Mangrove forest on the island of Nusa Lembongan in Indonesia / credit: Joel Vodell on Unsplash
More than 10.3 million acres of primary tropical forests—spanning about the size of Belgium—went up in flames in 2020. A new coalition claims it will mobilize $1 billion to thwart global climate change’s increasingly devastating forest fires. But scientists and other experts have raised doubts about this new program corporations and governments have kicked off.
Primary tropical forests are untouched by human development. More than 1 billion people live in and depend on the world’s tropical forests, and nearly 300 million people live in lands targeted for tropical forest restoration, according to Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a non-governmental organization. Meanwhile, RRI’s data shows over 900 million people live in the biodiverse areas of low- and middle-income countries.
The new coalition is called “Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance”—or LEAF—and it is expected to become “the single largest private-sector investment to protect tropical forests.” At the Leaders Summit on Climate on April 22, multinational corporations entered into a coalition with the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway. The list of corporations includes Airbnb, Amazon, Bayer, Boston Consulting Group, GlaxoSmithKline, McKinsey & Company, Nestle, Salesforce and Unilever.
Experts have raised this coalitional strategy could further marginalize communities dwelling in tropical forests across the developing world. They also have questioned the effectiveness of strategies that aim to raise funding to halt deforestation.
For example, Forrest Fleischman, an assistant professor of forest resources at the University of Minnesota, says the success of the LEAF coalition will depend “not on their ability to mobilize money from wealthy companies, but in their ability to negotiate complicated political arrangements which may involve challenging the powers that be, including states and private companies.
How Has Carbon Finance Worked?
Political and economic conditions create opportunities for power plays in carbon finance, i.e. the funding provided for carbon sequestration programs like forest restoration. In most cases, governments, corporations and aid organizations have immense discretionary power regarding carbon finance. That is why experts say Indigenous and other forest-dependent peoples should have primary decision-making power over monetary allocations, as well as the power to choose projects.
Not involving such communities can erode their rights. For example, consider how afforestation programs in India have been carried out on lands used for agricultural purposes by Indigenous and forest-dwelling communities.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, says forest conservation programs like LEAF “cannot work if the rights of Indigenous communities are not protected and the flow of money only leads to violence and conflicts” because of struggles over land rights. More specifically, she highlights a need to ensure land rights of forest-dwelling communities are recognized and that these communities play an active role in designing the LEAF program, as well as receive a fair share of the resources LEAF aims to gather.
Indigenous communities, such as the Yurok tribe in what is known as northern California, the Suquamish tribe in what is known as the Seattle, Washington area, as well as the U.S.-based Indigenous Environmental Network, could not be reached for comment, as of press time.
Fleischman also emphasizes LEAF’s aim ought to be to “transform the economic and political conditions surrounding forests, rather than just setting up conservation areas and providing payments to people.”
As for effectiveness, past efforts offer lessons.
“In Brazil, deforestation is a major source of emissions. So, it is important to have [internationally mobilized] resources to fight the climate crisis. But, at the same time, we worry when we hear about new funds to support forests because we have seen how the Amazon Fund has been used,” says Maureen Santos, policy officer at Federation of Organizations for Social and Educational Assistance in Rio de Janeiro.
Santos adds President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has failed to use the fund as a climate change tool. Deforestation rates in the Amazon have surged under Bolsonaro.
The Amazon Fund is a REDD+ initiative the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recognizes. “REDD” stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The aim here is to provide economic incentives for forest conservation. But reports have pointed to high deforestation rates in the Amazon basin, even after the Amazon Fund was fully operationalized.
Pays to note a leading partner at LEAF is the United States, which is the biggest historical emitter of CO2. “Initiatives like LEAF have to be followed up with stronger initiatives to reduce emissions, because even if you save all the forests in the world, you cannot solve the climate crisis until you stop emissions,” Santos adds.
Recognizing Land Rights and Asymmetrical Power
A recent paper that analyzed what happened with the Yurok tribe, who occupy the redwood forest of northern California in the United States. The tribe obtained funding to enable carbon sequestration on ancestral territory. This is different than what is known as the “Indian model,” which includes large-scale plantation drives by the government under the Paris Agreement and other forest conservation, afforestation and reforestation efforts funded by international agencies like the World Bank.
The paper highlights when land managers and users possess enforceable rights, like in the case of the Yurok tribe, “power is balanced, accountability is clear, authorities represent the interests of the broader user community and carbon storage aligns with local interests.”
In India, the report found, forest carbon finance is controlled by state governments who “do not share benefits of carbon finance with the rural forest-dependent people whose actions play a major role in determining the outcomes of these programs.”
Communities dependent on forests also lacked countervailing power because their rights to forest land are not recognized.
One of the key findings of the paper is mobilizing money is not enough to ensure forest protection. This is because a wide variety of influences impact forest conservation, many of which are not directly related to financial incentives. Fleischman, the lead author of the paper says, “We’ve long recognised that insecure land tenure is a major driver of forest loss, however it is not clear how giving a country or state money leads to securing land tenure for poor or marginalized people.”
Financial investment, including ones that aim to promote forest conservation, do not work out well. This occurs, Fleischman explains, in cases where financial investments in land end up undermining secure land tenure, which then leads to land degradation. When land values increase, owing to interest from international funding agencies, power actors like companies, states and NGOs are incentivized to control land-based revenue by grabbing land for themselves. This process forcibly takes away the land rights of rural and Indigenous people.
