Zembla: Victim of the World Wildlife Fund

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) fights for the preservation of endangered species all around the world, but nature conservation comes at a price. In the name of animal protection, many indigenious peoples have been forcefully driven from their lands. The fight against poachers is getting grimmer and more violent all the time. ZEMBLA travels to Kaziranga National Park in India, where local inhabitants are wrongly accused of poaching, being tortured and sometimes even killed. WWF supports Kaziranga's guards with material like GPS-devices and night vision goggles and even provides them with combat and interrogation training. This militarisation puts local people in harms way, they risk ending up as collateral damage in the fight for endangered animals. An official Kaziranga Park document states that crimes against wildlife and the environment prevail over human rights. On camera, guards from Kaziranga tell Zembla that they are allowed to shoot unwanted people.

Zembla also discovers that WWF supported family planning programs all over the world. According to WWF, people living around the protected areas are harming the environment. Therefore, their population growth must be slowed down. To reach this goal, WWF supported so-called 'PHE-programs', that promoted birth control projects including contraception and even sterilization. Zembla interviewed an Indian doctor that took part in one of these WWF-supported programs near Dudwha National Park. The doctor stated that he performed vasectomies and confirmed that WWF was involved in the project. 

Zembla shared all this information with WWF and scheduled an interview. Sadly, WWF cancelled the interview without reason.