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The Regional Environmental Reconstruction Programme for South Eastern EuropeREReP Record |
| Are environmental
activists in Central and Eastern Europe being singled out for harassment? Fidanka and Eoin McGrath, a newly married couple of nature lovers, spent two of the hottest days of August in quite unusual circumstances: they were being interrogated by police. Even as summer blockbuster Die Hard 4 portrays Bruce Willis’ character as cooperating with hackers to save the day, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for authorities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to target activists for things done—or not done—over the internet. If you were looking for a model of coexistence between European integration and environmental sustainability, the McGraths would be a good one. Fidanka, a Bulgarian environmental activist, and Eoin, an Irish computer programmer, settled in the countryside to tend their own bio-farm. But their pastoral existence was disturbed abruptly this summer when the two were called in by the local unit of the GDBOP (the Bulgarian acronym for the Chief Directorate for Combating Organised Crime). The GDBOP is a vestige of the communist State Security agency, which broke up after 1990. Eoin accepted an informal invitation to appear in person at the Blagoevgrad precinct—with neither a lawyer nor a translator—only to learn that he was the suspected author of a bomb threat. News of the threat in question, sent from a Russian server and signed by a non-existent environmental group, was published in the Bulgarian mass media in February. The threat warned that controlled explosions were set to initiate a catastrophic avalanche over the Bansko Ski Resort—revenge for alleged environmental damage caused by resort construction. Police found no explosives, although resort operations were suspended for a few hours, the media reported. Responding to the news, environmental organisations
from the ‘Save Pirin’ coalition, which had campaigned against
the resort’s development, condemned the threat as a provocation.
Half a year later, interrogating officers urged McGrath that a confession
would “make things easier,” online daily MediaPool reported.
After more than two days of questioning, however, neither of the McGraths
admitted to any involvement in the email threat. “The police were
friendly, but that may have merely been an interrogation technique,”
Fidanka McGrath told MediaPool. The police officer in charge of the investigation
refused the media any comments. That same month, protesters angry about over-construction on the Black Sea Coast took to the street after the Supreme Administrative Court in Sofia had stripped Bulgaria’s largest natural park, Strandja, of its protected status, thus green-lighting yet another major coastal hotel project. After Bouzgounov promoted the street protests on his personal blog Optimiced, he was ordered to “refrain from quoting other sources of information when possible violation of the law is involved; namely, the organising of non-permitted civil protests,” and to sign his name in agreement. No copy of the warning protocol was handed to him. Upon his release, Bouzgounov returned to his blog and wrote: “Yes, I wrote about Strandja because I care about whether or not this park will exist tomorrow! No, I did not call for riots, illegal action, violence or anarchy!” He went on to complain that a government agency equipped to fight organised crime was instead using it resources and personnel to “investigate bloggers, free people, writing about Bulgaria’s nature—reporting on past and future protests in [nature’s] defence.” Police action against bloggers writing opinion or posting information on the environment is completely unacceptable, agrees Dan McQuillan, coordinator of Amnesty International’s Irrepressible.info internet rights campaign. Lawyers from the Access to Information Programme in Sofia back this opinion. Freedom to publish information on the internet, which includes blogging, is a form of expression guaranteed under the European Human Rights Convention and by the Bulgarian Constitution, the organisation stated. Who’s safe in cyberspace? Ancient Gold Mines of Dacia: the Rosia Montana District, a report written by Beatrice Cauuet, a scholar at Toulouse University in France, detailed the existence of valuable archeological findings in the potential gold-mining site, Stefanie Roth explained. Roth, who received the Goldman Environmental Prize for her campaigning work in Rosia Montana since 2002, is outraged by the police action: “They were looking for one guilty person, playing ‘good cop, bad cop’ to single out who posted the report online,” Roth said, adding that the activists stood by their claim that the campaign had more than a thousand volunteers from all over the world, and that any one of them could have posted the report. The case concluded satisfactorily, Roth recalled, when the court ruled that it served the public interest to publish the report. The aggressive expansion of copyright and intellectual property rights poses another major threat to internet freedoms, especially where the environment is concerned, Amnesty’s McQuillan commented. Corporations are already responding aggressively to the use of their logos in online [environmental] campaigns, although organisations like Greenpeace are putting up a robust defence. He also warned that websites could face forced shutdown through legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a possible tool for legalised harassment and disruption of online campaigning websites. “I’m not surprised to see examples of pressure against bloggers in [CEE],” said McQuillan, explaining that internet speech and other freedoms we take for granted need to be rigorously defended as not to be eventually weakened or undermined completely. Cyberspace has certainly opened doors for new types of surveillance, intimidation or manipulation. The appearance of ‘internet moles’, for example, on online discussion forums has become increasingly common, said long-time Hungarian environmental activist Laszlo Perneczky—known to most of his readers as ‘Pepe’. “Internet moles are anonymous contributors propagating certain political or business interests in almost every type of public forum,” Perneczky explained. “We sometimes even know who they are and who pays their salaries, but there’s nothing we can do. It’s all legal, but this is the nature of the internet.” In 2004, Hungarian authorities employed some sleight of hand against campaigners who opposed the construction of a NATO radar installation on Mount Zengo. Fake news items were filed at Hungarian Indimedia, an independent online outlet run by individual citizens. A contributor to the portal, presented as a Zengo-area resident, submitted several articles in favour of the controversial construction project, according to ‘Fidusz’, the Indimedia editor at the time. After checking the sender’s internet protocol address, Fidusz realised that the articles had been sent from the servers of the Ministry of Defence’s Security Investment Department, the NATO project’s key proponent. The case was made public, and the internet-led campaign proved influential enough that the radar project was relocated from Zengo, Fidusz added. Environmental cases aside, Central and Eastern European cyberspace appears to be obligingly tolerant. In 2006, for example, Croatian police investigated Zombix, a well-known blogger and contributor to the country’s second-largest newspaper, Jutarnji List, following a complaint by Hrvatski Telecom (HT). “I drew Hitler-style moustaches on images of [HT] management personnel, and used a small, animated GIF to transform the letters ‘HT’ into a swastika,” Zombix told Green Horizon. “Guys from the police were laughing with me. The company wanted to close down [my blog], but the government told them ‘no way!’” In spite of the reprieve, Zombix remains sceptical about the government’s actions: “Their tactic is not to repress but to ignore whatever anybody wrote about them…so I write, and write…and write.” Internet rights fight As a network of environmental NGOs, BlueLink has hosted and provided online support to major environmental campaigns since 1998, including Save Pirin. Incidentally, both Bozgounov and McGrath are the present and former web managers of BlueLink.
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