The problems that arise from not recognizing land titles extends to Brazil, too.
Santos adds the first priority ought to be to ensure community land rights are recognized, and environmental regulations and oversight mechanisms are strong enough to assess the success and failures of proposals like LEAF.
Organizations that monitor land use, such as Land Conflict Watch and Vasundhara in India, as well as Amazon Watch, could not be reached for comment.
The Path Ahead
“Substantial investment in the recognition of Indigenous and community land rights is a prerequisite to the global climate agenda,” concluded a study published in June by Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). The authors looked at 31 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which hold 70 percent of the world’s tropical forests to highlight risks in developing carbon markets without first settling the land rights of Indigenous communities.
Bryson Ogden, associate director for strategic analysis & global engagement at Rights and Resources Group—the secretariat for RRI—notes “serious power imbalances” in the geographies where the LEAF Coalition plans to operate. He adds power imbalances between companies and governments on the one hand, and rural communities on the other, “often exacerbated by insecure land tenure, have driven land-grabs and violations in the past, and more recently, hindered efforts to eliminate supply chain-driven deforestation.”
In response to concerns about power asymmetries and land rights, Emergent Media, administrative coordinator of LEAF Coalition, told Toward Freedom that LEAF participants recognize Indigenous peoples and local communities are “essential stakeholders in the design and implementation” of plans to reduce deforestation and maintain forest cover in the jurisdictions where they live.
Emergent Media noted safeguards have been drawn up to ensure protection and respect of land-tenure rights and effective stakeholder participation. They also added these safeguards are based on the Cancun Safeguards drafted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
But doubts still remain. Nothing is concrete in either publicly available documents about the coalition, nor in its statement that Indigenous and local people are directly involved in the design and evaluation of projects. Fleischman pointed out it seems like the coalition is treating Indigenous and forest-dependent people “as secondary people who need to be protected in projects designed and financed by others, as opposed to directly empowering those people to make decisions about their lands.”
The kind of economic and political changes that are needed to “ensure [forest] conservation when it conflicts with the profits of companies and the interests of national governments” are left lacking, Fleischman says.
Ogden of RRI suggests a just way to achieve emission-reduction aims would be to scale-up the legal recognition of customary land and resource rights of forest communities—including the carbon stored therein—across proposed accounting areas; develop operational feedback and grievance redress mechanisms; and adequately involve affected constituencies in the design of benefit sharing plans.
The question remains of whether the $1 billion LEAF proposes to raise is enough to conserve tropical forests around the world.
“To the extent that money can address conservation challenges, the quantity of money may need to be much larger to make a real dent. In other words, if money is what matters, the money may need to be roughly equivalent to the potential profits to be made by clearing forests to grow soybeans or palm oil,” Fleischman says.
Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.
Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker Kavita Magdum monitors the health of infants and children. Here, she weighs one of twins of Hasina Hajukhan / credit: Sanket Jain
Hasina Hajukhan never imagined that returning to her maternal house would turn into a near-death experience. In April, the 28-year-old was seven months pregnant, and her medical parameters were normal. “I was taking extra care to ensure no complications during childbirth,” she told Toward Freedom.
As is customary in many parts of India, pregnant women return to their parents’ homes to give birth. When Hajukhan first reached her mother’s house in Ganeshwadi village of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, she felt nauseated. “It was April’s final week, and I couldn’t even breathe properly,” she recounted. A heat wave had taken hold. “The climate was the stark opposite of what it was in my husband’s village.” In Ganeshwadi, things kept getting complicated with the rising heat. “Every day, I was breathless and would feel dizzy.”
Using a desk fan at the highest speed didn’t help, as it just circulated more hot air. An air conditioning system was something her family could not afford. The tin sheet roof would get extremely hot. During this crucial time, Hajukhan needed rest. However, she spent most of her day stepping out to gasp for cold air. In May’s final week, things got worse. “I felt as if I was going to die,” she recalled, teary-eyed.
Immediately, her mother dialed Ranjana Gavade, an accredited social health activist (ASHA worker), part of a community of 1 million women healthcare workers appointed for every 1,000 people in India’s villages. ASHAs are responsible for more than 70 healthcare tasks, with a particular focus on maternal and child health.
ASHA worker Shubhangi Kamble spends a significant amount of time each day talking to community women to help them understand the impact of climate change on children / credit: Sanket Jain
“I was worried looking at her rapidly deteriorating health and informed my colleagues.” Upon their instructions, Gavade called a government ambulance and swiftly took her to the district hospital, 33 kilometers (20.5 miles) away. Hajukhan gave birth to underweight twins. Her troubles still hadn’t ended when she was discharged after three days. For a month since then, Hajukhan has been trying to ensure her twins gain weight, but all efforts have failed. As a result, they weren’t administered the necessary Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG vaccine used against tuberculosis), Hepatitis B, and Polio vaccines.
The Kolhapur district, where Hajukhan lives, has been reporting recurring floods, heat waves, incessant rainfall, and hailstorms triggered by climate change. She said everything would have been normal had she not returned to her parents’ home to give birth in the heat waves. “My children wouldn’t have had to live such a dangerous life,” she said.
