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He's young,
unemployed and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn't spent
much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer
Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk's description of chemical dumping into a
brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea was
punctuated by photos of unmistakable filth. He won over the audience when, in
response to a question on how one travels with sensitive material, Tamer deftly
removed a memory card secreted in an electronic device and held it in the air.
That, he said, is where he had carried documents for this trip.
The lines between
journalism and blogging have never been blurrier, but the risks and challenges
of reporting on environmental issues are clear. BP workers and U.S.
Coast Guard personnel have denied access to
photographers and camera crews trying to document the ongoing oil spill off
shore of the U.S. coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. In many other nations, extreme
and sometimes violent reprisals have been reported in the wake of stories on environmental
degradation.
Before I tell you
about the journalists who made it to the June 22 environmental panel at the
third annual Global Media Forum hosted by
the German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle,
I'd like to tell you about a few who were unable to travel. Few journalists
have done more to document illegal logging and other encroachments on the
Brazilian Amazon than Lúcio Flávio Pinto. But, in response to his stories, private
companies, government officials, and other actors have filed more than 30
lawsuits against him in courts whose integrity is challenged. The point of the
suits is to harass, if not drive him into
bankruptcy, says Pinto who turned down the invitation to join the panel in
Germany. If he were to leave Brazil for even a few days, he explained, he might
fail to respond to a judge's unexpected ruling and thereby lose a case seeking
damages.
Another potential panelist just couldn't physically travel. Mikhael
Beketov was a Russian reporter who criticized the local government's plans
to deforest an area in order to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
He was later found in a coma lying in the garden of his home, at least a day
and a half after assailants broke his skull, smashed his fingers, broken his
legs, and left him in the freezing cold. One leg and several fingers were later
amputated. Elsewhere, environmental journalists in Guinea and Bulgaria have
been threatened;
journalist Joey
Estriber was abducted by unidentified men in the Philippines, never to be
seen again.
But one thing that
all the panelists in Bonn made clear is that subtle forms of pressure can also silence
environmental reporters. Liu
Jiangiang is one of China's few journalists whose stories have led
authorities to suspend if not stop dams and other construction projects with
potential environmental consequences. He explained that the unwritten rules
about what is and is not permitted in China may change without warning, and
that pressure often comes from hidden sources to communicate "don't do that
again."
Elsewhere in Asia,
however, the environment is still seen as a minor concern. Rina Saeed Khan
writes the weekly "Earthly Matters" column for Dawn, Pakistan's largest English-language daily. She told a packed room
in Bonn that terrorist bombings still make the front page in Pakistani papers,
and that climate change or other environmental stories make page two at best--even
though, she added, there is sometimes a connection between them. There is a nexus
between militants and what Khan called the "timber mafia" in the nation's
northwest tribal areas. She also warned that in South Asia, like on several
other continents, stories about competition over dwindling water supplies are
looming.
In Haiti, it's not
the water but plastic water bottles that are adding to the country's growing
waste in the wake of the January earthquake, according to relief agency sources.
Roosevelt
Jean Francois is the leader of a community-minded journalist organization
called CECOSIDA that promotes leadership development and training on reporting
health, environmental and other matters. He noted that one yet untold effect of
the relief efforts is the corruption, especially among local officials, over controlling
distribution of foreign aid. Francois also noted that Haitian journalists
covering any sensitive matter operate in an environment where reporters enjoy
little protection against threats and violent
reprisals.
Environmental
reporters are more often silenced quietly through economic pressure, noted Jean François Julliard,
secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders.
The pressure may be so great on traditional journalists, noted Julliard, that
bloggers may emerge as the chroniclers doing the best reporting. By then I had
already underscored to the audience that RSF, the Paris-based press freedom
watchdog, had issued a report on the myriad risks of
environmental reporting worldwide.
The case of the young
Egyptian blogger, Tamer Mabrouk, illustrated the point. He not only got fined
for his online exposés, including documents and photographs of dumping
by Trust Chemicals Company into Manzala Lake. He lost his job at the factory,
too.
This blog is dedicated to colleague and friend Persephone Miel, a champion of press freedom, kindness and humor.
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