The EconomistFebruary 24th 2018 Europe 452
Lake BaikalOne step forward, another one back
O
N AN early winter morning, with
temperatures below –20oC and a
fierce wind whipping off the water, Vasily
Sutula, the stern, moustachioed director
of a nature reserve on the shores of Lake
Baikal, happily surveyed a dozen young
volunteers. The youngsters declared the
daydubak, slang for a freeze deeper than
the standard Russian word for cold,
kholod, can convey. Yet they had come to
work nonetheless. Coats zipped, they set
off for the forest to clear dead trees.
The volunteers’ presence is just one
small sign of shifting tides in the battle for
Baikal, which holds a fifth of the world’s
unfrozen fresh water. Environmentalists
won a big victory with the closure in 2013
of the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill (BPPM),
a belching behemoth that had dirtied the
waters for decades. Yet even as the pollu-
tion from the mill has waned, tourist
flows have waxed, creating new pres-
sures on an ecosystem thatUNESCO
warns is “under significant stress”. En-
couragingly, veteran activists note that
environmental awareness has been
steadily rising, especially among younger
generations brought up to view the lake
as a treasure to be protected. “First of all,
we see that it concerns the kids now,”
says Mr Sutula, who has headed the
reserve for nearly 20 years.
Signs of the shifting attitudes can be
seen all along the lake. “When we started
volunteering in 2009, few understood
what it was and why we were doing it,”
says Natalia Tugutkhonova of the Great
Baikal Trail, the group that organised the
outing at the Baikalsky Reserve. Former
BPPM employees now help make eco-
friendly paper from algae. Even the local
chapter of the BlackBears, a Russian
bikers’ club, has joined the green cam-
paign, launching patrols along the lake
against “piggishness”.To preserve the lake, environmental-
ists still have their work cut out. The
number of tourists visiting Irkutsk Ob-
last, the main entrypoint to Baikal, has
tripled in the past decade, from some
500,000 to over 1.5m last year. To serve
the newcomers, hotels and campgrounds
have “popped up like mushrooms after
the rain”, says Oleg Timoshkin, a biolo-
gist at the Russian Academy of Sciences
in Irkutsk. Many lack systems to process
the waste they generate, and so dump it
into the lake.
Nature has also bristled at the influx
of outsiders. Specialists reckon that hu-
man run-off contributed to the lake’s
latest crisis: the sudden and widespread
appearance of a new form of algae, spiro-
gyra. Hundreds of tons of the slimy stuff
have been infecting the pristine waters
and washing up in clumps on the shore.
Researchers worry that it may have
devastating effects on a delicate ecosys-
tem that is home to over 3,500 plant and
animal species. “No one knows where
the limit is,” says Sergei Shapkhaev, a
local ecologist. “No one knows what kind
of immune system Baikal has.”IRKUTSK
Victories and problems in the quest to clean up the world’s deepest lakeMONGOLIARUSSIAUlan-UdeSeverobaykalskCheremkhovoSite of Baikal
Pulp and
Paper MillIrkutskL
akeBaikalBaikalsky
Reserve150 km
RUSSIAfederal prosecutorin Karlsruhe, in the
hope that his torturers will one day face
justice in German courts. Working with the
European Centre for Constitutional and
Human Rights (ECCHR), a pressure group
in Berlin, and Anwar al-Bounni and Mazen
Darwish, two lawyers who spent years in
Syrian prisons before escaping to Ger-
many, the refugees have lodged criminal
complaints against several high-level offi-
cials for crimes against humanity. Their
statements are adding to a stack of evi-
dence that prosecutorsbegan compiling in- At first, the investigation looked into
violence against peaceful protesters. Later,
they started looking at war crimes and
opened a separate file for crimes commit-
ted by so-called Islamic State (IS).
Mr Ibrahim and his fellow activists are
turning to the German judiciary because
there is little chance that their torturers will
be prosecuted elsewhere. The justice sys-
tem in Syria is run by the people who tor-
tured them. Syria is not party to the Inter-
national Criminal Court (ICC), and a UN
Security Council resolution that would
have given the ICC a mandate to investi-
gate war crimes in the country was
blocked by China and Russia in 2014. Ger-
man authorities have assumed the man-
date to prosecute based on the principle of
universal jurisdiction, which holds that a
state may act in the most serious crimes
against international law even if neither
the perpetrator nor the victim is a national
of that state. Germany hassome of the
best-developed institutions in the world
for investigating and prosecuting such
crimes, including a specialised war-crimes
unit.
Even so, the chancesof getting justice
remain slim. German law does not provide
for trial in absentia, and most of the ac-
cused wisely do not travel outside Syria.
Even where a defendant can be tracked
down, proving responsibility for crimes
that took place thousands of miles away is
difficult. Some of those who should really
be tried for war crimes wind up with a ter-
rorism conviction instead. That happens
both because authorities tend to be more
worried about active terrorists than about
war criminals, and also because it is easier
to prove that someone joined a terrorist or-
ganisation than that he ordered or took
part in torture. Only a handful of Syrian
war-crimes cases, all involving small-time
members ofIS or anti-government militias
(some of whom are German citizens), haveso far made it to trial, though a further 30 or
so may soon do so.
The witnesses and their lawyers hope
that some bigwigs will eventually be
caught. For now, they know their work is of
largely symbolic value. One aim is to keep
the issue in the public eye and to prepare
the ground for future prosecutions by the
ICC or a special tribunal, if geopolitics
changes in a way that allows this, says Al-
exandra Lily Kather, a legal adviser at the
ECCHR. Mr al-Bounni adds thathe wants
the torturers not to feel safe. “And we want
to tell our friends who are still in prison
that they shouldn’t give up hope.” 7Scene of the crimes