Like in the village of Ganeshwadi, climate change impacts have been delaying children’s immunization schedules throughout India, making them vulnerable to diseases. Research has found that if a child belonged to a district highly vulnerable to climate change, the odds of stunting rose by 32 percent, low weight by 45 percent, anemia by 63 percent and acute malnutrition by 42 percent. An analysis by global nonprofit Save the Children found that, globally, 774 million children are living in poverty and at a high risk of climate-related disasters. Weather disasters ranging from floods to droughts prevent children from obtaining nourishment, causing low weight, and these disasters put a break on children receiving vaccinations on time. Their weakened immune systems, as a result of a lack of proper nourishment in crisis times, make them vulnerable to other diseases. Being sick can halt the necessary immunizations, and these delays have led to a rise in epidemics and diseases.
ASHA worker Shubhangi Kamble often works beyond her duty to ensure every child completes the universal immunization on time. Here, she speaks to a woman to help her understand how climate change can impact her son’s health / credit: Sanket Jain
How Floods Impact Universal Immunization
Snehal Kamble, 24, a resident of Maharashtra’s flood-prone Arjunwad village, remembers the year 2019 in meticulous detail. “A day before the floods, I was preparing to go to my parent’s house.” Five months pregnant, she was looking for iron folic acid tablets. “Instead, all of us went to a flood relief camp,” she recounted. From there, she moved to another relief camp within a few days, as the water rose further. “During this time, I was worried about my house and belongings,” she said. She fell sick and was away from home for 15 days. “Those were the most difficult days of my life,” she shared. Then in January 2020, she gave birth to a boy named Sangarsh, who has often fallen sick. “When I went to my maternal house, he just couldn’t bear the heat there,” she said. The dehydration and spells of fever he experienced affected his immunization schedule. “His Pentavalent vaccine was delayed by several months because of health ailments,” said ASHA worker Shubhangi Kamble (no relation to Snehal), who has been monitoring this child since birth.
Further, his Measles-Rubella vaccine and Vitamin A dose were also delayed, making him vulnerable to diseases. “Vaccines need to be administered on time,” said Sachin Kamble, a nursing officer at the district women’s hospital in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district. “Otherwise, it affects a child’s immunity, making them more vulnerable to diseases.”
He pointed out how the lack of vaccinations led to 2,692 cases in 2022 in Maharashtra, which reported the highest measles count in India. That was an eight-fold increase from the previous year. During this time, India reported 12,773 cases. India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS) said only 31.9 percent of children ages 24 months to 35 months had received a second dose of measles-containing vaccine in 2019-21.
Another healthcare worker, Kavita Magdum, from flood-affected Ganeshwadi village, said that children in her surveying area never fell ill so frequently. She started noticing such stark changes only in the past five years. Upon inspecting this, she found, “Stress caused by the changing climate is leading to this.” For instance, Magdum sees that many children aren’t drinking breast milk, which has impacted their medical parameters. These drastic changes reflect in Indian government statistics, as well. During 2015-16, 58.6 percent of children ages 6 months to 59 months (just under 5 years old) were anemic in India. By 2019-20, this number rose to 67.1 percent. In addition, 32 percent of children nationally remain underweight.
After a year-and-a-half, Snehal’s son started getting better, thanks to Shubhangi’s consistent visits, when she monitored every parameter and ensured the best possible treatment by working hours beyond her duty. “Once the vaccination schedule started falling in place, his health, too, began improving,” Shubhangi shared.
ASHA worker Ranjana Gavade frequently visits Hajukhan’s home to monitor the health of her children / credit: Sanket Jain
Untimely Administration of Vaccines
While climate change is making it difficult for these healthcare workers to complete universal immunization, another challenge is the untimely vaccine administration.
“There are many instances, where vaccines in several villages are just not available,” said Netradipa Patil, leader of more than 3,000 ASHA workers and co-founder of Deep-Maya Foundation, a non-profit that works for women and children. “During such times, it becomes extremely challenging for us healthcare workers to manage everyone.”
Patil has observed that the workload has increased tremendously for all the ASHA workers because of the delay in vaccination. This is because ASHA workers are responsible for immunization, and in case of any discrepancy or error, they are held accountable. Research published in 2016 concluded, “Lack of timely administration of key childhood vaccines, especially DPT3 (the three doses of the Diphtheria, Tetanus and Pertussis vaccine) and MCV (measles-containing vaccine), remains a major challenge in India and likely contributes to the significant burden of vaccine-preventable disease-related morbidity and mortality in children.” Another paper published in 2019 inferred, “The proportion of children with delayed vaccination is high in India.”
In 2021, the World Health Organization found that 25 million children around the world under the age of 1 didn’t receive vaccines, a figure not seen since 2009. “Many children never get the Vitamin A doses on time. These doses are just not available when required,” Patil said, suggesting the Indian government should consult local healthcare workers to arrange vaccination. “We need to reach more and more people, and, currently, looking at the changing climate, we aren’t prepared to do this,” she shared. Patil made simple suggestions like identifying vulnerable children and their locality and monitoring them from the earlier stages, even before the disaster strikes. “Just by proper identification, we can save so many children,” she said.
A woman playing with her child in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district / credit: Sanket Jain
Rising Undernourishment
Fed up with feeding medications and tonics that didn’t seem to help increase his weight and prevent him from continually falling ill due to the changing weather conditions, Rashi Patil, 23, quit taking her son to the doctor every month after 18 months. “My son just wouldn’t eat anything,” Patil said.
