THE GOLFRIED SIREGAR CASE
Environmental activists are motivated to do what they do because they care: about people, animals and obviously, the planet earth which after all is home to us all.
However, in the past two decades, according to Treehugger (https://www.treehugger.com/), a recent study showed that between 2002 and 2017, “the annual death toll has doubled and 1,500 defenders of land, forest, water, and other natural resources have been killed, mainly in countries with high levels of corruption and weak rules of law.”
In Indonesia, which does have a high level of corruption and weak rules of law, the latest addition to the statistic is Golfried Siregar, an environmental lawyer and grassroots activist in Medan, North Sumatra.
The police concluded that he died due to a motorcycle accident, a single-vehicle crash.
Six days after his death, they claim they found alcohol in his system, implying that he had been drunk. However, witnesses said that before the accident, Siregar only drank coffee and bottled tea.
Regarding Siregar’s death, Andreas Harsono, senior Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch stated that “[Siregar’s]… death under suspicious circumstances demands a prompt, thorough investigation into all those implicated”.
Siregar had acted to represent the Indonesian Forum for Environment (WALHI) “in a lawsuit against North Sumatra’s governor over his 2017 approval of the construction of the US$1.5 billion Batang Toru hydroelectric dam” to be carried out by the North Sumatra Hydro Energy (NSHE) company.
In his report, Andreas wrote, “Siregar was […] taking part in a legal case concerning an alleged forged signature in the Batang Toru dam’s environmental assessment report (amdal) [and] involved in other controversial North Sumatra litigations”.
Around the time of Siregar’s death, the police stopped their investigation into the forgery of the signature of Onrizal, a forestry researcher from the University of North Sumatra, on the amdal (environmental impact assessment)a key permit for the Batang Toru hydropower dam project. WALHI regards the amdal as flawed, legally and in substance.
Ironically, under the draconian Electronic Information and Transactions Law, Onrizal is now being sued by the PR firm hired by the NSHE company contracted to build the dam.
Siregar had in fact received threats, so it is hardly surprising that many think he was murdered. It’s a classic situation: capital versus the environment. The government typically is with capital, which in the case of the Batang Toru dam, is from China.
The Batang Toru dam is in fact part of a Chinese government global strategy called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which has a completion date of 2049 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
The BRI is described by the Alliance of Environmental Researchers (ALERT) as being a “global labyrinth of some 7,000 infrastructure and extractive-industry projects that will span much of the planet” and cut into many of the remaining wild ecosystems. This will clearly impose a threat to biodiversity worldwide as the BRI involves infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries.
According to ALERT, the area where the dam is to be constructed cuts across a forest that is the habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan, the rarest species of great ape in the world. There are now only about 800 left.
The dam would also reduce and fragment the land, cutting through some of the most biologically diverse rainforests, “greatly increasing its vulnerability to illegal poaching, fires, deforestation, mining and logging”.
Not surprisingly, there has been a flurry of protests against the construction of the Batang Toru dam, not just in Indonesia, but also around the world.
Golfried Siregar was only 34, leaving behind a wife and an infant child, but he has not received widespread media attention, despite the fact that his fight was for global climate change.
According to Treehugger, “murders of environmental defenders outweighed the combined deaths of soldiers from the U.K. and Australia deployed to overseas war zones.” So Siregar’s death was a dime a dozen and not so newsworthy.
It has been Greta Thunberg, a 16-year old, Swedish climate change activist who has garnered widespread media attention, school striking in front of the Swedish parliament, protesting climate change. Her action was followed by thousands of schoolkids around the globe.
Will governments and businesses finally listen to her scathing and tearful United Nations address and indictment that they are killing the future of the world’s children if they don’t drastically change their “business as usual” policies?
Julia Suryakusuma
Columnist and author of Julia’s Jihad
