activist in Burma committed in the defence of democracy, human rights, and the environment. The camera, on the one hand, follows him into the jungle on the border with Thailand to collect evidence of human rights violations among villagers from the Karen tribe, where people have been violently displaced to make room for an oil pipeline built by the western corporations Unocal and Total; the camera also bears witnesses to the fierce lawsuit against the giant oil corporations for human-rights abuses, in U.S. courts, until the impossible victory.

The panorama of countries where these policies of pillaging their natural patrimony are accompanied by serious human rights violations is vast and disheartening, but the courage and determination of activists willing to oppose them show us that we can make a change.