Abstract
Twenty years after the killing of the Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa,
In a report in Der Spiegel filed soon after their kidnapping, Grill wrote “Just a short time ago, I was taken hostage in a small Mozambique village. Now I’m speeding through the bush in a pick-up truck driven by the boss of a criminal gang, his underlings hooting and hollering in the back. They are going to ‘finish’ me, they had told me earlier, and I am convinced that they will stop at the next clearing and beat me to death like a dog. For the first time in my almost 30 years as a correspondent in Africa, I am afraid for my life.”
The two were released, thanks to their embassies’ intervention, and it later transpired that the contact they trusted to set up interviews for them with poachers had led them into a trap from which they were lucky to escape unharmed.
On-going investigations by environmental journalism platform Oxpeckers Center for Environmental Investigative Journalism have shown that Mozambique plays a key role in rhino and elephant poaching. The country is home to gangs of heavily armed illegal hunters, many said to be members of the police and armed forces, hired and armed by transnational crime syndicates to kill rhinos and harvest their horns, which fetch high prices in Asia, particularly China.
With the high stakes involved in rhino poaching, and with poachers often engaging in bloody shoot-outs with the authorities, Grill and Selander took a huge risk.
“They made a basic mistake,” Oxpeckers editor Fiona Macleod told Index. “They went in with dubious connections and a fixer who couldn’t deliver. Sometimes it’s a case of parachuted-in journos without the right background or connections going into something.” She warns that if you are going into areas like this that are potentially dangerous, you need to be very careful and do your homework properly.
The 16 February incident came in the year that activists planned a series of events to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Nigerian environmental activist, author and TV producer was hanged after being convicted on trumped-up murder charges by a military tribunal. His execution, alongside eight other activists – with oil giant Royal Dutch Shell accused of playing a role in their arrest and prosecution – provoked international outrage and led to Nigeria’s suspension from the Commonwealth for three years.
Saro-Wiwa, a vocal critic of the Nigerian government and president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, led a non-violent campaign against the environmental degradation wreaked by Shell and other multinational companies extracting oil in the area.
There are dangerous gangs involved in this poaching who are also in involved drugs and firearms smuggling. If you get too close, you face serious physical risk
In 2009, on the eve of the trial in a federal court in New York, Shell agreed to pay $15.5m (then £9.7m) to settle a legal action in which it was it was accused of collaborating in the execution of Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues – at the time the largest payout by a multinational in relation to human rights violations, although Shell denied liability.
During 2015, Action Saro-Wiwa will use the anniversary of the men’s deaths to force Shell, which pulled out of Ogoni in 1993, to seek “environmental justice for the Ogoni”.
The death of Saro-Wiwa and the terrifying experience of the two journalists on the trail of the Mozambiquan poachers both highlight the potential dangers faced by environmental activists and journalists.
Award-winning Cape Town-based environmental journalist John Yeld said that in South Africa reporters covering the multi-million dollar abalone poaching “industry” faced real danger.
“There are dangerous gangs and syndicates involved in this poaching, who are also in involved drugs and firearms smuggling,” he said. “If you get too close, you face serious physical risk or worse. There have been times where I have not gone into a place because I believed it was too dangerous and I’ve walked away from a story because it was not worth the risk. The reality is that there are some seriously dangerous people involved in environmental crimes.”
But for most environmental journalists and activists the dangers they face are far more mundane, even if they can still have serious financial consequences.
Land developers, for example, can be “very litigious”, said Yeld. “You write very carefully what you can get away with. But there are times your editors aren’t prepared to back you, so you just walk away.”
The danger of lawsuits is ever-present for environmental journalists, agrees journalist and author Leonie Joubert. “Litigation is always an issue that you need to be aware of because often the stakes, like those involving mining or developments, are high for those involved,” she said.
Another potential problem journalists face is that of official sources who “fall over themselves” to be helpful and willingly supply information.
“But often when it’s properly checked out, it turns out to be spin, or just plain wrong,” said Joubert.
Taking on Africa’s illegal lion trade
An exposé that revealed the Asian lion bone potion market and the smuggling of wild lions from Botswana to South Africa to feed the lucrative “canned hunting” industry – in which animals are hunted in an enclosed area to make it easier for hunters to secure a kill – is one of the most successful long-term projects by the investigative environmental journalism platform Oxpeckers.
During the months-long investigation that resulted in a ban on canned lion hunting in Botswana, Oxpeckers revealed how South African farmers were using traditional cattle rustling routes through the Northern Cape to smuggle captured wild lions from Botswana.
Oxpeckers showed that this illicit trade by organised crime cartels was adding to the pressures on wild lions, which could lead to their extinction within 12 years. Africa’s wild lion population has crashed from 200,000 in the 1970s to about 20,000 today.
