Read online at Radio Netherlands Worldwide

Image by Belinda Lopez

Featured on Radio National’s Awaye! 

A radio documentary about the Arhuacos, an indigenous tribe in northern Colombia.  After years of being caught in the crossfire of a quasi-civil war driven by the supply and demand for cocaine, the Arhuacos have found an ingenious way to regain control of their lands and to stop cocaine production. At the same time they’ve developed a strategy to regenerate their sacred forest country.

Photo: Tim Collings

While young people are told that engaging in activism might imperil their future careers, Belinda Lopez meets someone who has made a career out of pranking powerful evildoers.

“There’s a new dawn rising at Shell,” a short man with a megaphone tells a group of people wearing white chemical suits. “We’re sorry for the gas flares that make your rivers toxic.”

International petrochemical company Shell has apparently chosen The Hague, in the Netherlands, as the place to come clean about human rights violations in the Niger Delta. It’s an anti-climatic affair. The square where the group has gathered is nearly empty. The white-suited folk are claiming to be Shell workers — but the dreadlocks and unkempt hair some of them sport are a giveaway.

After the group forms the word “sorry” with their bodies, they cheer. “Boo,” say some teenage boys playing hacky sack nearby.

It’s been a not-so-successful stunt for activist pranksters and corporate impersonators The Yes Men, who organised the crowd in The Hague, in conjunction with Amnesty International, at the Movies that Matter Festival. Shell’s PR complained that the accusations levelled at the company misrepresented the complexity of the situation. Other stunts have certainly generated much more publicity.

The man with the mic is Mike Bonanno, one of the group’s frontmen, who is in Europe to promote their latest film, The Yes Men Fix the World.

Bonanno is not actually who he says he is. His real name is Igor Vamos, which he claims is an unconvincing name to use if you’re dressing up as the spokesperson of a Fortune 500 company or trying to fool the US Chamber of Commerce.

Vamos was full of energy during the Shell Apologises stunt and the audience responded gleefully to his film. Later, slumped on a hotel lobby floor in a secondhand suit, he admits to a bit of fatigue after only three hours sleep: another day in the life of an independent filmmaker dealing with DIY distribution and publicity.

“Our international distribution for the film has been a bit of a joke. You know, we have a sales agent, a US sales agent takes a cut of that, and then you slowly end up divvying up this non-existent pie,” Vamos tells newmatilda.com.

The movie won an audience award at the Berlin International Film Festival last year and has toured the world, but The Yes Men still aren’t reaping financial profits, Vamos claims.

So far Vamos and his fellow Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum (real name Jacques Servin) have lost money on both The Yes Men Fix The World and the 2003 The Yes Men. Both have full-time academic jobs and they fund their films with their own money and the help of friendly individual “investors”, he says. “There are at least 100 people in the credits for our movie, and I think none of them were paid.”

While their films might not be lucrative, there’s more than financial gain at stake. Vamos says that short of changing public opinion, “I think that we are changing minds, and encouraging some people to push their ideas further, encouraging a lot of young people.”

At Q & A sessions after screenings at universities, Vamos says the same issue is always raised by students: “Everybody’s telling them there’s a great risk in engaging in some kind of activism, that they might not get a job.”

Vamos doesn’t agree. He insists that the greater danger lies in not participating in activist campaigns. “You’re really cheating yourself and in a way, cheating your own future, because college students today are going to have to deal with the future that they’re inheriting from our mistakes right now.”

In their early days, The Yes Men were not too concerned about hindering future employment opportunities. When Vamos was a 21-year-old undergraduate art student, he vomited up a stomach full of potatoes dyed red, white and blue outside a Republican fundraising event. “If I had decided to take a more conservative path and try to get a good job, I don’t know if I would have a good job today; and I do, and it’s largely because I followed my convictions.”

Vamos has tenure as a professor of electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. (“So they can’t fire me,” he told the Movies That Matter crowd earlier in the day.) He preaches what he practices, teaching graduate students the fine art of “creative activism”. It’s a pricey way to protest — without funding, a two year masters program at the Rensselaer will set you back US$76,200.

Even with this teaching interest and the Yes Men’s use of the internet to enhance and sometimes to execute their pranks, Vamos says that he doesn’t buy the rhetoric that social media will revolutionise fundamental power dynamics in the world.

