On Wednesday 18th September, 30 Greenpeace activitists took the Arctic Sunrise to campaign peacefully against Arctic oil drilling. The Russian authorities illegally seized the ship at gunpoint and have put all the activists in custody for 2 months without trial. This is supposedly to look into possible piracy charges, though of course the piracy was in the Russians' breaking of international maritime law by taking a vessel in international waters. It seems like a blatant threat to intimidate anyone else hoping to protest at Arctic oil exploration.
This is my personal blog, not a Greenpeace one, but I feel very strongly about this issue (as you may have gathered), so if you'd like to help, please write to the Russian Ambassador in London here, urging Russia to release the activists. If you'd like to share the link on Twitter, the hashtag is the title of the poem...
#freethearctic30
Small shoal,
thirty strong,
peaceful but determined
makes waves in Arctic waters
to save them from the sticky-black greed
of oil barons and boyars,
Gazprom’s oligarchic puppeteers
pulling whose strings
to toss aside the law of the sea,
summoning coastguards like mercenaries –
no pravda with these privateers –
to steal a ship at gun-and-knifepoint
then spill barrels of slick hypocrisy
as trumped-up piracy claims,
netting their catch to store
for months in cages without trial –
but these fish don’t just jerk on hooks,
they are the alumni of a worldwide school,
an academy of defiance
with voices (4 million and more)
unfettered by incarceration –
and they will be heard.
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