Moreover, the changes in local climatic patterns affected her son’s health, and he often fell sick. Last year, he was hospitalized for a week as his platelets fell and a fever intensified. What followed next were recurring illnesses that delayed his immunization schedule. Because of the fever in March, he wasn’t administered the Pentavalent 1 vaccine (it protects from five life-threatening diseases: Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus, Hepatitis B and Hib [Haemophilus Influenzae Type b]). Her son soon became weak and began recovering only after the vaccine’s administration. All this while, her son struggled with good eating habits. After several trials and errors, Rashi and her husband, Rajkumar, discovered the climate affected their son’s health and eating habits.
“Now, their son makes it a point to eat only outside the house, where he gets some cold air,” says Rashi. “Contrastingly, this was never the case with my elder daughter.”
Toward Freedom reached out to Ganeshwadi’s community health officer, Dr. Prajakta Gurav, regarding what steps her team was taking to deal with delayed immunization. Gurav hasn’t replied as of press time.
The impact of poor diets is more obvious at the national level. For instance, just 11.3 percent of children between the ages of 6 months and 23 months receive an adequate diet. Plus, in 2022, India ranked 107 out of 121 countries on the global hunger index. These numbers further reveal how climate change is exacerbating the existing faultlines.
The problem is not restricted to India. Of the countries at severe risk of being adversely affected by climate change, the report by Save the Children says, “Burundi has the highest rate of stunted children (54 percent), followed by Niger (47 percent), Yemen (46 percent), Papua New Guinea (43 percent), Mozambique (42 percent) and Madagascar (42 percent).”
Research published in PLOS Medicine found that in 22 sub-saharan African countries, drought led to lower chances of completion of BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin), Polio and DPT (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) vaccines. “We took vaccines to the last mile. Now, climate change is eroding progress.”
For Komal Kamble, 30, vaccinating her 2-year-old daughter remains challenging. Her remote mountainous village of Kerle, in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, remains inaccessible most of the year.
For the village population of less than 1,100 people, the nearest healthcare facility is 15 kilometers away. Last year, within a week of October rains, the road that connects her village to the nearest hospital was completely under floodwater.
Komal’s daughter couldn’t get proper medical care for two days, worsening her health. Her chest was full of cough, and the fever rose, making things difficult for the agrarian Kamble family. This wasn’t restricted to heavy rainfall, though. Since her birth in 2021, Komal has taken her daughter to a private doctor at least 20 times, spending over Rs 15,000 ($182). Last year, she was feverish and wasn’t given the crucial Japanese encephalitis vaccine, a Vitamin A dose and the Measles-Rubella vaccine. This made her vulnerable to more diseases, challenging the Kamble family.
Healthcare worker Shubhangi Kamble from Arjunwad says that instances of children missing their vaccination are rising rapidly. When she went to find out why this was happening in her village, Arjunwad, she saw that children fell sick during floods and heat waves. “This was the time that coincided with their vaccination schedule, and so many couldn’t get the vaccines,” she shared.
However, a delay in vaccination has caused more problems than she had anticipated.
“Almost every day, at least one parent dials me asking where they should get their children hospitalized,” she said.
Now, every rainfall brings a health issue for Komal’s daughter. “I am tired of going to the healthcare center to hear that my daughter is underweight or sick and can’t be given the vaccine,” Komal said, with frustration in her voice.
Meanwhile, with every climate disaster, it will become increasingly difficult for many families to complete the immunization in time. “I’ve been vaccinating children for over a decade, but things never got this difficult. We took vaccines to the last mile. Now, climate change is eroding progress,” said healthcare worker Kavita Magdum.
Sanket Jain is an independent journalist based in the Kolhapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was a 2019 People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, for which he documented vanishing art forms in the Indian countryside. He has written for Baffler, Progressive Magazine, Counterpunch, Byline Times, The National, Popula, Media Co-op, Indian Express and several other publications.
Wadi Rabah dunes at sunset / credit: Anastasia Pozdnyakova / Wikipedia
WADI RABAH, Palestine—On August 11, the Israel Civil Administration (ICA) is expected to discuss construction of the Nahal Rabah cemetery in the occupied West Bank. Experts and activists claim the cemetery, which was approved without an environmental survey, will disrupt the region’s biodiversity in addition to harming Palestinian land.
Last week, activists from the Israeli climate justice movement, One Climate, barricaded themselves to the head office of Chevra Kadisha, the Tel Aviv burial society promoting the cemetery’s construction in Nahal Rabah (or Wadi Rabah in Arabic). Chevra Kadisha is working in conjunction with the Israeli settlements of Elkana, Oranit, and the Samaria Regional Council, the governmental body overseeing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to build the burial site.
Led by an activist dressed as a gazelle—one of the main species at risk of losing their habitat in Wadi Rabah if development occurs—the One Climate group stormed the Chevra Kadisha office on July 26, demanding to meet with the company’s CEO, Rabbi Avraham Menela.
Israeli activists from Climate One attempted to block the head office of Chevra Kadisha, the Tel Aviv burial society promoting the cemetery’s construction in Nahal Rabah (or Wadi Rabah in Arabic) / credit: activists
“We will not leave until the CEO will provide us with an explanation as to why they are promoting a plan that seems purely geared to make profit off of field-burial plots,” said One Climate activist Tamar, who declined to give her last name. “While field burials are being phased out inside Israel, this cemetery might turn Israelis into settlers after their deaths.”
During the demonstration, activists emphasized the cemetery’s construction is part of a political agenda to create Jewish territorial contiguity between the city of Rosh Ha’ayin—in proximity to Wadi Rabah inside Historic Palestine (or modern-day Israel)—and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They said that would deepen the de-facto annexation of Area C, a region of the West Bank under full Israeli military control.
