Rosek dedicated to wildlife

Bambang M., The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta

The name of environmental crusader Rosek Nursahid is heard almost every time people discuss wildlife protection in Indonesia.

Rosek is the founder and director of ProFauna, a non- governmental organization dedicated to wildlife protection. Through this organization he has tried to lift the veil on the illegal trade in protected species in Indonesia, having realized that it poses a serious threat to Indonesia's wildlife sustainability.

One of the organization's activities was an investigation into the trading of turtles on Bali between 1999 and 2001.

Rosek said that during the investigation, it was discovered that the number of turtles killed in Bali was the world's greatest. Consequently, ProFauna started to campaign against the illegal trade in turtles.

Thanks to great pressure from ProFauna, in cooperation with international diving organization PADI-Europe and hundreds of foreign travel agencies, the Indonesian government finally took stringent measures against the practice.

As a result, illegal turtle trade and killing in Bali is now reduced by 80 percent. "As long as you have sufficient motivation and courage, a complex problem like the turtle trade in Bali can also be solved," Rosek said.

His great love of animals is a big asset in the attempt to save Indonesia's wildlife, which has shown an increasing vulnerability toward extinction.

"When I was studying in an Islamic boarding school in Liquisa, East Timor (now independent Timor Leste), a Muslim cleric taught me that cricket-fighting was sinful and prohibited," he said. That has remained in his memory even today.

While studying at the school of biology at state Brawijaya University, Malang, East Java, he once had a quarrel with a friend who experimented on animals for his thesis.

Rosek thought his friend was torturing rats and rabbits by running an electric current through these animals to observe their pain threshold.

For him, the experiment was not important for human beings.

"What's the use of measuring the pain threshold of animals?" he asked.

ProFauna, whose head office is located in Malang, East Java, has, since 1998, had a well-organized membership system. Its total membership is now around 2,000 people from many places in Indonesia and abroad, including Indonesians in musical groups Slank and Cokelat.

ProFauna is also a member of the Special Survival Network (SSN), an international coalition committed to the implementation of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna).

Although Indonesia has Law No. 5/1990 on the conservation of biological natural resources and their ecosystem, and bans trading in protected animals, in reality illegal trading in such animals can easily be found at any bird market in Indonesia's major cities.

"When I visited Pramuka market, Jakarta, I was shocked to see how easy it was to purchase a protected animal," said Rosek, father of Nada Prinia and Canakya Galerita.

Reacting to this state of affairs, he contacted a number of environmental organizations to join forces with them in handling problems related to the illegal trade in protected animals, but to no avail.

Finally, along with his wife, Made Astuti, and a friend, Eko Hardianto, Rosek set up an organization for the protection of wildlife, Animal Conservation for Life (KSBK), on December 23, 1994.

In 2003, this organization, which has the Javan black or gray long-tailed monkey as its symbol, was renamed ProFauna to make it easier to remember.

Since it was first established, KSBK consistently provided advocacy on wildlife conservation, although it did not receive huge financial support.

Strangely, owing to this consistency and lack of financial support, many people joined the organization and showed their militancy in implementing the organization's programs.

To ensure that it was a credible environmental organization, KSBK received training from one of the world's most famous -- Greenpeace.

"They sent some people to train us in organizing demonstrations and campaigns and also in building a professional organization," Rosek said.

ProFauna has also applied the methods used by a number of international environmental organizations. It has, for example, adopted investigative methods from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and a fund-raising model introduced by the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA).

As the organization has a serious intent, ProFauna has scored several outstanding achievements. For investigative purposes it infiltrated one of its members into a mafia-like network that was smuggling orangutans out of Indonesia.

As a result, in June 2003, action by ProFauna, in cooperation with the Jakarta Police and the directorate for the protection of forest and natural resources, led to the arrest of the leader of the smuggling network.

Rosek and ProFauna members have also documented the process of catching birds with bent beaks from eastern Indonesia and the route they take to the bird market, in a film titled Flying without wings.

Today, he added, a national airline tightly scrutinizes the procedure for dispatching birds from eastern Indonesia. The Indonesian Military commander has also banned a warship from carrying these birds. At the same time, the government officially stopped the export of these birds last year.

Other activities that ProFauna has been engaged in include surveys on the trade in primates in Sulawesi and on the trade in primate meat in Lampung, Sumatra, an investigation into zoos in Indonesia and an investigation into the trade in bears and their body parts in Indonesia.

These investigations, Rosek said, were top of the organization's priority list as they produced irrefutable evidence.

There are risks entailed, of course, in carrying out these activities to protect wildlife. Rosek and his colleagues in ProFauna have often received physical threats and been terrorized.

In 1995, for example, he was kidnapped by the military for two days because KSBK protested the destruction of an urban forest in Malang for the construction of an upmarket housing complex.

He said that the urban forest was home to about 30 bird species. The next year, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at his house.

Last year, members of ProFauna were beaten black and blue by hoodlums from Pramuka market as they confiscated protected animals on sale there.

Rosek's mobile phone also receives short texts containing terror messages. "I would like to change the number but it would cause problems for my friends, who usually contact me on this number. As wildlife protection entails great personal risk, few non-governmental organizations are interested in getting involved in this undertaking.

"What ProFauna has been doing is highly risky as it interferes with other people's lives," said Rosek, who is also one of the founders of Petungsewu Animal Rescue Center, Malang.

Now Rosek and ProFauna have received wider recognition.

"He is my hero," said Willie Smits, director of The Gibbon Foundation, an organization also devoted to wildlife protection in Indonesia. Thanks to support from the Gibbon Foundation, ProFauna now has its own environmental education center, the ProFauna-Wildlife Education Center (P-WEC), in Petungsewu, Malang.

Despite receiving frequent threats, Rosek has consistently advocated the protection of wildlife in Indonesia. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) has warned that many animal species face the threat of extinction in Indonesia.

This warning has become a main concern for Rosek. "I don't care: If it is time for me to die, then I'm ready to die," he said, without the slightest trace of fear.

Keep up the good work, Rosek!