“I would say, yes, Web 2.0 is going to change everything, but Web 1.0 didn’t do squat for changing everything,” he says. “You look at what was going on in the 60s in relation to mobilising people and the seachange of attitudes and ideas, and it so dwarfs anything that’s happened since in Europe and the United States.”

And rather than trumpeting the hope that Web 2.0 will enlighten people in the developing world, Vamos says that the people he met during filming were already sufficiently enlightened.

In one scene in The Yes Men Fix the World, the pranksters accept full responsibility for the Bhopal gas leak on behalf of Dow Chemicals, and promise financial compensation to those affected. Afterwards, Vamos says, “we were told by the BBC that they had been given false hope, that they had had their hopes dashed.” This didn’t prove to be so. “What we found was that that was not the case at all, that these people were incredibly sophisticated in terms of their understanding of their position relative to the rest of the world, to globalisation and relative to the free market running roughshod over their needs.”

Without giving too much of the movie away, Vamos’s words reflect another scene in the film, where an older woman is asked by a local US media outlet how she felt when she learnt the promise of having her home returned to her was just another one of the culture jammers’ pranks.

“I respect this hoax, because maybe it’ll take a hoax like this to bring them out here to see what we’re going through,” she tells the reporter, defiantly. “So if a hoax is what it’ll be, then a hoax is what we’ve got.”

Concerns Grow Over UN Forest Scheme

Link to Web     Link to PDF

Copenhagen. A world away from the official climate talks are the forests of the world’s developing nations. Agreements may be made (and unmade) in carpeted conference halls by world leaders, but it is local forest communities who will now be on the frontline of the fight against deforestation — and the many ways governments and companies may be able to make a quick buck in the process.

Other COP15 stories:

Delegates on REDD alert to protect forests and indigenous peoples. Published Dec. 15.

Indonesian Activists Remain Frustrated About Copenhagen ‘Participation’.  Dec. 16.

Yudhoyono Urges Climate Delegates to ´Seal the Deal´.  Dec. 17.

Indonesia Defends Palm Plantations. Dec. 17.

REDD Faces Defining Moment at Copenhagen Summit.  Dec. 18.

Targets Will Be Met By Slashing Forest and Peat Emissions: Indonesian Climate Delegates.  Dec. 18.

Image by Nick Perry

Featured on Radio National’s documentary show, 360.

Night Butterflies was a finalist in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 360 ‘City Nights’ Competition.  Co-produced with Nick Perry.

One of the more polite names given to sex workers in Indonesia is ‘night butterflies’. Transsexual night butterflies haunt the streets of Jakarta, eking out an income from passing cars. They have often left their deeply-religious families in rural towns across Indonesia to pursue their desire to live as women in the bustling, ‘liberal’ capital. Even so, in Jakarta their choice of lifestyle is still widely considered a sin against God and makes them worthy of derision, ridicule and contempt

Listen to the story here

In Indonesia, the former leaders of Aceh’s separatist movement, GAM, are celebrating. The legitimate political party set up by former GAM rebels, Partai Aceh, has secured at least 30 of the 69 provincial parliament seats. The win represents something of a moral victory for the ex GAM leaders, who spent decades fighting the Indonesian military.

Belinda Lopez followed some ex-militants who took her to their former jungle hideouts.

I am sitting in the backpacker cafe in West Sumatra, Indonesia, that members of the Southeast Asian terrorism network Jemaah Islamiya had planned to bomb. I am drinking a beer. It may be an immature way of giving the middle finger to fundamentalism, but in the otherwise peaceful town of Bukittinggi, the tourism industry clearly needs a toast.

Kafe Bedubel, a well-worn rest seat along the backpacker trail, was reportedly spared in 2007 only because of the would-be terrorists’ last-minute nerves that too many Indonesian Muslims– presumably the bar staff– would be killed in the explosion. Nine suspects were caught in Palembang, South Sumatra, in July last year. Days earlier in the province, police arrested the alleged ringleader of the Bukittinggi plot and key Jemaah Islamiya figure Mohammad Hasan, a Singaporean who has claimed he also plotted to bomb his country’s Changi airport. Hasan was recently sentenced to 18 years in jail, while five others got 12 each in connection to the Bukittinggi plot, among other terrorism charges.

Perhaps Kafe Bedubel’s cardboard lanterns sporting beer brands were an affront to their ideals. The only other bule — the name Indonesians use for Westerners — in the cafe is a dreadlocked, skinny hippie-looking fellow speaking Indonesian with a lived-in ease.