Chevra Kadisha, said the activists, is participating in the theft of Palestinian land in order to bury Jewish bodies—creating irreversible destruction in the name of Jewish supremacy.
One Climate was not able to meet with Menela on July 26, but Chevra Kadisha suggested activists call the firm to set up a meeting. One Climate contacted Chevra Kadisha to schedule a meeting, but the date hasn’t been established yet. Chevra Kadisha did not respond to Toward Freedom’s requests for comment on the cemetery’s construction as well as on the opposition.
Map of Wadi Rabah area in occupied Palestine, abutting the Mediterranean Sea / credit: Estelle Orelle / ResearchGate
A Sensitive Ecological Habitat Under Threat
Wadi Rabah is part of the central ecological corridor between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is considered a sensitive ecological habitat, filled with diverse animals and plants. It is also located on occupied Palestinian land, expropriated in the 1980s.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, explained the area is a Mediterranean hotspot of particular environmental concern because the region’s biodiversity has become rare and endangered due to a changing climate.
Qumsiyeh emphasized the area must be protected, given it is a passageway for millions of migratory birds.
Quarry Splits Palestine
The cemetery isn’t the only construction in development in Wadi Rabah. Israel’s Ministry of Defense is promoting a settlement industrial zone and the expansion of the Hanson Israel quarry, a subsidiary of German company HeidelbergCementAG. The ICA, which oversees all civilian matters in the West Bank and operates under the Defense Ministry, did not respond to press inquiries regarding these building proposals.
The existing quarry in Wadi Rabah was built on about 148 acres of Palestinian land, including private land belonging to al-Zawiya, a Palestinian village home to over 6,000 people in the West Bank. In February 2019, Israeli authorities seized an additional 24 acres of private Palestinian land belonging to the village of Rafat, which is now the site of the proposed quarry expansion. While located in Area C, the quarry was built on the Israeli side of the apartheid wall, the barrier dividing the West Bank and historic Palestine. The strategic placement of the quarry encloses it inside historic Palestine, cutting off al-Zawiya and Rafat residents from their agricultural lands.
Christoph Beumelburg, communication director at HeidelbergCementAG, told Toward Freedom that the quarry expansion is ongoing and nothing is finalized yet.
“We are confident that all regulations and processes are in coherence with applicable law within this license extension application process, including all environmental studies,” Beumelburg said.
‘Way to Control Land’
Yet, according to Moshe Perlmuter of the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), it isn’t possible to sustainably develop Wadi Rabah.
“You can’t build something that won’t cause damage in this place,” Perlmuter said. “If you build inside [Wadi Rabah], you make the natural area smaller and gazelles, especially, need a very wide area to live.”
For Qumsiyeh, the building plans in Wadi Rabah—especially the cemetery—are just another Israeli colonization attempt.
“These grave settlements are a way to control land and territory.”
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.
Top, left to right: Mumia Abu Jamal, Julian Assange and Alex Saab. Bottom, left to right: Leonard Peltier, Rev. Joy Powell and Veronza Bowers / photo illustration: Multipolarista
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Multipolarista.
The United States constantly accuses its adversaries of holding political prisoners, while insisting it has none of its own. But for its entire history, the U.S. government has used incarceration of its political opponents as a tool to crush dissent and advance the interests of economic elites.
Well-known cases are those entrapped or framed in U.S. national security state sting operations, or imprisoned with extreme sentences for a minor offense because of their political activism, such as Black revolutionary George Jackson.
Each period of struggle by the working class and oppressed peoples against ruling-class control results in some activists locked up for their revolutionary work. “Political prisoner” has often meant those revolutionaries jailed for fighting their national oppression, as is the case with a great number of Black Panthers.
In contrast, a century ago, most political prisoners in the United States were Marxists, labor organizers, and anti-war activists, such as Joe Hill, Eugene Debs, and Big Bill Haywood.
Today, the U.S. national security state considers its most dangerous enemies those who expose its crimes at home and abroad.
There are also many thousands of incarcerated people who never received a fair trial, or were innocent of the crimes they have been jailed for. A high percentage of them are non-white, peoples subject to second-class citizenship in the United States. A number are executed, such as Troy Davis, or spend their whole lives in prison.
While the United States represents just over 4 percent of the world’s population, it holds approximately 20 percent of its prisoners. Black people are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites.
The following list of political prisoners currently detained by the U.S. government categorizes them into seven groups:
national security state employees and reporters locked up for publicizing blatant government criminality
representatives of foreign governments that Washington seeks to overthrow who were imprisoned for “violating” illegal unilateral U.S. sanctions
Black, Indigenous, and Latinx revolutionaries fighting for the rights of their peoples
Arabs and Muslims targeted after 9/11
prisoners detained in the Guantánamo torture center without charges
women locked up for defending themselves against violent attacks
environmental activists
1. Journalists and National Security State Employees Exposing Illegal U.S. Surveillance Operations and War Crimes
A number of whistleblowers in the United States have previously been imprisoned or are wanted. These have included:
Julian Assange is a renowned journalist and editor of WikiLeaks who was arrested in 2019 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had political asylum since 2012. In April 2022, a British judge ordered Assange extradited to the United States to face up to 175 years in prison for publishing truthful information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has indicted Assange under the Espionage Act, even though he published the same information as did the New York Times and Washington Post.
