Oil mining in Siberia: Indigenous people demand German environmental standards

With oil drums, smoking torches and a flexible pipe as a "pipeline” the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) and the Institut für Ökologie und Aktions-Ethnologie (infoe) were present in Berlin on Thursday during the signing of the agreements on the construction of the Baltic pipeline and pointed out the dangers attending the extraction of oil and gas in Siberia for the indigenous people living there. "In order to decrease the already massive damage to the environment with devastating consequences for the 40 indigenous communities in the far north of Russia, the strict German environment standards must be adhered to” said the GfbV expert for the states of the Russian Federation, Sarah Reinke, during the imaginative human rights campaign. The means of existence of the indigenous peoples, who still manage their life in their traditional way, are immediately threatened or have already been destroyed.

Many indigenous people live as subsistence farmers from hunting wild animals, fishing, reindeer breeding or collecting wild fruit and mushrooms, emphasised the spokesman of the Nivkh from the island of Sakhalin, Alexei Limanso. He is at present in Germany, looking for support for the native people. "For decades oil and gas have been mined in Siberia without any regard for nature – on the island of Sakhalin too. There the damage to the environment is already serious” adds Johannes Rohr from infoe. "Between eight and ten percent of the Russian oil escapes out of leaky pipelines and pollutes soil and water.”

The people become ill from the consumption of poisoned fish, meat or water. The expectation of life of the native peoples, who number some 200,000, lies at least ten years below that of the Russian average. The number of rivers, streams and lakes which are either highly contaminated or already biologically dead is rising, while the stocks of fish are constantly dropping. Reindeer breeders are always finding poisonous oil patches on their pasturelands.

The contracts between the Russian gas company Gazprom and the German energy suppliers EON and Wintershall for the joint construction of the pipeline were signed in the German capital in the presence of the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The BASF subsidiary Wintershall has a cooperation agreement with the Russian state company Gazprom in the opening up and mining operations in the enormous natural gas field belonging to "South Russian” in the west-Siberian lowlands and is called on by the GfbV to involve representatives of the indigenous peoples in every step of the project planning and to make compensation payments to the indigenous peoples for the loss of their land.

Germany receives with about 35 milion tons some 30 percent of its imported raw oil and with 35 thousand million cubic metres some 40 percent of its imported natural gas from Russia.