This is John Seed and I'd like to ask for your help.
Two Americans are among the 8 people detained for chaining themselves
to a crane and other equipment to stop the loading of rainforest
timbers onto a barge on the Baram River, Sarawak a couple of weeks ago.
Five of the 8 including the two Americans pleaded guilty and have
been sentenced to 2 months jail. The other three have pleaded not guilty
and are awaiting trial in a week.
There has been lots of media in Australia and the home country of the
other jailed activists (UK, Germany), but very little as yet in the US
Background info on the issue is found on this item and also a press release
uploaded to rainfor.general a few days ago by peg:rainfaus
Pam Wellner or the Rainforest Action Network will be uploading press releases
to this conference starting in the next day or two, stay tuned.
What I'd like to ask you to do is to call your local media (newspapers, radio,
TV) and see if you can interest them in the story. if you can, get their
fax number and print off the press releas(es) from rainfor.general and
fax these to them.
Please stress that 1. this is the first time that people (white
people anyway) have been jailed for so long for rainforest
protests, 2. Two Americans are in jail after obvious
miscarriage of justice (see Anja's press release on
rainfor.timber); 3. (for TV stations) footage will be
available from CNN on the 29th or so, just before the next trials.
Please clip any newspaper reports that result and send them to PAM at
RAN and also try to let us know of Any radio or TV stations that take
this up.
for the Earth - John Seed