Marching for climate justice in Belem

Some 70,000 people from all over the world marched in Belem—the Turkish delegation demanded justice for Hakan Tosun

On 15 November we were part of a march of some 70,000 people from all over Brazil and the world for climate justice in Belem, Brazil, the location of the Cop30 climate summit.

Belem is at the mouth of the Amazon River in Para state, which has seen some of the worst deforestation in the country. 

Marchers on the 4km march included delegations from the landless peasants’ movement and many left trade unionists, all protesting the failures of president Lula and the Workers’ Party government. Indigenous people blockaded the official Cop30 summit and demanded to speak to Lula, saying “Our forest is not for sale” in their declaration.

Our delegation from the Climate Justice Coalition in Turkey carried a banner for murdered ecological activist and journalist, Hakan Tosun. Hakan was killed in Istanbul on 13 October. There has been no proper investigation into his death.

The Cop30 climate talks were the first since Cop26 in Glasgow, four years ago, where any kind of alternative summit was possible. Cop27, 28 and 29 were held in the authoritarian states of Egypt, UAE and Azerbaijan, the latter two are major fossil fuel producers. The official Cop process has been reduced to greenwashing of fossil fuel capitalism.

The “delegation” from the fossil fuel companies is now bigger than all other delegations.

At Cop30, the “alternative summit” was put in a contradictory position. It was two thirds financed by the Brazilian government.

Just before the summit began, Lula announced new licences for offshore oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon. While there was hard criticism of the U-turns by the Workers’ Party government, from movements such as the landless peasants’ movement that helped elect them, the assemblies also provided a platform for spokespeople for a government that is betraying its promises on the environment.

The competition between the Australian and Turkish governments to host Cop31 was typical of the absurdity of the Cop process.

Cop31 will be held in Istanbul and Antalya, but chaired by Australia. So it will be chaired by a country that has massively ramped up coal production. And it will be held in a country where the murder of an environmental activist has gone un-investigated and where mining companies are devastating rural communities while villagers protest at the loss of their agricultural land.

Turkey plays a role in fuelling the apartheid Israel. Some 40 percent of Israel’s oil still flows from Azerbaijan through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan to be loaded onto tankers taking it to Israel.

The Cop process is a spectacle that offers little hope of bringing climate justice for workers and the poor.

By Çiğdem Özbaş and Ecehan Balta, Climate Justice Coalition, Turkey