Putin Sets Back Ecological Clock
July 15th, 2000
By Rory Cox
"Sadly, foreign secret services use not only diplomatic cover, but also all sorts of ecological organizations." - Vladimir Putin, as head of the FSB, July 1999.
Over the last 10 years, Russian citizens have responded to dire environmental conditions with a growing grassroots movement, stricter environmental laws, and a regulatory agency struggling to enforce those laws, the Federal Committee on Ecology. President Putin, however, seems determined to undo these efforts. In the most dramatic chapter of his anti-green campaign so far, Putin proceeded to axe the Committee on Ecology, as well as the 200-year-old Russian Forest Service last May.
The Ministry of Natural Resources will now carry out the functions of both. Specific plans on how the Ministry of Natural Resources will handle its new tasks have not yet been disclosed. This action is roughly the equivalent of folding the U.S. EPA and Forest Service into the Department of Commerce, or as some Russian critics have put it, putting an alcoholic in charge of a vodka shop.
Events leading up to this move demonstrate signs of the Russian government's growing intolerance for environmental and other citizen activities, as well as the deliberate harassment of citizens' groups in the name of national security. These actions could signal the unravelling of a decade of remarkable growth in the civil society movement in Russia, and a return to an age of centralized government making all natural resource decisions.
The difference between then and now, however, is that Russia is no longer an insular empire. Billions of dollars in western international investment are financing natural resource extraction in Russia. International oil, mining, forest, and fisheries concerns now have access to resource-rich territories in both Russia and other ex-Soviet states that were off-limits before the 1990s. Such international entities stand to gain immensely from any decrease in regulatory oversight, while the vast resource-rich areas of Russia's outer regions risk becoming natural resource colonies for the developed world.
Putin's abolition of the Committee on Ecology effectively did away with the only government agency with any environmental regulatory power. It had begun as a governmental ministry in 1991, when the policies of glasnost (or "openness") alerted the Russian people to the ecological destruction caused by Soviet central planning. Just as the U.S. responded to the downside of industrial development by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, Soviets also recognized the need for such a regulatory body to mitigate the negative outcomes of Soviet industrialization.
Among the more important functions of the Ministry was the authority to conduct expertizas, the Russian equivalent of environmental impact assessments, and to designate and administer zapovedniks, or protected areas, set aside for scientific research and nature protection. During the 1990s, environmental laws in Russia were actually stricter than in many Western countries, though enforcement was spotty at best. However, citizens successfully invoked Russian laws to stop or improve upon what could have been very destructive projects. For example, Sakhalin activists, through the local Committee office, halted the Sakhalin-I oil extraction project last year.
In 1996, Boris Yeltsin's re-election led him to re-organize the government, which included downgrading the Ecology Ministry to State Committee status. The new designation created a body that was criticized by many Russian activists as being a largely ineffective bureaucracy. But the Committee, nevertheless, played a role as a check and balance against the Ministry of Natural Resources, established early in the Soviet era, for the purpose of facilitating the extraction of Russia's valuable oil and mineral resources.
In the absence of the Committee on Ecology, environmental watchdogging will be in the hands of citizens' groups, part of the non-governmental organization (NGO) sector which has flourished since the end of the Soviet Union. But such groups, as well, envision a difficult path.
The Green Crackdown
In the years preceding the Putin Administration, a few environmental activists and whistle-blowers were singled out, jailed, and tried for trumped up charges, such as treason and espionage. The most widely-known such case was Alexander Nikitin, a retired Navy captain who wrote a report on the marine nuclear pollution seeping into the Barents Sea from the discarded submarines of Russia's northern fleet. Another trial was held in the case of military journalist Grigory Pasko, who reported similar stories from the Russian Far East. Ultimately, after those trials had attracted international outrage, the charges were reduced, and the defendants were released.
