Sumbe
Tomorsukh- Martyred saving the Snow Leopard.
'Damdin'
Protecting this snow-leopard cub, Sumbe
found the strength and passion we need to save our planet.
His
bereaved father, Tomorsukh, is a Forest Ranger who rides a reindeer and
tracks down poachers along the shores of Lake Hovsgol in Northern Mongolia.
Young Sumbe's own work, saving the ibex and the snow leopard, took him a thousand kilometres South to the arid mountains of the Gobi desert. He was a ‘mountain climbing machine’- routinely tackling sharp inclines carrying 50 kilograms of water and salt on his back, while holding a massive piece of ice in his gloved hands, to restock the camera-traps his team set up to monitor prey abundance and population dynamics.
The reindeer, like the Mongolian pony, is an intelligent and loyal friend. Moreover its antlers aren’t purely decorative. But Sumbe wasn’t riding a reindeer, like his Forest Ranger father that fateful day when he was attacked. He was mounted on a light motor-bike coming down a steep slope where the path narrowed between two rocks when suddenly two masked men jumped forward brandishing knives. He had no choice but to carry on and trust to his momentum to get himself clear. He received 3 wounds- a 4.5cm deep gash below the solar plexus and two slightly shallower cuts on the left and right side of his stomach. He was lucky to have survived.
Seven
months later Sumbe's body was recovered from Hovsgol lake. His grieving father was
shocked to find, almost immediately, a mobile phone in his car even though it
had been previously searched by the Police Detectives who had blandly assured
him that his son had committed suicide while drunk.
The mobile phone had a chilling voice
recording on it. In a tone of quiet desperation, Sumbe blames the Police for
not investigating the knife attack on him and instead spinning old wives' tales
to explain away the incident. He says, in a tone which is bitter but calm and utterly
bereft of histrionics, that to protect his family he is letting the gangsters
win because they have all the power and money for the moment. But they are low
people. Despicable creatures. At this point there is a voice of someone saying
‘shut up!’ and, on audio analysis, another voice uttering an expletive. Perhaps
the gangsters thought their voices would not register on the recording. Or perhaps
they knew it wouldn't matter. The fix was in.
Previously,
on the long drive to Hovsgol, from Ulan Bator, Sumbe’s car had stopped in front
of a CC camera. He got out of the car alone and walked in a circle so as to be
visible to the camera. The intention, clearly, was to show he was driving alone
to Hovsgol. The only problem is that analysis of the shadows cast in the
footage shows that he had got into the back seat not the front. He wasn’t
driving the car. Once again, the perfunctory manner of the frame-up is what
makes it so chilling. Sumbe wasn't yet a high official. Thus it was important,
not just to bump him off but to do it in so deliberately a slovenly fashion as
to showcase how easily the bumping off of an activist can be passed off as
suicide.
Sumbe Tomorsukh had just turned 27 when he
was killed. He had completed his Masters Degree and already co-authored several
well regarded Scientific papers in his field. He had attended specialist
courses in India and America, and was due to come to the U.K this year to
further hone his skills and expertise.
Yet, according to the Mongolian police, Sumbe
was a maladjusted fellow who, for some mysterious reason, kept bothering them
with complaints that he had been stabbed in the neck (in May 2014) or, later
on, kidnapped and threatened (in January 2015) both times in the City of Ulan
Bator, and then stabbed three times in the stomach in the Tost Mountains,
before finally being drowned in Hovsgol.
It is
completely ridiculous to suggest that some ‘Mining Mafia’ exists which
threatens or bribes Conservationists into giving ‘no objection’ certificates
for Exploratory or Operational Licenses for multi billion World Bank funded projects
involving some of the most powerful companies in the world. Sumbe was just
unlucky. The attack in the Tost mountains could plausibly have been dismissed
as the work of 'Ninja miners'- i.e. illegal prospectors- and the attacks which
happened in the Capital city explained away as unrelated acts of hooliganism.
But, since the long drive to Hovsgol and subsequent drowning has been attributed
to drunken melancholia, the official line is to say that the other attacks
which Sumbe reported- even the one for which his Snow Leopard team-mates were
material witnesses- never happened at all. With Monty Pythonesque humour, the
Police explained that they looked for foot prints and tyre tracks on bare rock,
not the places where snow was piled up and the escape vehicle likely to be
parked. Strategic stupidity, in the West, is a tactic of resistance associated
with 'Good Soldier Svejk'. It has a far more ominous and Orwellian ring in
countries with a Stalinist past.
Still,
because Mongolia is a genuine multi-party democracy and because its people really
care about their marvellous, but fragile, natural heritage, Sumbe Tomorsukh's
sacrifice will not go in vain.
