By James Balowski
Last October, the Far Eastern Economic Review warned, "The strong winds of market demand and the smouldering coals of collusion are likely to keep the fires [in Indonesia] raging for many dry seasons to come". Three months later, uncontrollable fires were again burning in East Kalimantan.
According to experts, current climatic conditions, combined with last year's fires followed by a shot wet season, are similar to 1982-83, when 3 million hectares of rainforest were destroyed in Kalimantan.
Longgena Ginting, from the Indonesian environment organisation WALHI, told the February 24 International Herald Tribune that if meteorology predictions are correct, the dry season may be longer than last year and, if so, the fires will be far worse. The root cause has not changed, he said: "In Kalimantan, the fires are mostly caused by plantations and timber estates that have started to clear land again."
Charles Barber, a researcher for the World Resources Institute agrees, saying, "It's a very unfortunate confluence of events: the drought, a boom in land clearing, which never had very good oversight, and now less money to focus on what goes on out in the field. Combine that with a large amount of dead and dry biomass, which is lying around from incompletely burned areas from 1997, and you could have some real rough fires."
According to a Press Agency of France report on February 25, estimates of the number of fires burning in East Kalimantan alone ranged between 300 and 1000, and dozens more were said to be blazing in Riau, Central Sumatra. The head of a German-funded fire-fighting program was quoted as saying: "The fires have escalated to the extent that makes it impossible or economically impossible to put them out. The only thing that could help now is rain."
On February 9, the Jakarta daily Kompas reported that 198,580 hectares of the Kutai National Park in East Kalimantan were ablaze. The head of the park, Warsito, said the fires are more serious that last year and harder to reach.
On February 18, the Indonesian government claimed there were only 200 hot spots in East Kalimantan, however, Integrated Forest Fires Management put the figure at 543. According to a March 5 report by Reuters, WALHI estimated that up to 40,000 hectares of forest had been destroyed since January.
With the Indonesian government claiming it is short of money and "preoccupied with the economic crisis", concern is growing in Singapore and Malaysia that last year's disaster will be repeated.
World Wild Wide Fund for Nature estimates that the regional damage bill for last year's fires and haze was almost US$1.5 billion. The fund also said that around 1 million hectares of peat are still burning.
The economic crisis and cuts to government spending demanded under the IMF "reform" package provide justification for Indonesian regime's claim that it does not have the resources to deal with the fires. But the very same excuses were made last year, and on every previous occasion when major fires have broken out.
The February 13 International Herald Tribune quoted the IMF managing director, Michel Camdessus, as saying that Indonesia did not use its special reforestation fund to help cope with the fires last year because the money had been earmarked for a "national" car project. The project he was referring to is run by Suharto's son Tommy and was given massive tax breaks.
In the same article, Gerry van Klinken, editor of Inside Indonesia magazine, said that the little is known about the reforestation fund except that it contains billions of dollars drawn from timber taxes, is administered directly by Suharto and its major use has been to provide cheap loans to commercial timber plantation companies.
The state earns around US$3 billion (at the 1996 exchange rate) from timber exports each year. In 1996, Suharto approved a loan of over US$100 million from reforestation funds (almost half of the previous year's revenue) to help build "Bob" Hasan's PT Kiani Kertas paper and pulp plant in East Kalimantan. Last week, Hasan, who is a long-term Suharto business crony, was appointed minister for trade and industry.
In 1994, Suharto gave a US$190 million interest-free loan from reforestation funds to the Nusantara Aircraft Industry, run by another long-term crony, technology and research minister and now vice-president, B.J. Habibie.
Last year, the Indonesian government admitted that land clearing by large timber and plantation companies was mostly to blame for the extensive fires.
In a BBC report on February 25, however, Hasan said: "When we do deforestation, we do organised burning ... we clean up the shrubs, we clean up the grass, because if you do not clean up the shrubs, it might become a fire hazard. We want to develop our country on a sustainable basis, but sometimes some of the NGOs come in and say 'you're violating environment rules, you're violating human rights', but usually things like this comes from communist individuals."