The government’s “Visit Indonesia 2008″ campaign failed to meet its target of 7 million visitors for the country, unsurprising given hysterical travel warnings doled out by various governments in light of the execution of the Bali bombers last year. The US ambassador to Indonesia Cameron Hume gave the country a boost in 2008 when he said the country was safe to travel in— apart from, he added, the fact that terrorists had been caught in Sumatra.

Rather than looking like a breeding ground for terrorism, West Sumatra embraces a moral conservatism that some Westerners might find difficult to comprehend. Many of its cities and towns have reportedly passed Sharia-inspired bylaws that insist local female students and public servants wear Muslim headscarves. I am traveling in a group of five friends, and the manager of the hotel we are staying in, the Singgalang Hotel, across the road from Kafe Bedubel, asks if there are any Indonesians in our party.

There is only one. This is fortunate, we discover, because had there been an Indonesian couple among us, we would have had to produce a marriage certificate in order to be permitted to stay in a room together. The result of this interaction will be a serious discussion that lasts over our four-day journey on the best strategies for producing fake documents, down to buying rubber stamps and copying country seals.
Sumatran conservatism, however, does not extend to a willingness to venture forth. From the city of Padang and across West Sumatra, its people have a reputation as entrepreneurial travelers. Stalls selling the famed masakan padang (padang cooking) can seemingly be found on every street corner in Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta. For the uninitiated, padang food is an attack on the sinuses and stomach. Adrenal glands and brains, among other organs, soaked in thick, spicy sauces are considered a tasty body blow. You pay only for what you eat, and you eat with your right hand, pinching at white rice. I am a left-handed vegetarian, and therefore not designed for this. I struggle clumsily to grab green boiled vegetables with my right hand. My left hand is hidden away politely on my lap, a custom in most countries with a Muslim majority.

While Padang is a bustling city we mostly want to avoid, and Bukittinggi we are happy to explore for a day, we have other plans. We rent a car and driver for Rp500,000 (US$47.45) and set out on the hour-long drive to Lake Maninjau, a 17 km-long crater lake formed as the afterthought of a volcanic eruption.

We hire creaky bikes for Rp35,000 and cycle along the dirt road that weaves around the grandiose lake front. Clouds, mountain tops and forest face the lake like theater in the round. People actually get live like this, we tell each other, salivating. The scene is so beautiful it’s practically tourist pornography, but the locals have suffered heavy losses from it in the last few months.

“The fish are sick,” a middle-aged woman in worn clothes tells us in Indonesian, standing on the wooden edge of her fish farm suspended on the lake. Thousands of similar farms— locals’ livelihoods— have suffered heavy losses of about 7,000 tons of fish, the result of sulphur whipped up from the bottom of the volcanic lake during storms.

But we’re too busy romanticizing over the lake’s vista to let a little thing like possible sulphur poisoning stop us swimming in it. The water is warm on entry, and turns icy after a headfirst plunge into darkness. It’s liquid meditation.

Rubbish, surprisingly, is not a problem on the riverbank, and this is unusual for Indonesia’s notoriously bad rubbish management, even in rural areas. Littering the streets, though, are the banners of the dozens of political parties taking part in Indonesia’s election season, leading up to the presidential election in Juiy. PDI-P, PPP, PKS- the party’s acronyms are as stutter-inducing as the range of their promises.

We find ourselves discussing politics the next day, on top of a mountain in the Harau Valley, a two-hour drive from Bukittinggi. Our local guide for this hike, Ikbal, tells us he likes Prabowo Subianto as a presidential candidate. A former military leader who has conceded responsibility for the abduction of 24 human rights activists, 13 of whom were never found, Prabowo’s Gerindra party was nearly buried in the April primary election and he remains an extreme long-shot vice presidential candidate in the July runoff. But, Ikbal adds, he doesn’t really think any politician really cares about people like him.

He works at Echo Homestay, where we bag a simple yet cozy two- storey cabin among the trees, sleeping five, for Rp300,000. Over the phone when we were booked, we were again warned: no marriage certificates, no couples. But the Sumatran forest proves to be far less modest. Dozens of the native carnivorous “pitcher plants”, which go by their Indonesian name kantong semar, (slang for a man’s genital region) hang off green foliage. Ikbal refers to them as “condom flowers”, and manages to find a specimen he deems appropriately-sized for each male member of our party, according to their continent of origin.

