by Anne Summers
I inspected the new office in Manaus with its already-impressive amount of equipment, including of course a good supply of inflatables, then Anne and I flew in the Fat Duck, Greenpeace’s small aquaplane, to Porto de Moz, a region in northern Brazil where anti-logging action was happening on a tributary of the Amazon. Greenpeace was there to support the local community who wanted to protect their lands from illegal logging. For the several hours it took us to travel the almost 900 kilometres, we skimmed above the dense vegetation. As someone who was an extremely nervous flyer then, I was amazingly relaxed, enjoying it even. We were more connected to earth than in a jetliner, I told myself, and that made it feel safer. As we came into land on the river we could see MV Veloz, the bright blue riverboat Greenpeace had chartered. The rest of the team was already on board. The local community had formed a barricade across the river, comprising approximately 50 boats, with some 400 people on board, that was intended to block the expected barge of illegal logs. We settled in to wait. I was only able to stay a couple of days, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to still be there if a confrontation happened. I admit to being nervous, scared even. We were well aware of the loggers’ reputation for violence. Many people had been murdered for trying to resist them. We were in a very isolated part of the Amazon basin. There were less than a handful of police in Porto de Moz, and we didn’t know if they would intervene if the loggers became violent. Everyone was tense, but we all knew better than to show it. Shipboard routine had to be adhered to and that mostly meant cooking, serving and cleaning up after the three meals each day. I did my best to be useful. Anne and I were by far the oldest people on board and we found we had lots to talk about, including (we were surprised to discover, since we were from different countries) that we were both taking the same brand of HRT.
That night we settled into the deep darkness of the river. It was still and, at first, quiet. Then we began to hear a noise that sounded like someone slapping themselves and, it turned out, that is exactly what it was. The people on the boats making up the barricade were slapping their skin each time a mosquito landed. We on the big blue boat, with our tropical-strength repellant, were protected but the locals had no such luxury. All night, until I eventually fell asleep, I could hear the gentle slaps. As soon as it was light, I noticed a number of small boats were heading towards us.
‘What is going on?’ I asked one of the crew.
‘They know we have a doctor on board.’
For the rest of the day, after patiently waiting their turn, the occupants of the next boat would come alongside and a child, or an old man, or anyone who needed medical assistance would be helped on board. Our doctor, a young woman, worked all day, bandaging, medicating, soothing. One old man had a machete gash so deep I wondered that his arm did not fall off. A number of children were feverish. I felt humbled and proud watching this. I had known of Greenpeace’s rescue efforts during Hurricane Mitch in 1998, when we’d sent the Rainbow Warrior to Nicaragua with clothes, food and medical supplies. I was to learn that although Greenpeace is not an aid organisation, it frequently helped out if needed. Our ships turned out to have many uses apart from chasing Japanese whalers. It was not a role we had sought and certainly not one that we had advertised, but we could not turn these people away, even though by the end of the day our own medical supplies were running low. We needed to be prepared in case of a violent reaction from the loggers. Then, as the light was fading, a new boat approached. On board was a young woman who was moaning. She was helped on board, but soon it was apparent that there was a problem. The doctor conferred with the action team. The RHIB jet boat was deployed, the engine revved up, the woman was lowered onto the boat and, with the doctor and two young Greenpeace men beside her, they sped off into the gathering darkness.
The woman was miscarrying. The doctor said she needed urgent medical help, beyond what she could offer. There was no hospital anywhere near us but Porto de Moz, the small town about an hour’s fast ride up the river, had a clinic. The fit young men did not hesitate and I found myself strangely moved by the way they quickly readied the inflatable and prepared to take off in near darkness. When they got there the clinic was closed. The Greenpeace team did their best, waking up the town trying to find help, but there was none to be had. The young woman lost her baby. I have seldom seen young men more dejected and defeated than these two actions guys when they returned. To me, they were heroes, but they were more than that. They were the kind of men who could tend a miscarrying young woman one evening and, a few days later, engage in an extraordinary act of bravery that saved as many as 80 lives when the confrontation finally came.
It happened a few hours after I left. After three days the Fat Duck had picked me up and sped me back to Manaus, so I missed the arrival of the barge of logs being pushed by a tugboat. I am indebted to Anne Dingwall for this account of what happened next. The tugboat was captained by Andre Campos, whose brother was the mayor of nearby Porto de Moz, and since it was unable to proceed due to the barricade, Campos secured the tug to trees on the riverbank with cables, leaving the barge drifting perilously close to the boats forming the barricade. There followed a tense discussion between Campos and community leaders, who wanted it moved further upstream. Campos agreed to secure the cables more tightly, but would not move the barge. It was agreed they would negotiate further the next morning. However, just after midnight, when almost everyone was asleep, Campos released the cables and began trying to crash through the barricade. David Logie and Todd Southgate, the Greenpeace action guys, were having a few drinks on the deck of the Veloz when they heard the sound of the tug starting. Yelling a warning to the small boats to get out of the way, the two young men deployed the jet boat, and at full throttle rammed the barge, forcing it into the riverbank. The Veloz then started up and used its weight to keep the tug pinned to the bank. There was some fighting, several people were injured, but the tugboat’s keys were seized and the blockade was ended.
