Potkin Azarmehr has tried to get some leading environmental groups involved in the campaign to save Lake Orumiyeh in northwest Iran, which has lost almost 60 percent of its surface area in the past two decades largely due to government actions, including damming and construction of a causeway.
Orumiyeh is the world’s third largest salt lake, and its disappearance would leave behind ten billion tons of salt and potentially displace millions of people. Recent protests in the region of the lake have been brutally suppressed.
Potkin writes:
With the above in mind, I started writing to the major environmental groups I knew of, i.e. Friends of the Earth, The UK Green Party and Greenpeace. The first two did not even reply to me, but Greenpeace UK told me to contact Greenpeace International, which I did…
Greenpeace International essentially said it could do nothing because it doesn’t have a presence in Iran.
Potkin calls this “pathetic.”
Even if Greenpeace is unable to take “direct action” inside Iran, because they have no offices in Iran, the Islamic Republic have many representations and centres of interest across Europe and the rest of the world where they can be targeted.
In conclusion what kind of a message does that send to dictatorships who are plundering the environment with impunity? If you want groups like Greenpeace off your back, simply make sure they don’t have a local office.
I can’t help being reminded of how much more focus there is on human rights violations in Israel and the West Bank than in many other parts of the world with far worse records– largely because Israel and the West Bank are far more open to journalists and human rights organizations.
To state the obvious, this doesn’t mean Israel should be more closed. It means that other countries should be more open. And it means that countries which stay closed to journalists, human rights groups and environmental activists should no longer get off the hook when it comes to international pressure.