Researcher Mark Weisbrot explained in 2017, “Julian Assange is a political prisoner. … His crime, and that of WikiLeaks, has been the practice of journalism, and particularly in defense of human rights and civil liberties. … Assange and WikiLeaks’ real offense was to expose the crimes of the most powerful people in the world.”
Daniel Hale has been imprisoned since 2019. He was sentenced to 45 months for releasing documents showing U.S. military drone strikes in Afghanistan largely killed innocent people. Hale participated in the drone program while in the Air Force and NSA from 2009 to 2013, and later became an outspoken critic and a defender of whistle blowers.
Hale is believed to have been the source material for The Drone Papers. The documentary National Bird documents whistleblowers in the U.S. drone assassination program. For his truth-telling, Hale received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence and the Blueprint for Free Speech International Whistleblowing Prize. Chris Hedges has written about his case.
Joshua Schulte, a former hacker employed by the CIA, was blamed for releasing two billion pages of secret CIA data, known as Vault 7, to WikiLeaks. Vault 7 programs were CIA techniques used to compromise Wifi networks, hack into Skype, defeat anti-virus software, hack Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices, and commandeer the guidance systems in cars.
Schulte has been imprisoned since 2018 and faces up to 80 years, in brutal conditions similar to those endured by Assange today.
Ana Belén Montes was a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst who alerted Cuba of U.S. plans of aggression. She was arrested in 2001, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, and was held in solitary confinement in Fort Worth, Texas for most of her 21 years behind bars.
Montes told the judge, “I consider that the policy of our government towards Cuba is cruel and unjust, deeply unfriendly; I considered myself morally obligated to help the Island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it. We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to define its own destiny, its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate. … how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders should not be and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let them decide how they want to conduct their internal affairs.”
2. Foreigners Imprisoned for ‘Violating’ Illegal U.S. Sanctions on Their Countries
Mun Chol Myong is a North Korean was extradited and imprisoned in the United States on March 20, 2021. Mun was arrested in Malaysia in May 2019 after a Washington, DC judge issued a warrant for his arrest. His supposed “crime” of conspiracy and money laundering in fact consisted of supplying needed goods to the DPRK by circumventing U.S. sanctions on the country.
A top Justice Department official claimed foreigners who have never been in the United States can be extradited to it for violating domestic laws. The United States has enforced a blockade against North Korea since 1950, the start of the U.S. war on Korea, designed to cripple its economic and social development.
Alex Saab, a Venezuelan diplomat, was jailed on June 12, 2020 in Cabo Verde on orders of the United States. He was then seized by U.S. agents and brought to a Miami prison on October 16, 2021.
As a diplomat, Saab has immunity from detention based on the UN Vienna Convention of 1961. The UN Human Rights Commission and other international human rights defenders have denounced his extradition. The National Lawyers Guild calls for Saab’s immediate release.
Simón Trinidad (Ricardo Palmera) was a long-time leader in mass movements for social change in Colombia, and is a top negotiator for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In 2003, he was sent to Ecuador to make contact with UN official James Lemoyne, as part of efforts to revive peace talks with the Colombian government, and begin communication on the exchange of prisoners of war.
He was captured in Ecuador in 2004 and then extradited to the U.S. on charges of narco-trafficking and kidnapping, and subjected to four separate trials, due to repeated mistrials. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 60 years at the Florence “Supermax” prison in Colorado.
Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer and deputy chair of the board of Chinese tech giant Huawei, was imprisoned in Canada in 2018 on a U.S. extradition request, after Washington accused her company of misleading British bank HSBC over its business dealings in Iran, thereby violating its illegal unilateral sanctions. Meng was released in September 2021.
3. Fighters for Their People’s National Oppression Against Second-Class Citizenship
Many Black political prisoners in the United States were targets of the police state’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1960s and ’70s, when the FBI sought to destroy the movement for Black freedom.
As journalist Glen Ford explained, “If you attempt to lead Black people on an independent political path, the U.S. state will seek to neutralize you, imprison you, or kill you. If you exercise your right to defend yourself, and your people, from the oppressive arm of the state, they make you into an outlaw, and hunt you down.”
The FBI said it goals in COINTELPRO were to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize,” adding that “no opportunity must be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques … for maximum effectiveness … and a final goal should be to prevent the long range growth of militant black organizations, especially among youth.”
This police state operation against Black liberation resulted in at least 38 Black Panther Party members being killed, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, with hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges for their armed self-defense actions, several for more than 45 years.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most prominent former Black Panther political prisoner. In 1981, COINTELPRO style, he was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia cop. Judge Albert Sabo, who ruled in his case and in his appeals, was heard by a court reporter to state “I’m going to help them fry the ni**er.” Black jurors were excluded. Witnesses were bribed and threatened to lie on the stand. Documents were hidden in the state prosecutor’s office.
Leonard Peltier was an activist in the American Indian Movement (AIM) whose goal was to organize Indigenous communities to stand up for their rights. Sentenced to life as a result of a COINTELPRO operation, he has been imprisoned for 46 years for killing two FBI agents. Peltier participated in the AIM encampments on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where a 1975 shootout instigated by the FBI occurred.
Some 64 Native Americans, most with ties to AIM, were murdered. Their deaths went uninvestigated by the FBI. Evidence exonerating Peltier in the FBI case was withheld by the FBI. In his appeals, the government admitted it had no evidence he killed the two FBI agents, suppressed evidence proving this, and fabricated other “evidence.”