Subsequently Andre Campos was arrested, the barge with its illegal cargo of over 100 logs was seized, and its owners fined a substantial sum. Two years later, the Federal Verde para Sempre (Green Forever) Extractive Reserve for sustainable use of Amazon rainforest resources was established. The local population of approximately 2250 families had won the right to their land. It was a low-key action by Greenpeace standards, conducted far away from the media spotlight, but it succeeded in assisting a local community and it marked another milestone in the battle for the Amazon. I was sorry I was not there to witness it.
In October 2001, I had gone to Prague to attend Forum 2000, an exclusive invitation-only five-day event hosted by President Vaclev Havel, the formerly imprisoned political dissident, poet and playwright, who was now the President of the Czech Republic. It was rare for me to represent the organisation in a gathering such as this, but the ED in Greenpeace’s Czech office was insistent that it would help their standing if the international Board Chair attended. Forum 2000 had been founded five years earlier as a joint initiative of Havel, Japanese philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel. It was designed to address human rights, civil society, and other issues relevant to the globalising 21st century, and the guest list each year included famous political, cultural and religious figures. Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger and the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng had attended in previous years. I was both excited and slightly in awe of what awaited me.
I’d flown in from Amsterdam on 14 October and discovered that another invitee, Francis Fukuyama the famous political scientist, was on the same flight. We’d been given VIP treatment upon arrival at Prague Airport, escorted from the plane before the other passengers and, bypassing immigration, taken straight to the tarmac, where a line of cars waited. Following what I thought were my directions, I started to climb into the first car, a silver Mercedes. There was some shouting, which I could not understand, from the men who had met us, and I was roughly pulled from the Merc and pushed towards the ca
r behind it, a small battered Skoda. The Mercedes was for Dr Fukuyama. A little over a month earlier, the terrorist attacks on the United States seemed to disprove Fukuyama’s celebrated thesis that we had arrived at ‘the end of history’. He had posited in his best-selling book of the same name that the end of the Soviet era, dramatised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, showed ideology no longer mattered. We had reached ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. The West had won, in other words. His thesis was now looking a little shaky. Nevertheless, he got the good ride. He was a man, and this was indisputably a man’s world. Only nine of the 50 invited guests were women. There might have been notional equality of the sexes prior to the Velvet Revolution that had brought Havel to power in Czechoslovakia, but as I discovered during the Forum, it was no longer in evidence, seemingly discarded as just one more superfluous communist value. These Eastern European flunkeys made no effort to disguise their hostility towards me, even when a couple of them came to get me for my audience with the President.
Havel had asked to see me. He was very interested in Australia and had visited several times. I’d joined the throng in an old pub in The Rocks a year or so earlier when the visiting President had expressed a wish to meet writers and journalists in a relaxed environment. It had been too crowded to get close to him that evening, but now it was just the two of us. He looked just like his photographs, but he seemed slightly harried, which was not surprising given the big crowd of important guests, and that he was having to deal with the last-minute cancellation by some of the American participants, a few short weeks after the 11 September attacks. We were in a small anteroom in the lavish castle that could not have been further away, in style and comfort, from the prison cells where he had spent more than five years as a political prisoner. Havel was polite and tried to engage me but our meeting was perfunctory and awkward. He wanted to talk about Australia’s Aboriginal people but his English was poor, my Czech non-existent, and no one had thought to provide an interpreter. We gave up after a few stilted moments, and I was escorted away by the same grim-looking men who had forced me to ride in from the airport in the crappy little car while the male guest travelled in style.
The Forum took place in the magnificent Prague Castle, supposedly the largest castle in the world, dating from the ninth century, and displaying a wide array of architectural styles. We met in lavish chambers where the walls were gold, the furniture baroque and the chandeliers crystal. It reminded me of Versailles. My fellow guests included Shimon Peres, F.W. de Klerk, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of the Jordanian royal family, José Ramos-Horta, and several dozen other current or up-and-coming world leaders, whose names I was not yet familiar with.7 In mid-October all of us were still trying to digest the shocking events of the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September that was the reason for many of the American guests cancelling. Jeffrey Sachs, the once conservative economist who’d become an activist against poverty in developing countries, was beamed in via video-link. Bianca Jagger who was supposed to be on a panel with me did not show and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been Ronald Reagan’s (and the first woman) US Ambassador to the United Nations, was another who was afraid to fly. I was asked to deliver a keynote in her stead. But to everyone’s amazement, Bill Clinton came.
