Rosek dedicated to wildlife

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!