A Climate For Green Terror

By cracking down on dissent, we are inviting a violent backlash

New Indian Express, April 10, 2009

The shattered windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland, the target of a section of protesters during the G-20 summit at London, did not tell even half the story. The Metropolitan Police managed to “kettle” (pin down to a location) thousands of protesters for hours and claimed that they successfully “minimised the damage”. But the claim did not take into account the cost of tackling the protest itself. The damage to the exchequer was £7.5 million – astounding, considering it took less than £19 million to host the grand summit.

Now, consider the psychological fallout. The kettling of thousands of protestors outside the Bank of England for so long turned the area into a stinking public lavatory. Each and every protester was photographed and identified, in effect, treated like a criminal. At least one British daily put it bluntly: “The thing about kettles is that they do have a tendency to come to the boil.”

In 2005, the famed wetland of Bharatpur’s Keoladeo National Park that gets flooded post-monsoon and hosts thousands of migratory birds in the winter, became stone dry and desolate. Under pressure from farmers who depended on a dam upstream, the state had refused to release water to the park for the second consecutive year. Petitions and protests made no difference and the wetland ecology was on the verge of irreversible damage.

Sitting in an empty hotel lobby in a ghost town which usually bristled with birds and bird-lovers, I could sense the mounting frustration among a few local activists who had joined me. Suddenly, one of them stood up, angry, his eyes glistening, and asked me if I could help him procure a few dynamite sticks. “How many do we need to blast a crack in that damn dam to flood the park?”

To my surprise, he immediately had others backing his idea. No, I did not encourage the plan but, honestly, at that moment, it did not sound too outrageous. Fortunately, a bumper monsoon saved Keoladeo that year. But the term “green terrorism” had come into existence, at least in FBI files, long before 2005.

A CBS 60Minutes show in 2005 brought the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) into the public domain but the “Elves” – as ELF activists are known – were classified as the top domestic terror threat by the FBI as early as in 2001 for causing ecotage (economic sabotage to stop the destruction of the environment). The Animal Liberation Front, ELF’s big brother, was active even in the 80s and together, they have caused damages worth billions of dollars so far.

The ELF first hit the headlines in 1998 when it burnt down a ski resort in Vail for refusing to shelve an expansion plan that would have destroyed the last lynx habitat in Colorado. Since then, the group has burnt down dozens of SUVs and luxury housings and targeted universities for their research in genetic engineering. A gasoline bomb caused the Michigan State University $1.1 million in damages. The University of Washington suffered $7 million in damages when the Elves destroyed its laboratories and archives.

A number of ELF activists have been sentenced, some under terror laws, to jail terms exceeding 10 years but that hasn’t stopped others. Last year, the Elves planted explosive devices to set fire to four multi-million dollar homes in Washington’s Echo Lake.

If a handful of radicals could inflict such damage, imagine the implication of pushing so many thousands towards a doctrine of violence. And this is not just about methods of protest management during mega summits. Our general response to dissent has become confrontational, if not outright brutal. A couple of weeks before this G-20 meet, Greenpeace activists were ruthlessly thrashed by security guards outside the headquarters of Indonesia's biggest logging and palm oil company, the Sinar Mas Group, in Jakarta.

At Chevron’s Parabe offshore facility in 1998, security officers flew in Nigerian military to open fire on villagers peacefully protesting Chevron's destruction of environment and traditional fishing and farming practices. Two protesters were killed, a few seriously wounded and many detained and tortured for refusing to sign false confessions.

In 2004, Indonesian environmental activist Bestari Raden was convicted and jailed on charges of separatism, rebellion and inciting acts of violence for opposing the construction of a highway through virgin rainforest. In April 2006, Filipino environmental activist Elpidio de la Victoria was shot, allegedly by a senior police officer, for spearheading a campaign to protect the Visayan Sea.

In India, one doesn’t need to travel to the hinterland to look for such stories. Sumaira Abduali, a member of Bombay Environmental Action Group, was beaten up by the dredging mafia for trying to stop illegal sand mining at the Kihim beach. More recently, Challa Krishnamurthy of Karnataka, a green activist and advocate of organic farming, was shot dead by hired gunmen for trying to expose how local companies dumped untreated waste on farmland near Bangalore.

But this is not just about law-and-order issues or denial of democratic rights. While atrocities committed by the state or business conglomerates may act as a trigger, the ground for violence is being prepared by a gradual loss of faith.

But when even the best documented cases, presented on foundations of science, fail to defeat ill-conceived projects and policies, can activism be blamed for losing faith in the power of reason? For example, if mining continues against all scientific, economic and ecological rationale in some of the world’s most pristine forests, do we expect green activists to give up the fight because they have exhausted all legal and civil options?

States and masters of global economy have done little to assure the green lobby that they are genuinely interested in dialogue. As a result, protests are already seeking unorthodox expression. If we miss these early signals, green terrorism might soon become much more than FBI jargon. If that happens, it will be a lose-all endgame between the earth and the economy.

The author is an independent journalist and filmmaker. mazoomdaar@gmail.com