Slowly but steadily, Sumbe's father, is
uncovering the tracks of those behind this dastardly crime. Not so as to exact
a personal Revenge- bygones are bygones- but to help catalyse needful Reform of
a Society which could too easily cannibalize itself, the fragile eco-systems
which gives it life, in the name of some bogus Economic ideology. Already, a
detailed TV documentary on Sumbe's murder has been broadcast. Social Media has enabled
young people, already enraged at the rape and plunder of the environment, which
adversely impacts livelihoods now and for future generations, to find a
rallying point and campaigning issue. The Government may find legal excuses to
ban a protest videos by the pop-opera group Uvertura, but they can't un-ring
that clarion they first sounded in 2010. The film 'Wolf Totem' directed by Jean
Jacques Annaud (of '7 Years in Tibet' fame), based on Lu Jiamin's (aka Jiang
Rong) Chinese language book has found an eager audience even amongst alienated
urban youth. The wolf, as apex predator, preserved fragile grasslands which
might otherwise collapse and fuel apocalyptic dust-storms such as those with
threaten Beijing. Interestingly, Mongol youth seem to understand the author's
message (he was imprisoned in the Tiananmen aftermath) much better than certain
'Western' vaunted aesthetes and 'engaged intellectuals' who dismissed it as
'fascist' or woodenly 'didactic'. Many, nay most, of these young people have
been driven into the Cities only recently because of the double failure of
de-regulated Markets and soi disant Democratic
Parliamentary Musical Chairs. Like the 'Ninja Miners' who bitterly regret
poisoning their own ancestral source of sustenance, the marmots can destroy the
integrity of their own habitat if they are not kept in check.
Wolf and Marmot, Leopard and Ibex, Markets
and Regulation, Democracy and the Rule of Law- the one dies without the other.
Sumbe wasn't trying to make pets out of the
little snow leopard cubs he so often rescued. He was acting out of something
larger than love, more merciful than compassion, something as vast as the azure
sky, which yet is as intimate and implacable as the grief which unites his
beloved parents at what Death has divided from them now.
One
day, it may be, Sumbe Tomorsukh will
have a living monument equal to that of the great champion of Multi Party Democracy,
S. Zorig- who was murdered in his home in 1998.
That
murder remains unsolved, but, at least, it was acknowledged to be murder. What is
happening to the fragile eco-systems of the Gobi is not less than the Chronicles
of a Genocide foretold- a planetary disaster emerging plutocracies ignore at
their peril.
Sumbe, like his father, understood very well
what role apex predators play in fragile eco-systems. The ancient Sages expressed
it thus- 'where the leopard is endangered, the forest can not survive. When the
forest disappears so do the rains and rivers. Where waters fail, famine
follows.'
Sumbe was repeatedly attacked and threatened.
He could have kept quiet or gone away and earned laurels as an Ivy League, if
not Ivory Tower, Acadmician. He did not do so because he understood this was
not a story about a single greedy company or a clique of corrupt kleptocrats.
The issue here is centralized control of water- the diversion of rivers across vast
distances so as to create a mirage of wealth- in the service of a Chrematistic
swindle that couldn't take in a child.
Sumbe's
blood was shed in the arid region where he had himself carried water to ensure
the survival of an endangered cubs. He was drowned near his own home in the
water rich north. There is a sort of twisted sub-text to the way his murder was
staged. Surely all we need to do is to spend a few billion piping water from
one place to another so as to extract ever increasing dividends without paying
any price in terms of the loss of the cuddlier type of animal? Once everybody
signs up to the new grand design, everything will be fine- we won't have any
more 'Ninja Miners' poisoning the environment- big Corporations, meshing with
each other seamlessly, will take care of everything smoothly and neatly.
There is a problem with this story- a problem
Mongolians understand all too well. Commodity markets crash regularly. In the
boom years a tiny elite is enriched beyond the dreams of avarice with no
trickledown- then, when the bust comes, the same Corporations morph and downsize
creating a class of impoverished 'Ninja Miners' symbiotic with the State's
retreat to cosmetically Modern Metropolitan enclaves for a spot of old
fashioned Manorial Rent extraction.
Big irrigation schemes, and grand
hydrological projects- Communist or Capitalist- promise much but deliver
little. In the end, they divert water from those who use it efficiently, that
is sustainably, to vested interests who squander it senselessly. Democracy,
Transparency, Accountability- these are as necessary as water. Without them,
livelihoods and eco-systems will be destroyed in an irreparable manner. Economists
and Evolutionary Biologists are beginning to understand that 'regret minimization' not 'profit
maximization' is what underpins stable, sustainable, equilibria in the real
world where you have to expect the unexpected. Sumbe learnt this lesson at his
father's knee even before his Academic success. It is time for Pundits and
Policymaker's to admit that killing golden geese doesn't work out well for anybody.
Brutal men shed Sumbe's blood to secure the
mirage of wealth. But, by shedding the blood of a young innocent who carried
water to helpless cubs- they may just have triggered a mounting flood of
protest and indignation which will cleanse the Augean stables of corrupt politics
and corporate wrongdoing in Ulan Bator as surely as S. Zorig's blood sacrifice
established Mongolia firmly upon the path of Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Sumbe's
father
Father & Son- fighting the good fight.
Notes
1) Sumbe's
father is featured in 'Sons of Taiga' the official video of the Lake Hovsgol
Conservancy & Mongol Ecology. (this has English subtitles)
His picture is
taken from the Snow Leopard Trust website.
2) The two
parts of a Mongolian language documentary on the murder of Sumbe can be found
here- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLpG-vFriu0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql2AM-t3lTs
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