Fires and famine The forests are burning again. And this time the air pollution has been accompanied by early warnings of famine conditions in parts of East Kalimantan and a full blown famine in West Papua (Irian Jaya). B. Skanthakumar
In 1997 two million hectares of forest and non-forest lands were burned mainly by plantation companies and logging concessions in the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Sumatra (International Viewpoint #295 December 1997), leaving an incalculable human, animal and environmental disaster in its wake.
This year new fires have been detected and old ones reignited in a rerun of last year and with the same underlying causes but far more serious consequences.
The tell tale smog which chokes the air and all who breathe it has been experienced by hundreds of thousands of people across Borneo and caused air pollution warnings as far afield as Singapore but not so far affecting Java.
Of the 176 companies identified last year as starting fires, only a handful had their licenses revoked and most of these were restored upon "further investigation" by the Forestry department. Thus no company has been punished and fined for its actions encouraging the culture of impunity that exists among these corporations.
No wonder that with plummeting revenues and the reduced value of their asset holdings owing to the depreciation of the rupiah and the wider economic crisis, many companies have intensified their unsustainable exploitation of the land by lighting new fires to clear more land without any fear of legal penalties.
Instead soldiers victimise indigenous communities who 'slash and burn', , preventing them from planting new crops and scapegoating them for the fires.
Twenty-five thousand people face severe food shortages in East Kalimantan as
95% of this year's rice crop has failed because of the prevailing drought. "No one has any rice, either to feed themworking class, poor peasantry and the urban poor are unorganised, fragmented and lacking in anti-capitalist ideology. The struggle now is to defend and expand their capacity to create their own mass organisations in which class identity and class politics will be asserted.
As the PRD says, "What is important is to find ways so that mass actions by students, workers and other people again become vigorous and involve large numbers of people. Only through this mass pressure will the demands for democracy be won. Without real mass strength, the people's demands will be ignored!" * selves or to sell to make money", one woman told The Guardian (23rd March 1998).
The Indonesian military which is the only state agency which has the human, technical and financial resources to do fire-fighting work is used instead to suppress popular protest and maintain in place the existing regime.
The only guarantee to put out the fires for good and revive the agrarian economy are the rains. And the monsoon hasn't come.
Meanwhile in West Papua (Irian Jaya), which was annexed by Indonesia in the 1960s, famine is killing thousands of people.
Last year's drought blamed on the El Niño weather pattern decimated food crops like sweet potato, dried up rivers and pools depriving villagers of drinking water and fish and killed livestock.
Malaria deaths are on the increase as the Indonesian military forcibly move highland villagers to lowland areas in counter-insurgency operations against the separatist Free Papua Movement (OPM) and so they can profit from gold, timber and other natural resources in those areas in collaboration with the Freeport-Rio Tinto copper and gold mine.
This combination of malnutrition and malaria has weakened the population and its ability to plant new crops let alone harvest them and to find alternative foods in the meantime. So there has been a sharp increase in reported deaths.
Many villages can only be reached by helicopter or small aircraft and food and medical supplies have been pitifully small in a province from which the media is excluded and relief agencies operate on the whim of the military high command.
The Indonesian regime in Jakarta has yet to admit to the scale of the suffering and need and therefore to adequately respond to it; further evidence that its occupation of West Papua has nothing to do with the well-being of the Papuans. *
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* conference reports