Forest fires in Indonesia have blanketed Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Southern Thailand and the Southern Philippines in thick smoke blocking out the sun and choking tens of millions of people.

Within South-east Asia it’s called the ‘haze’ – an innocuous word which deliberately plays down the seriousness and severity of the situation and is intended to calm an agitated population. Claude Martin of the World Wide Fund for Nature described the environmental and health disaster in starker terms, “The sky has turned yellow and people are dying.”

In Sumatra and Kalimantan where the fires were started the smog has reduced visibility to a few yards at its worst. Everything coming into contact with the smog is left coated in grime and hundreds of thousands have been treated for respiratory problems, eye and skin irritations and children for asthma.

On September 26 there was an airline crash in Sumatra with all 234 lives lost. Poor visibility and communication have been blamed. On the Straits of Malacca, the world’s busiest shipping lane, there have been a number of collisions including one which left 29 dead. So far over 2 000 deaths have been in direct consequence of the fires and countless other fatalities particularly in road accidents have been blamed on the smog.

A state of emergency was declared in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak which has been particularly badly hit as it is shares a border with Kalimantan.
The Air Pollution Index (API) in the Sarawak state capital, Kuching hit a record level of 839. Any reading over 100 is unhealthy and over 500 is extremely hazardous. Elsewhere in the region the API has averaged between 200 and 350.

Schools, offices and businesses in Sarawak were closed as was its main airport and port. Many flights into and from regional airports in Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia have been cancelled.

In Indonesia in addition to the short-term consequences on livelihoods, the cost to the agricultural sector won’t be known for years. The absence of direct sunlight will stunt crop growth, reduce yields and decimate harvests in seasons to come. Food prices have already rocketed placing fresh fruit and vegetables at a premium and there are severe shortages in fire affected areas.
Surgical masks are hawked on street corners and sold in city shops as the officially sanctioned protection against the pollution. In Indonesia the price of these masks catapulted from 500 rupiah to 4000 rupiah putting it out of the reach of many.

Walhi, the Indonesian Environmental Forum, criticised the government for not making masks available to the poor in the interior. It has set up a community action centre in Kalimantan for free distribution of masks but also to begin consciousness raising campaigns on the causes of the fires and the importance of forest conservation.

Meanwhile Malaysian NGO activist, Sivarasa Rasiah, pointed out that the masks “were designed to stop surgeons spitting on their patients, not to keep out pollution.” Yet governments were encouraging people to buy and wear them just to soothe their fears. Health advisors believe a wet towel covering the nose and mouth to be more effective than a surgical mask.
Serious forest fires in Indonesia are now an annual ritual. Even the trans-boundary air pollution isn’t new and was particularly bad in 1987, 1991 and 1994. In fact in spite of the world headlines and extensive media coverage, this hasn’t been the worst year for forest cover loss.

During 1982/83 some 3.5 million hectares of forest – an area around the size of Belgium or the Netherlands – was burned to the ground in Kalimantan.
This year the World Wide Fund estimates that so far between five hundred thousand and one million hectares have been torched. The toll on animal and bird life is incalculable. Irreversible damage is being done to rainforest which has greater species diversity per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world excepting the Amazon.

The Indonesian Government initially began by blaming the El Nino weather pattern for delaying monsoon rains and creating drought conditions which have made the region a tinder-box where fire can start with the least encouragement.

El Nino arises from a warming of ocean currents in the Pacific and used to appear in cycles of four or five years. However in the past 15 years, it seems to have become a yearly occurrence. One explanation is that global warming due to carbon emissions is the culprit. Ironically the present spate of fires will add to those emissions exacerbating the problem in future.

Certainly the tragic starvation deaths which have been reported in recent weeks in Irian Jaya (West Papua) on the island of New Guinea, are a consequence of the absence of rainfall and the poor distribution of relief supplies in that province.

The distribution of food and medicine to the 90 000 people at risk has been hampered by the inaccessibility of the villages and thick smoke is deterring relief flights.

Indonesian agencies estimate around 500 people have starved to death while others are foraging for insects, tree roots and leaves for food.
However it was soon obvious that the alleged cause of the forest fires, El Nino, might in fact be a symptom of the fires themselves, and further that there were human and not natural factors which explained why fires had begun in certain areas and not others and the purpose behind the arson.

The Jakarta Post editorialised on August 13, “there seems to be no doubt today about the cause of these forest fires. They were deliberately lit to clear land and make way for new plantations, timber estates and new settlements under the government’s transmigration program.”

Even then the Indonesian government was reluctant to pin the blame on loggers and export-crop plantation agriculture in Kalimantan in which President Suharto’s family and the military have personal and financial stakes.
Instead it faulted subsistence crop small-holders principally the indigenous Dayak peoples who practise ‘slash and burn’ techniques to clear land, plant seed and then after a few seasons move elsewhere allowing old plots to lie fallow and the soil to regain its natural fertility. The controlled burning in shifting cultivation is a method used for centuries without the present environmental harm.

This was another classic instance of ‘blaming the victims’. The Dayak communities have been bearing the brunt of Indonesia’s trans-migration program which settles people from the densely populated islands particularly Java to provinces like Kalimantan, Irian Jaya (West Papua) and East Timor.
The motive behind these schemes, which until recently received World Bank support, is to relieve population pressure on the main islands and to open up new areas to capitalist development. What it also does is encourage the ‘Javanisation’ of ethnic groups perceived as “backward” and “uncivilised” through inter-marriage and cultural assimilation.

