On April 26th, Cambodian anti-logging activist Chut Wutty was killed by military police near one of the protected areas he was monitoring. The shooting was one of the most shocking episodes in the fierce battle to save the country’s forests from destruction by powerful, corrupt elites who have accumulated vast wealth from their plunder while the people remain devastatingly poor.

Wutty worked with many communities who find themselves in the firing line, fighting for their rights and those of the forest. This exclusively commissioned film explains why they stood firm in the face of extreme intimidation and state-sponsored brutality, and why he was willing to pay the ultimate price to protect the forest from the march of the loggers.

A showing of the ten minute film will be followed by interviews with colleagues of Wutty’s about their cause and the threats they face. This will then be followed by a session chaired by Global Witness on the links between natural resources, corruption and conflict in Cambodia and elsewhere internationally.

Chair by Christopher Mitchell, Managing Director of OR Media Ltd and Chair of the Global Witness Trust. He is an award-winning writer, producer and director whose films, mostly on international affairs, have been shown on most of the world’s leading TV networks. He has written for the Sunday Times and Independent on Sunday, and been a visiting lecturer at Oxford University, the Royal College of Art and the National Film School.

With:

Mike Davis, Head of the Conflict Resources Campaign at Global Witness.

Markus Hardtke and Sen Samnang, who have both worked with Wutty to protect Cambodia’s forests and other natural resources from destruction for many years.

Whatever else you think about it (and a lot of people have a lot of thoughts), the campaign has succeeded in raising awareness of the crimes of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.

I just thought I’d take the opportunity to flag up this visualisation by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute tracking the spread of the campaign on a number of related Kony hashtags on Twitter during March:

Mark Graham at the OII concludes:

"#Kony’s moment of visibility was both brief and largely transatlantic. This Western-centric pattern of information flow is not necessarily surprising and can be found on many other online platforms. However, given the video’s relevance to East Africa, and the global diffusion of Twitter (e.g. Indonesians form the world’s 6th largest population of Twitter users), we might have expected #Kony to have a slightly less clustered geography."

Worth checking out the original post on the Zero Geography blog at the OII for more details.