The other AIM members tried for the killings were exonerated in trial by reason of self-defense. One prosecutor admitted, “Your honor, we do not know who killed those agents. Further, we don’t know what participation, if any, Mr. Peltier had in it.”
Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the American Association of Jurists, and 54 Congresspeople, among many others, have called for his freedom. The film “Incident at Ogala,” produced by Robert Redford, and the best-selling book “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement” made the case widely known. More information can be found at the websites whoisleonardpeltier.info and Peltier’s Prison Writings.
Mutulu Shakur, of the Republic of New Afrika movement, participated in presentations to the UN on discrimination experienced by Black communities, and by 1970 a target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltration. He helped free Assata Shakur from prison in 1979, and she now has a bounty on her head.
In 1988 he was convicted of conspiracy related to a 1981 robbery where a guard and two police officers were killed, and sentenced to 60 years. At no time did the evidence show that Mutulu Shakur killed anyone.
He was also convicted for aiding in the prison escape of Assata Shakur, who has asylum in Cuba.
At two trials the evidence indicated others were responsible for the deaths (one became a government witness in return for a sentencing deal). The remaining defendants were acquitted for the murder allegations. More information can be found at mutulushakur.com and the Jericho Movement.
Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) was chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a Black Panther leader. FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover himself named H. Rap Brown – along with Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad, and Maxwell Stanford – as targets of COINTELPRO.
In a October 1971 standoff with police, he was shot and seized, and spent five years in Attica prison. From 1992 to 1997, the FBI closely surveilled Al-Amin, generating pages of 44,000 documents. In 2000, two sheriffs came to Al-Amin’s store with a warrant for failure to appear in court for a case later thrown out. Both were shot and one killed. Al-Amin was sentenced to life without parole, even though Otis Jackson confessed to the shootings. More information is available at whathappened2rap.com.
Veronza Bowers was an organizer in the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. He has been imprisoned for 49 years for the murder of a U.S. park ranger, on the word of two government informers. There were no eye witnesses and no other independent evidence. See more at veronza.org and prisonersolidarity.com.
Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (who died in prison in 2016) were leaders of the Black Panthers in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1960s, and targets of COINTELPRO. Both men were given life sentences on charges of killing a policeman. They were convicted on the testimony of a teenager who was beaten by the police and threatened with the electric chair if he did not incriminate Poindexter and Mondo.
Amnesty International has identified them as “prisoners of conscience.” Poindexter has been imprisoned for 52 years. The book “FRAMED: J. Edgar Hoover, Cointelpro and the Omaha Two story” and the documentary “Ed Poindexter & Mondo We Langa” offer more information.
Kamau Sadiki (Freddie Hilton), was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, and close to Assata Shakur. He has been imprisoned since 2002, for a 1971 murder of a police officer. Back in 1971, two witnesses failed to identify Kamau from a line-up, and there was no physical evidence that implicated Sadiki, so the case was closed.
In 2002 Kamau was re-arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing – only after he refused to work with the government to induce Assata Shakur to leave Cuba for another country, where they could seize her. See more at freekamau.com.
Joy Powell organized protests against police brutality and corruption, demanding accountability for its victims, which led her to be targeted by the Rochester Police Department. In 2006, Powell was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to 16 years for burglary and assault. No evidence or eyewitnesses linked her to the crime.
Alvaro Luna Hernandez (Xinachtli) is a Texas activist for Chicano rights and against police brutality. He was continually targeted by the police, who in 1996 attempted to arrest him on a spurious robbery charge that was later dismissed. The police used violence to arrest him, and Hernandez was sentenced to 50 years in prison on trumped up charges of threatening a sheriff while resisting arrest. More information can be found at freealvaro.net and prisonersolidarity.com.
more than half of all alleged terrorism cases involved the use of paid informants who were usually responsible for concocting the plots in collusion with the FBI. Sensationalistic media coverage of the most high-profile cases almost never made mention of the fact that these terrorist conspiracies were the work of FBI informants.
…
the FBI has built a network of more than 15,000 registered informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the bureau can then claim it is winning the War on Terror … the FBI engaged in a witch hunt, convicting hundreds of Muslims on pretext terrorism charges, even though the government knew that the defendants were not in communication with international terrorists, had not injured a single person or piece of property, and had no means to carry out a terrorist attack even if they wanted to.
For the government to tell the truth about the convictions would have undercut their own prosecutions, and exposed hundreds of Muslim convictions for the sham they were. No matter how innocent the government knew the defendants to be, it apparently decided that they had to publicly treat the defendants as the worst of the worst, or lose the fear factor which they had used so effectively to enact harsher laws.
Holy Land 5: Shukri Abu-Baker and Ghassan Elashi of the Holy Land Foundation were each sentenced in 2008 to 65 years in prison. Three others were sentenced to 13-20 years: Mufid Abdulqader, Mohammad El-Mezain (released and deported to Turkey in 2022) and Abdulrahman Odeh (released in 2020). All were imprisoned for giving more than $12 million to charitable groups in Palestine which funded hospitals and schools and fed the poor and orphans.
The U.S. government said these groups were controlled by Hamas, which it lists as a terrorist organization, even though it is the elected government of Gaza. Some of these charitable groups still received U.S. funds through USAID as late as 2006.