Thus Madurese have been settled in Kalimantan where they are local partners in cash-crop farming of cocoa and palm oil with plantation companies. The government channels huge sums of money into their re-settlement and indigenous Dayaks complain of being marginalised politically and in resource allocation by the settlers. Early this year tensions between the two communities exploded into bloody riots with many lives lost and much damage to homes and property; at the root of which are conflicts over access to and use of land.

Neighbouring governments responding to domestic public pressure were beginning to lose patience with the Indonesian government. President Suharto was forced to make a public apology for the smoke pollution at a meeting of Association of South-East-Asian Nations (ASEAN) Environmental Ministers.

In a sharp break with the ASEAN policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states, the meek regional media featured commentaries critical of the Indonesian regime’s handling of the situation.

The Singapore Straits Times published satellite images of Kalimantan which pin-pointed the areas where fires had begun and where well into September new ones were being started. These corresponded to logging and plantation concessions including those owned by companies which had been warned in previous years not to burn forest.

A. S. Budiman of the Rubber Association of Indonesia candidly explained, “if you do land-clearing in pioneer areas, where no roads are established, the only practical way to get rid of the debris is to burn it.” What he didn’t say is that it is also the cheapest way and saves companies the expense of bringing in heavy machinery to do the job, when a cheap match-stick and some kerosene would do instead.

Indonesia’s Environment Ministry finally released a report in September identifying 176 logging and plantation companies in eight provinces responsible for starting fires and gave them a deadline to show evidence to the contrary.

Among these companies are numerous joint-ventures in Sumatra with Malaysian and Singaporean conglomerates which accounts for the “softly, softly” approach of those governments in placing pressure on the Indonesians to take firm action against corporate interests.

The exiled Indonesian academic George Aditjondro writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (October 1), exposed the nexus of business relationships between Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s son, Mirzan, and a son of Indonesian President Suharto, Bambang, as well as between Suharto’s daughter, Titiek and Malaysian businessman Robert Kuok in an oil palm plantation in Sumatra.

Malaysian and Indonesian timber conglomerates have also begun to attract attention for logging operations in Guyana and Surinam in South America, where indigenous peoples complain of forest denudation, pollution and cultural threat.

On October 3, the Indonesian Forestry Minister revoked the licences of nine companies. Their shareholders read like a roll-call of Indonesia’s richest men and President Suharto’s closest friends, Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim), Mohammad ‘Bob’ Hasan, Prayogo Pangestu and Ekta Tjipta Wijaya.

It remains to be seen whether the companies will stop operations. In past years they have ignored bans and licence revocations imposed on them, secure in the protection they receive from their ties to the Suharto clan and special interest groups in the government and military.

In August this year Suharto personally opened a pulp factory in Kalimantan owned by his regular golfing partner Bob Hasan.

In a presidential decree last year Suharto authorised the transfer of over US$ 100 million from the state reforestation fund to finance the construction of Hasan’s Kiani Kertas paper and pulp plant in East Kalimantan. This decision is currently being challenged in court by Walhi.

In 1994 Suharto had channelled money from this fund to the domestic aircraft industry headed by his protégé Research and Technology Minister, B. J. Habibie. A legal challenge to that decision by Walhi failed.

The fund which is financed by timber taxes and which is intended for replanting of trees and forest conservation has also allegedly been used recently to prop up the Indonesian rupiah, which lost 36 per cent of its value in just two months and to restore foreign investor confidence in the economy.

Indonesia is already the world’s largest plywood exporter and aims by 2005 to become the world’s largest oil-palm producer. Meanwhile logging companies continue felling timber at unsustainable rates and planting fast growing non-indigenous substitutes in their place creating havoc in the eco-system. Arable land in Java is turned into golf-courses and hotel resorts or inundated by hydro-electric dams while 200 000 hectares of peat bogs in Kalimantan are drained and turned into rice-fields, paper and pulp factories and oil palm plantations.

However once these peat fields are alight they burn on and on and aerial spraying with water nor cloud seeding to induce rain cannot extinguish these fires which can only be quenched by a rise in the water table, which itself is dependent on monsoon rainfall which is also much reduced by loss of rainforest cover due to break-neck logging and land-clearance: which is where we began.

In November, the Malaysian authorities issued a directive banning researchers and academics from making statements about the smog as according to one Minister, “it could give a negative image of Malaysia, causing a scare among Malaysians and preventing foreigners from coming to the country”. Throughout the crisis, worries over the tourist trade have been a higher priority for regional governments than the health of their own citizenry.

However the gagging order backfired with public outrage that the government instead of sharing information with the people is trying to conceal the facts and restrict freedom of expression.

Gone are the days when south-east Asian governments could confidently peddle the lie that only interfering foreign NGOs and small local environmental groups cared about the environmental impact of economic growth.

A wide-spread consciousness of environmental degradation and of the inter-generational consequences of pollution and deforestation is present among all social classes and throughout society in the region.

What remains to be seen is how much more need be sacrificed and for how much longer, before this insanity is ended?

References: Aliran Monthly (Penang), ASIET NetNews Digest (http://www.peg.apc.org/~asiet/netnews.htm), Down To Earth (London), Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong), Frontline (Chennai), The Guardian (London), The Independent (London). Terima kasih kepada saudari Teresa Birks.