“The wild lions are sought after by canned lion farmers to widen their breeding gene pool and after the hunters have taken their trophies, the lions’ bones are sold to make ‘tiger wine’, which the Chinese believe is an aphrodisiac. It is also a status thing for the middle class. The wild tiger population in China has dwindled so much that this is helping fulfill a demand.”
Their questions were “met with lots of obfuscation and misinformation” from the Chinese authorities and local lion farmers, said Oxpeckers’ editor Fiona Macleod .
Part of the team involved in the exposé was a young Chinese journalist Hongqiao Liu, who spent three months working with Oxpeckers as part of its international fellows programme.
Macleod said: “It is a closed industry and it is difficult to get information because everything happens in private. We have spent a long time developing contacts on the inside … it is the only way to get some of the information.”
“The problem we face is that it is a very secretive industry that is conducted on private farms, so access is very difficult. There have been incidents where reporters trying to get on to farms have been assaulted. To get the story you have to find another way of doing it. As journalists we do not want to use subterfuge, but this is a good example of where it is needed,” said Macleod.
She recalls a story she was researching about proposed fracking in South Africa’s pristine and ecologically sensitive Karoo region, where there are concerns about the potential pollution of underground water sources.
“I submitted a request for information to the department of water and environmental affairs asking how they would deal with pollution resulting from fracking, and the follow-up was great. But when I tested the information with experts, I discovered it wasn’t relevant to South Africa … it turned out to be a cut-and-paste of the policy of another country’s protocols and completely out of context for local conditions.”
This, she said, reinforced the need for environmental journalists to build a network of trusted experts that they can call on to help them unpack reality from spin. “If you do not have skilful people to help you sift through the information and interrogate it, you could be fooled,” said Joubert. “I have done science writing for 10 years and I am often overwhelmed and would battle without the expert sources I have built up that I can turn to.”
And, with environmental stories often extending into other areas, contacts need to be developed beyond the normal ones the beat requires.
An example of this, she said, is the South African government’s proposed building of a fleet of six new nuclear power stations as a solution to the power shortages plaguing the economy and inhibiting growth. There are allegations that a secret deal to build them has been signed with Russia.
“The story is no longer just about health and safety issues, but also one of the massive potential for corruption,” said Joubert. “It has moved beyond the environment, and the finance reporters and the newsrooms will also have to become more involved.”
The scramble for mining licenses to exploit South Africa’s vast mineral wealth was another potential problem area for investigative environmental journalists, she said. “Because of the high stakes and political involvement (of the players), reporting on mining will be the next big hurdle to overcome,” said Joubert. “As an issue, it is becoming bigger and bigger, and this will present its own set of problems.”
A critical challenge for environmental journalists protecting sources, particularly whistleblowers, who placed themselves, their families and their jobs at great risk was to help get a story out, said Macleod.
The first – and cardinal – rule of journalism is “protect your sources at all costs”, she said.
“Whistleblowers are in the firing line and the danger is that not all journalists know how to deal with them and, more importantly, how to protect them. You need to know and practice the basics of security, like only communicating with sources through encrypted services, and removing the battery from your phone during meetings, so you cannot be tracked.” But ultimately face-to-face meetings were the best and the safest, she said.
Whistleblowers are in the firing line and the danger is that not all journalists know how to deal with them and, more importantly, how to protect them
The greatest changes in the way that environmental journalists operate today are in the key role now played by technology and in the importance of activists and citizen reporters, often operating in areas that are either inaccessible or too dangerous for journalists to enter safely, acting as eyes and ears on the ground.
An excellent example of this is Infoamazonia, a network of organisations and journalists that help gather information from the nine countries the Amazon rainforest traverses. The platform, which makes it easy for civilians and activists to share tips, stories, pictures and video, uses the data collected to map the ongoing destruction of the forest.
Oxpeckers, which has both its own staff journalists and a network of activists and organisations on the ground in southern Africa, has also turned to technology to deepen its investigative reporting on environmental issues. It has pioneered a suite of tools that enables users to become involved in the monitoring and information-gathering process. One of them tracks the deaths of rhinos and the arrests and court appearances of poachers. The information is collated on a heat map and is sometimes more current than that from the official sources, said Macleod.
To protect sources who want to remain anonymous and enable them to securely pass on documents, Oxpeckers has partnered with Wildleaks, the world’s first secure online platform dedicated to wildlife crime. Based on Tor, it allows sources to stay anonymous by encrypting files and other sensitive information they leak.
Another tool, GreenAlert, gives users access to community networks that monitor developers, alerts on new developments and also the ability to track the progress of Environmental Impact Assessments. A similar tool to monitor mining, MineAlert, is currently under development.
But technology can only help up to a point – and ultimately good environmental investigations come down to doing proper research and applying old-fashioned journalism and common sense before just blundering into potentially dangerous situations.
© Ray Joseph