Testimony was given in the case by an Israeli government agent whose identity and evidence was kept secret from the defense. This marked the first time in U.S. legal history that testimony has been allowed from an expert witness with no identity, therefore making them immune from perjury. The book “Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five” details the case.
Aafia Siddiqui is a U.S.-educated Pakistani neuroscientist who came to the United States in 1990, then returned to Pakistan with her family in 2002. In 2003, she was kidnapped by U.S. and Pakistani agents and held in Bagram Air Base through 2008. She was convicted of attempted murder of her U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan in 2008—though she was the person shot—and sentenced to 86 years in prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The weapon she allegedly fired in the interrogation room did not have her fingerprints, nor was there evidence the gun was fired.
Four British parliamentarians wrote to President Barack Obama that “there was an utter lack of concrete evidence tying Dr Siddiqui to the weapon she allegedly fired at a U.S. officer,” and that she should be freed immediately. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark described Aafia’s plight as the “worst case of individual injustice I have ever witnessed.” More information is available at aafia.org and aafiamovement.com.
5. Arab/Muslim Prisoners Tortured and Locked Up Without Trial at Guantanamo
Since 2002, a total of 779 Muslim men and boys as young as 10 have been seized and held at Guantánamo, a military base in Cuban territory that is illegally occupied by the United States.
Washington claimed the prisoners are outside U.S. and international law, and thus do not have the rights of POWs. Nearly all of the prisoners were held without charge or trial. Many were tortured to produce a compliant “learned helplessness” – the goal of former U.S. slave-breaking.
Some detainees were even tortured to death. In 2003, 23 prisoners attempted suicide in a mass protest against their abuse.
The torture was directed by two psychologists, James E Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.
By any definition of political prisoner, most political prisoners in Cuba are at the U.S. military-torture center at Guantanamo.
Today there are still 36 prisoners, only 11 of whom have been charged with war crimes, while just two have been convicted – and by “military commissions,” which Amnesty International declared do not meet fair trial standards.
Another 20 have been approved for release but remain locked up. Five detainees are “forever prisoners,” held without charge or trial, but not to be released. The websites closeguantanamo.org and witnessagainsttorture.com and films The Report and The Mauritanian provide more information.
6. Women Fighting Patriarchal Sexist Violence
Nearly three in 10 women in the United States have endured male physical violence or stalking by a partner. Nearly one in five women are raped in their lifetime. Almost four women are killed a day by a male partner.
Half of all women murdered are killed by men they know intimately, yet hundreds of women are in prison for killing their abuser in self-defense.
The U.S. legal system treats these as individual cases, not for what it is: the systematic patriarchal violence against women as an oppressed group.
Marissa Alexander, a Black women from Florida, was sentenced to 20 years in 2013 for firing a warning shot inside her home to ward off her brutal husband, against whom she had an order of protection. Her affirmation that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law applied to her because she was defending herself was rejected. The same year, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin based on that same law. National protests finally freed her in 2017.
Fran Thompson was an environmental activist in Nebraska. She has been in jail for 30 years for murder, sentenced to life without parole. She had defended herself, killing a man who was threatening to sexually assault her after he broke into her home. She was also targeted because of her environmental work, and was not allowed to plea self-defense.
Thompson had taken on the prosecutor and local government during her activism, having organized against two big projects, an egg factory and a nuclear waste facility, which would have brought the county big profits.
Maddesyn George has been imprisoned since July 2020. She was given a 6.5-year sentence for defending herself from sexual assault by a white man. She is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes.
A number of environmental activists, animal rights supporters, and water protectors have challenged corporate abuses and have been jailed.
During the original so-called Green Scare, in the 1990s to early 2000s, the U.S. government sought to squash animal rights and environmental activism, acting in the interest of corporations that profit from damaging the earth.
A more recent series of jailings have specifically targeted people protesting against pipeline construction.
The following are political prisoners:
Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, a member of Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front was arrested in 2018 for his participation in setting fire to a slaughterhouse. Between 1995 and 2001, a group of Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front supporters caused more than $45 million in damages in a series of arsons. Dibee is imprisoned awaiting sentencing.
Marius Mason (formerly Marie Mason), a member of the Earth Liberation Front, was arrested in 2008 for an attack on a lab building at Michigan State University that was creating genetically modified organisms, with funding from mega-corporation Monsanto, the producer of Agent Orange.
Mason was also sentenced for damage to commercial logging equipment. No one was harmed by these actions. Mason’s 22 year-sentence is the longest yet for any of the Green Scare cases of those committing crimes against property of corporations.
Jessica Reznicek, of the Catholic Workers Movement, took action in 2016 to stop the environmentally destructive Dakota Access Pipeline by dismantling construction equipment and pipeline valves and setting fire to construction machinery. She would have been handed three years, but was sentenced to eight, with the added sentence for terrorism, even though no person was physically harmed.
Reznicek’s actions against private property were “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government,” meaning a person who takes direct action against an energy company can be treated as an enemy of the state. Reznicek explained, “What we did do was fight a private corporation that has run rampant across our country seizing land and polluting our nation’s water supply.”
The United States Government Has Political Prisoners
This list belies the myth that the United States has no political prisoners.
Political prisoners have no shared ideology. Standing for justice does not necessarily mean that one defends their political views; it means that one demands their freedom because they have been unjustly incarcerated.
Many hundreds of thousands of people have been unjustly incarcerated in the United States, but in these cases, it is clear that they were detained because of their political beliefs and activism, and that by definition makes them political prisoners.
