FOREST FIRES originating in Indonesia have blanketed much of the region in thick smoke blocking out natural light and choking tens of millions of people.
Claude Martin of the World Wide Fund for Nature described the environmental and health disaster: "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 it comes into contact with is coated in grime. Tens of thousands of Indonesians 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.
The East Malaysian state of Sarawak has been particularly badly hit. Schools, offices and businesses have been closed along with its main airport and port. Many flights into and from regional airports in Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia have been cancelled.
The Air Pollution Index (API) in Sarawak state capital, Kuching hit a record level of 839. Anything over 100 is unhealthy, and over 500 is extremely hazardous. In the rest of the region the API averages between 200 and 350.
Stunted growth
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 CONIC. Food prices have 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.
One Malaysian NGO activist, Siva 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 to be more effective.
Forest fires in Indonesia are an annual event. 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 was burnt to the ground in Kalimantan, an area around the size of Belgium or the Netherlands.
In contrast the World Wide Fund estimates that so far between 500,000 and one million hectares have been torched. The damage is being done in rainforest which has greater species diversity per square kilometre than anywhere else barring the Amazon.
The Indonesian Government initially began by blaming the El Niño weather front for delaying monsoon rains and creating drought conditions which have made the region a tinder-box, where fire starts with the least encouragement The tragic starvation deaths which have been reported in recent weeks in Irian Jaya (West Papua) can indeed be traced back to the The belated fire-fighting exercise in Irian Jaya, where forest fires got slightly out of control absence of rainfall and the poor distribution of relief supplies in that province.
El Niño arises from warm ocean currents in the Pacific and used to appear in cycles of four or five years. However in the last 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.
It was soon obvious that the alleged cause of the forest fires, El Niño, might in fact be a symptom of the fires themselves. There were sacrificed on the altar of human factors which ex- "Development" before a plained why fires had begun in certain areas halt is called to this and not others. insanity?
The Jakarta Post editorial on August 13 explained: "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 governments transmigration program."
Even then the Indonesian government was reluctant to pin the blame on loggers and export-crop plantation agriculture in Kalimantan with which President Suharto's family and the military have notoriously close personal and financial dealings.
Instead it blamed subsistence crop small-holders, principally the indigenous Dayak peoples who practise 'slash and burn' cultivation to clear land. This controlled burning has been a technique used for centuries without the present environmental harm.
This was a classic instance of "blaming the victims'. The Dayak communities have been bearing the brunt of Indonesia's transmigration program which settles people from the densely populated islands particularly Java to provinces like Kalimantan, Irian Jaya (West Papua) and East Timor.
The stated motive of these schemes, which used to receive World Bank support, is to relieve population pressure on the main islands. It also opens up new areas to capitalist exploitation and encourages the 'Javanisation' of ethnic groups perceived as "backward" and "uncivilised" How much more need be intermarriage 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.
Angry neighbours
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.
In a sharp break with the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states, the tame regional media began publishing commentaries critical of the Indonesian government'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 justified the burning explaining, "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.
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.
Suharto's friends
On October 3, the 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.
It remains to be seen whether the companies will stop operations. In past years they have flouted bans and licence revocations imposed on them, secure in the protection they receive from their ties to the Suharto clan and the military.
In August Suharto personally opened a pulp factory in Kalimantan owned by his golfing companion Bob Hasan. Last year he had authorised the transfer of over US$100 million from state reforestation funds 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.
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 planting fast growing non-indigenous substitutes in their place, creating havoc with the eco-system.
Primary forest cover has been reduced to 55 per cent of the country from 82 per cent in 1966. At the current rate of deforestation within a hundred years Indonesia will have no primary forest left. Arable land in Java is turned into golf-courses and hotel resorts or inundated by hydro-electric dams, while peat bogs in Kalimantan are drained and turned into rice-fields.
Once peat fields are alight they burn on and on and aerial spraying with water does not extinguish them. They can only be put out by a rise in the water table. This will only happen if there are sufficient monsoon rains -which are recently much reduced by loss of rainforest cover due to break-neck logging and land-clearance.
Which is where we began.
The Indonesian regime is committed to the pursuit of economic growth as an end to itself, abandoning social welfare and poverty eradication to the charity of market forces. This model is not only imposed by international financial institutions but enthusiastically supported by the national capitalist class.
How much more need be sacrificed on the altar of "Development" before a halt is called to this insanity?
IWORLD OUTLOOK Socialist Outlook