Now two of the three activists arrested last week at the Marfork Coal Company’s offices are fighting back against their excessive bails ($5000 for two and $7500 for the third activist, Mike Roselle).

These folks are putting their health and safety on the line in resisting big coal and the corrupt legal systems. Please donate to help Climate Ground Zero fight King Coal in southern West Virginia.

BEAVER, W.Va.—Tom Smyth, and Joe Hamsher, from Charleston, W.Va., began a hunger strike in jail today in protest of the absurdity of their $5,000, cash-only bonds compared to that of violent criminals. Smyth and Hamsher went to jail last Thursday when they chained themselves to office furniture in Massey’s Marfork Mining Co., office in response to mounting permit violations and the continued blasting on Coal River Mountain. They also presented a citizen’s arrest warrant to Marfork president Christopher Blanchard, on charges of attempting to injure by poison, malicious or unlawful assault or assault of a child near a school, and wanton endangerment.

Already this month, a man accused of four sex crimes involving a 13-year-old got out on $15,000 bond. Another man, after stabbing someone five times in the back, was being held on $10,000 bond and his accomplice on $6,000 bond. A 19-year-old Beckley woman was arrested for wanton endangerment after shooting at another woman in a Family Dollar parking lot and was being held on $10,000 bond. None of these articles indicates they were restricted to cash-only, which means they’d only have to put up 10% of their total bond amount.

The protesters “cash-only” bonds mean the entire bond amount must be paid in cash, and they cannot use a bail bondsman to pay only 10% of the amount. “There is something broken in a judicial system that responds more harshly to nonviolent protesters than violent criminals, not to mention allowing Massey’s crimes to go on unpunished,” tree sitter Amber Nitchman said. Smyth and Hamsher say they will continue their hunger strike until their bonds are reduced to a reasonable amount.

Today, on the way to a meeting with the local NGO Elang, I passed villagers from the Kampar Peninsula, a carbon-rich and biodiverse ecoystem that is under attack by Sinar Mas’ oil palm operations and their timber division Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), on a hunger strike.

In front of the provincial parliament building, a group of men and women from the village of Kijang Kejo have set up a plastic tarp and banner, announcing to Riau’s elected officials that they will not eat until the oil palm plantation PT Arindo Tri Sejahtera, who stole their land and then paid thugs to kill three of their family members, is brought to justice.

10 days into their hunger strike, the villagers are pale and weak, sleeping while motor bikes and buses fly by them on the road. They told me they have not been able to meet with any members of the provincial government, and were not sure how much longer they could last without food.

The group that owns this particular plantation, Surya Dumai, might be on the nastier end of the scale of dirty, dangerous, and destructive oil palm and timber companies, but this is how the resource extraction game is played here in Riau, Sumatra; buy the military, government, and media and trample any local people that dare to stand up for their rights.

APP and Sinar Mas have been shown to violate Indonesian law and human rights, but with the authorities in their pocket, it is us, the consumers of timber and palm oil, that must demand  producers respect forests and the people who inhabit them.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org