The Economist, January 6, 2001
Chilled Greens
Who says the Russians are passive? In recent months their green movement has
managed to collect at least 2.5m signatures in support of a referendum on
two big eco-questions facing the country. One is the government's plan to
start accepting foreign nuclear waste for storage. The other is whether to
restore the country's two main environmental protection agencies, abolished
by President Vladimir Putin in May.
But the Central Election Committee ruled that nearly 700,000 of the
signatures were incorrect. It said that people signing the petition had not
filled in their passport numbers properly, or had made other technical
errors. That left the greens well below the 2m signatures that the
constitution requires for a referendum.
So Russia's parliament was free to go ahead and enact a money-making
proposal to store up to 20,000 tonnes of foreigners' nuclear waste for 50
years; the revenues, supposedly worth tens of billions of dollars, are meant
to pay for cleaning up the environment. Greens say that storage will be
dangerous, and the money stolen or wasted.
Russia's environmentalists and human-rights campaigners, shaken by the way
the government dismissed their petition, are increasingly alarmed. They say
the treatment they receive ranges from contemptuous indifference to outright
persecution.
The clearest example concerns Grigory Pasko, a journalist on a military
newspaper in Vladivostok, in Russia's far east. He passed information about
the navy's careless nuclear-waste habits to Japanese journalists; that, said
the authorities, was spying. After 20 months in jail, he was found guilty on
a minor charge and set free. But after a recent appeal hearing in Moscow a
retrial on the original charge of treason was ordered.
According to Alexei Yablokov, a noted scientist who used to advise President
Boris Yeltsin on ecology and now heads a pressure group, Russia's security
services remember and resent the role that greens played in the collapse of
the Soviet Union. Many green issues highlight the secretive, careless or
incompetent habits, past and present, of the nuclear industries, the space
agency, the armed forces and big business. All have powerful lobbies.
The greens' best hope is foreign pressure. Russia's neighbours worry about
derelict nuclear submarines, decrepit power stations and the like. Many in
the West also worry about Russia's greens themselves. Amnesty International
took up Mr Pasko's case; he got 24,000 letters of support while in prison.
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