With Putin's ascension to the presidency, some citizens' organizations have been subject to government harassment. A crackdown on NGOs occurred last April, when the Prosecutor General's Office conducted "audits" of several organizations. These audits were performed at roughly the same time in a few disparate cities and involved inspecting the target organizations' books, records, files, and databases. They were not part of any standard review procedure. Among those raided were "Sakhalin Environment Watch," a group that played a crucial role in exposing the harmful effects of offshore oil development in the Sea of Okhotsk; "Zelyony Mir," an organization which has written critical reports about a nuclear power plant in the Leningrad region; and the Moscow branch of Greenpeace.
Most recently, "Fund for 21st Century Altai," a citizens' organization in the southern Siberian city of Barnaul has come under similar pressure. The Prosecutor General's office found that the barter arrangement the Fund has for its office space, which it shared with the Institute of Culture at the local university, is illegal, and the Fund has been evicted. The arrangement with the Institute had never previously been questioned in over five years of tenancy there.
A spokesperson from the Fund said, "We had heard that (Altai Governor) Surikov had demanded this audit and hopes to simply throw us out on the street." This eviction comes at a time when the Fund is playing a key role in an international campaign to halt construction of a road and oil pipeline from Siberia to China across a protected area.
Manageable Democracy
It is clear both from government edicts and from recent actions that the shape of the Russian political playing field is changing dramatically. The Kremlin has coined the term "Manageable Democracy" to describe the new state of affairs. The Russian Duma is considering altering the Law on Citizens' Organizations to limit the rights and freedoms of citizens' groups. The Duma is also reviewing a draft law to expand the right of the Federal Prosecutor's Office, permitting it to independently close down unregistered NGOs.
The FSB (successor to the KGB) has attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to regulate the content of the Internet by requiring websites to register with the government as "mass media," therefore subjecting all website owners to licensing. In February, the government publicly announced "SORM," or System for Operational-Investigative Activities, a program that had secretly been monitoring email, the Internet, and phone conversations since 1995. Alexei Rokotyan, head of electronic communications at the Communications Ministry, said in February, "Security organs and special forces have the right-and now the capability-to monitor private correspondence and telephone conversations of individual citizens in the name of establishing order."
Harassment of activists and citizens' groups is nothing new in Russia, and any one of the recent events could have happened during the Yeltsin presidency. It is the frequency of events infringing on individual freedoms that have many worried. There is certainly a much more concerted pattern to the harassment now, as well as some rather chilling language used to rationalize it. Labelling concerned citizens as spies, and justifying phone tapping as "establishing order" were tactics used during a period that many Russians would rather forget.
World Bank: Loans to Russia Will Continue
Despite the lack of an environmental regulatory body in Russia, the World Bank continues to violate its own by-laws with continual loans to Russia. Five days after the Ecology Committee and Forest Service were abolished, the World Bank signed over a $60 million loan for sustainable forestry, which was to be implemented by the now-abolished Forest Service. In addition, the bank has pledged to release another $1 billion to Russia this fall.
In a strongly worded letter, 67 Russian and international environmental organizations criticized the World Bank's loans to Russia. The letter emphasizes the short-sightedness of the Bank's lending policy and points out that the loan to a non-existent agency is legally questionable. Many of Russia's leading environmentalists, including Alexei Yablokov, an environmental advisor to former President Boris Yeltsin, and Aleksandr Nikitin, a former Navy officer who was imprisoned after writing about the dangers of Russia's nuclear fleet, endorsed the letter.
"In the absence of the State Committee on Ecology and the Forest Service," the letter reads, "we do not believe World Bank Group projects that impact the environment in Russia can proceed in an environmentally, financially or legally sound way. We believe the most prudent action the World Bank Group can take is the cessation of these projects until these agencies and their original functions return intact."
Aleksandr Arbachakov, director of Siberia's Taiga Research and Protection Agency, said "President Putin is leading us down a path towards environmental harm that can impact countries beyond Russia and even the ecological balance of the planet. With the liquidation of these agencies, we have reasons to worry about our future and the future of our children."