He’s arranged to guide us for Rp50,000 per person for four hours up one of the forests behind the cliffs. We throw down our bags to point multiple cameras at a black gibbon swinging in the trees above us, as apes sing out across the valley. Like bats, birds and other small creatures, gibbons are hunted to be put on sale as pets in dirty menageries throughout Indonesia. We see this for ourselves deep in the forest, when Ikbal waves hello to two young men who are staring up at the trees. High in the branches they have hung a tiny bird cage with a sparrow fluttering inside, a trap for the native species they are trying to catch. “For collection,” Ikbal tells us.

The day has been bright, and hot, and the best option seems to meander down to a nearby waterfall that also serves as the local swimming pool. It’s an amusing montage, an imposing natural cliff spilling water into a man-made concrete pool, complete with retro-blue tiles. Young girls are swimming fully-clothed and I follow suite, deciding a bikini would be horribly inappropriate.

There hasn’t been a backpacker in sight since I arrived in this valley. Although it’s a shame for the local economy that the place seems to be so underutilized by foreign travelers, a tiny little part of me is selfishly pleased that some people let government warnings, foiled terrorism plots and preconceptions get in the way of reaching here.

Accommodation & Sites:

Echo Valley, Lambah Harau

http://echohomestay.blogspot.com/

812 673 0609. Mr (Pak) Adek.
Ask for Ikbal for hiking tours.

Singgalang Hotel,
Jalan Ahmad Yani, Bukkittingi
(62) 752 21576
Car hire available from here.

Cafe Bedubel
Jalan Ahmad Yani, Bukkittinggi

Journalist Jose Belo. Photo by Lirio da Fonseca.

East Timor’s Justice Minister denies she will block the long-anticipated removal of Indonesia’s criminal defamation law that is still used in the fledging nation, despite using it to bring an action against a journalist who published a series of articles accusing her of corruption.
Jose Belo, the publisher of the respected investigative weekly newspaper Tempo Semanal, will defend his paper against defamation charges for a series of articles he published in October last year, accusing Justice Minister Lucia Lobato of corruption, collusion and nepotism in the handing out of government tenders.
Belo has been charged under Indonesia’s penal code — in which defamation is a criminal act and carries a jail sentence — that has mostly been used in East Timor since it was annexed by Indonesia in 1975. The country has drafted its own penal code, which would make defamation a civil matter.
As justice minister, Lobato is responsible for defending the new law before the country’s Council of Ministers, likely to take place in the next month, before it is enacted by President Jose Ramos-Horta. East Timor’s government has long expressed strong support of free speech.
Christopher Henry Samson, head of Labeh, an East Timorese anticorruption nongovernment organization, said he was concerned the minister would now delay the passage of the new penal code while her own action against Belo was underway.
“The minister knows very well that the [new] penal code has already taken away criminal defamation,” Samson said. “So why would you use [the old] penal code to charge criminal defamation against your own citizen?”
Rosario Martins, a radio journalist and head of international relations for the East Timor Journalists Association, said Lobato had been an advocate of decriminalizing defamation during the writing of the draft penal law.
“But she is on the way to charging Jose Belo, so I don’t think the defamation law will be changed as soon as possible,” Martins said.
Lobato has strongly denied that her criminal defamation case against Belo meant she would attempt to delay the passage of the new penal code. She said she would schedule to have it discussed in the Council of Ministers by the end of the month.
Lobato said she had brought both criminal and civil actions against Belo.
“The court will decide based on the law. If we still have the [Indonesian penal] law that says defamation is a crime, then he will be tried under that,” she said.
If East Timor’s penal law is passed before Belo‘s trial, she said, “I still have the civil law.”
“Me also, if the court decides I am wrong, I will accept the result,” she said.
But Belo said no investigation into the justice minister herself had been pursued after his newspaper published the story.
“It’s very sad for my country, that they keep using these former invader’s laws to prosecute me. We should have our own laws,” he said.
“But even in democratic countries, these ministers have to be accountable, they have to investigate at least the allegation of corruption and nepotism itself.”
The minister said that Belo had not given her a right of reply before the article was published, contrary to Tempo Semanal’s claims.
“They should take into consideration the journalists’ code of ethics. All of us have a responsibility,” she said.