******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, Oct. 25, 2019
A Hard-Fighting Indonesian Lawyer’s Death Has Colleagues Asking Questions
By Richard C. Paddock
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The environmental lawyer from North Sumatra battled
palm oil plantations, sand miners and a company building a dam that
threatens a newly discovered species of orangutan.
It was not unusual for the lawyer, Golfrid Siregar, to receive warnings
and death threats, especially after he tried to halt the $1.7 billion,
China-funded hydropower dam on the remote Batang Toru river. He
contended that a signature on a key environmental document had been forged.
So when three strangers brought Mr. Siregar to an emergency room three
weeks ago, unconscious with a severe head injury, his friends and family
had trouble accepting the police’s conclusion that he had crashed his
motorcycle into a curb.
Mr. Siregar, 34, never regained consciousness and died on Oct. 6, three
days after arriving at the hospital in Medan, Sumatra’s largest city. He
left a wife and a young daughter.
Human rights and environmental groups, including Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch, are calling for an investigation into whether
Mr. Siregar was murdered in retaliation for his work.
“We urge you to initiate a prompt, thorough, impartial and independent
investigation into the incident,” wrote Usman Hamid, Amnesty
International’s executive director for Indonesia, in an open letter last
week to Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo.
Anton Sugiono, the chief executive of PT North Sumatera Hydro Energy,
which is building the dam on the Batang Toru river, said the company
would support “any investigation” into Mr. Siregar’s death.
“Of course, we are very sorry to hear this happened,” Mr. Anton said in
an interview. “We definitely had nothing to do with it at all.”
Mr. Siregar’s legal battle over the Batang Toru project led to a
contentious relationship with the North Sumatra Police Department, the
same police force that concluded his death was an accident.
Earlier this year, Mr. Siregar had filed a complaint with the North
Sumatra police on behalf of a forestry expert, who alleged that his
signature had been forged on an environmental assessment for the dam
project. The police refused to pursue the allegation, Mr. Siregar’s
colleagues said.
In August, Mr. Siregar filed another complaint — with the Indonesian
national police, accusing the North Sumatra police of misconduct. Around
the time of his death, he had been scheduled to provide information
about the case to the national police’s internal affairs department in
Jakarta, the capital, Mr. Hamid said in his letter to President Joko.
A spokesman for the North Sumatra police, Tatan Dirsan Atmaja, declined
to discuss the case in detail but said Mr. Siregar’s death was not
connected to his legal or advocacy work. “It was a single-vehicle
traffic accident,” he said.
But many environmental groups argue that the dam’s potential harm to the
newly identified Tapanuli species of orangutan, along with other
endangered wildlife in the area, far outweighs any benefit in reduced
emissions.
The project, which is already under construction and scheduled for
completion in 2022, would initially take up about 1,600 acres in the
orangutan’s historic habitat. Once the work is finished and the area
reforested, its final footprint would be about 300 acres, according to
North Sumatera Hydro Energy, whose name uses an alternate spelling of
Sumatra.
With the flooding of the steep Batang Toru gorge, about 150 acres of the
site would be underwater, an area smaller than the reservoirs of typical
hydropower dams.
The Bank of China, a major Chinese state-owned bank, is financing the
project. Mr. Anton said it was not part of the Belt and Road Initiative,
China’s ambitious program to finance infrastructure projects around the
world, which has been criticized for saddling developing countries with
debt.
Planning for the dam project had been underway for a decade when
scientists determined in 2017 that orangutans living in the Batang Toru
ecosystem constituted a distinct species, which they named the Tapanuli
after the area where it lives.
There are only about 800 Tapanuli, making it the most endangered of the
three orangutan species. Sumatran orangutans number about 14,600 and
Borneo orangutans about 105,000, experts say.
Many Indonesian and international environmental groups fear that the
Batang Toru project is endangering the Tapanuli orangutan by continuing
the fragmentation of its habitat and opening the area to illegal logging
and other human encroachment.
“The risks attached to the dam are incredibly severe,” said Helen
Buckland, director of the United Kingdom-based Sumatran Orangutan
Society. “The fear is if the dam construction goes ahead, it will lead
to the functional extinction of the species.”
Mr. Anton has pledged to minimize harm to the orangutans, but opponents
of the project see his company as ruthless and heavy-handed, citing the
forgery alleged by Mr. Siregar as one example.
Mr. Siregar’s client, Onrizal, a forestry expert who like many
Indonesians uses one name, had signed off on a 2014 assessment of the
dam’s environmental impact, but he later came to oppose the project.
Earlier this year, he discovered that his signature had been attached to
a new report, in 2016, without his permission.
The energy company says that was a mistake, not a forgery. Mr. Anton
said the 2016 filing was merely an addendum to the original report
signed by Mr. Onrizal, and that it did not supersede it.
Mr. Onrizal, a scientist at the University of North Sumatra, declined
through an associate to be interviewed, citing a fear of retribution.
Colleagues of Mr. Siregar say that on the evening of Oct. 2, he visited
his uncle’s house in Medan, drank tea and left at about 11 p.m. Around
that time, a video camera captured him riding his motorcycle while
wearing his helmet, they say.
At about 1:15 a.m., the three men brought Mr. Siregar to the hospital,
saying they had found him lying in the street. They were later arrested
on suspicion of stealing his belongings, but the police concluded that
they were not responsible for his injuries. The police also said Mr.
Siregar had been drinking, though they did not specify his blood alcohol
level or release an autopsy report.
Colleagues and family members have raised numerous questions, including
why no blood was found at the scene and why Mr. Siregar’s body did not
have marks and abrasions typical of a motorcycle accident. They also
question why no one found his helmet, which they say he always wore. His
motorcycle had little damage, they said.
Given these circumstances, they suggest he was attacked elsewhere, and
that his body and motorcycle were left in the road to make it appear
that he had crashed.
“How much did he drink? Before he was found, what actually happened?”
asked Dana Prima Tarigan, director of Walhi North Sumatra. “It is too
soon to conclude that this was due to a single-vehicle traffic accident
while there are still so many mysteries that need to be revealed.”
Mr. Siregar had become known as a fighter, and his fellow advocates have
no intention of letting his case rest.
“He was smart. He was courageous. He was bold,” said Andreas Harsono,
senior Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “His death under
suspicious circumstances demands a prompt, thorough investigation of all
those implicated.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