I’d been in Toronto, intending to fly to New York later that day, when the planes struck. Greenpeace had been founded in September 1971 and we were planning to celebrate 30 years of activism and innumerable victories in defence of the planet with a series of events, including some very high-level fundraising activities, in New York. The Rainbow Warrior was sailing up the east cost of the US, headed for the Chelsea Piers where we were going to hold a fancy cocktail party on 12 September. I tried without success that crazy, scary day to reach Gerd Leipold, who was somewhere on the west coast; we had planned to meet up in New York that evening. Once we connected, the next day, we had to try to digest the implications for Greenpeace of this unprecedented act of terrorism. We would need to find the right words to console and reassure our American colleagues, to set the tone to guide the rest of the organisation as it began to grapple with this new kind of war, and its yet-unknown consequences. Before long, the Americans would dictate new maritime rules that would restrict our free movement on and off our ships wherever they docked around the world, political surveillance would increase, as would the aggressive prosecution of our activists, especially around our opposition to nuclear issues such the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence system.
The day before the attack, on 10 September, I’d found myself surrounded by the Canberra Press Gallery as I flew from Sydney to Los Angeles, en route to Toronto. John Howard was flying commercial for some reason, so the travelling party was all aboard that Qantas jet. I was chatting with Michelle Grattan when they were all summonsed to the front of the plane; the Prime Minister wanted to talk to them. When they returned some 30 minutes later, Grattan told me that Howard had briefed them that he was excising Christmas Island from Australia. They would file the story when we landed at Los Angeles in about ten hours time. In future, no people arriving by boat at this remote Indian Ocean Island that, until now, had been part of Australia, would be able to claim asylum. As we flew across the Pacific, we pondered the politics of this extraordinary move, this pitiless declaration of war on some of the most vulnerable people on earth, none of us knowing how much worse it was going to get for them when the world changed so profoundly the very next day.
Bill Clinton had been in Australia, holidaying in Port Douglas in Far North Queensland, at the time of the attacks. The Australian military had helped get him back to the US while commercial flights remained restricted, but he was not grounding himself in the aftermath. His presence in Prague that day was an exemplary act of courage. There are several things for which I cannot forgive Bill Clinton: the pardoning of financial fugitive Marc Rich, nor the abuse of his power with the exploitation of a young woman’s emotions in the Monica Lewinsky episode, but he was absolutely a hero for making this trip to the Forum. Until January that year he had been President of the United States, and while he was now technically just a private citizen, albeit one who would forever be able to use the title President, his very presence was a powerful act of moral leadership. He sat at the head of a simple table in that extravagantly baroque gilt and mirrored room as dozens of us delegates crammed around. He spoke in those low, slow tones of his so that we had to lean forward to catch his words. He consoled us, he empathised with the shock most of us were still feeling and, most important of all, he encouraged us not to lose sight of the issues that had brought us all to Prague. Bill Clinton has a remarkable way with words, and that day those of us who were privileged to be present experienced the kind of healing that made him such a potent politician.
At my session, there were just two others at the table: Vandana Shiva the Indian environmentalist and F.W. de Klerk, the former President of South Africa. He was the man who on 11 February 1990 had released Nelson Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment. In 1993, he and Mandela had jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize. De Klerk was that rare kind of man in politics: both brave and creative. He had shocked his colleagues, and the world, on 2 February 1990 by announcing the end of apartheid and the introduction of democracy to South Africa. He was already preparing the ground for Mandela’s release nine days later.
I had read Allister Sparks’s long and illuminating article in the New Yorker, in April 1994, that described the lengthy talks and processes that preceded Mandela’s release. Most of them were conducted outside the prison, in government buildings, including an initial meeting between de Klerk and Mandela in the Prime Minister’s office, even in ministers’ private homes. (Mandela recalled later being offered his first alcoholic drink in 22 years at one of these gatherings; it was a creamed sherry, and he said it tasted like nectar.) De Klerk understood that South Africa’s—indeed the world’s—most fa
mous prisoner would need time to adjust to the outside world after his long incarceration. He arranged for Mandela, who by now had been transferred to a prison in Paarl, not far from Cape Town, to be driven around, to towns and to the countryside, to see the way the world had changed. He was taken, in what must have been an unconscious act of ironic cruelty, to Stellenbosch. It was the nearest town, but it was still the ideological centre of apartheid. The whole thing was a very risky operation. Mandela’s release might have been thwarted if word had got out that it was about to happen. Once, at a petrol station, Mandela spoke to the attendant who appeared to recognise him.8
