Raping BorneoIndonesia’s wildlife never had it easy under the dictator Suharto. For 32 years he controlled a logging-and-mining apparatus that steadily eroded the forests and polluted the rivers of this archipelago. But when Suharto’s rule came to an end, things got even worse. Logging and mining industries run by feudal warlords operate under virtually no constraint. Logging has soared on Borneo, Sumatra and Sulawesi, says the World Bank. So is gold mining, which is polluting the waters with mercury. Abdurrahman Wahid, the country’s first democratically elected president, showed little interest in stopping the destruction. Wahid was impeached on July 23, 2001 by the National Assembly for corruption and incompetence after a yearlong power struggle. His successor faces an economic crisis, tens of millions of unemployed and growing separatist movements in two resource-rich provinces. Wildlife will not be high on the agenda. “The tragedy of democracy is going to be the environment,” says Jatna Supriatna, country director of Conservation International, a US environmental group. “It’s anarchy. People are trying to grab what they can.” Government and independent figures show that about two thirds of the 70 million cubic meters of timber produced in Indonesia annually is illegally felled, costing the cash-strapped government about $720 million a year in tax revenues. About 70 percent of all sawmills are illegal. Indonesia contains 10 percent of the world’s tropical rain forest, but the country is losing up to 2 million hectares each year. “Indonesia is losing a huge amount of its natural capital,” says Tom Walton, a senior environment specialist with the World Bank. “It has abundant natural resources, and they are being plundered for the benefit of a relatively small number of people.” Deforestation is already causing droughts and floods on farmland across the country, mudslides that bury entire villages and massive soil erosion. Locals have no say in how their resources are used and receive no money from the plunder. Under pressure from foreign-aid donors, the government signed an agreement last fall to crack down on illegal logging and prosecute the timber barons, but none of a dozen cases referred to the attorney general’s office has resulted in a conviction. Illegal loggers and gold miners work in broad daylight in Tanjung Putting National Park. A spotter plane hired by the Environmental Investigation Agency took aerial photos of a logging road, camps, eight kilometers of steel track used to transport cut trees and other infrastructure in the park’s interior. Dozens of floating mining machines and their crews inside the park boundaries pump sediment from the Sekonyer River. Miners use mercury to separate the gold from the rich soil, then throw the pollutants into the river. The mining has turned several kilometers of rain forest along the western boundary of Tanjung Putting into barren and contaminated sand dunes. “I know this is a national park, but I don’t think the government or police are too concerned,” says Dain, a 21-year-old miner. Donors will never follow through with threats to halt economic aid to Indonesia, a Western environmentalist says, because they cannot afford to let the country collapse. The Indonesians know this too well. Japan, the United States and the International Monetary Fund want the Jakarta government to arrest and prosecute their timber barons who are responsible for large-scale commercial illegal logging. One name that keeps coming up is Abdul Rasyid, owner of Tanjung Lingga, the largest timber company in Central Kalimantan, Rasyid and his company are widely feared in the province. In January 2000, company executives allegedly attacked and kidnapped a British environmental investigator and an Indonesian colleague who visited Tanjung Lingga’s office in Panhkalanbuun. They were released after a three-day standoff when the British Embassy and the highest levels of the Indonesian government intervened. The Ministry of Forestry has investigated Rasyid for more than a year, but has made no arrest. He represents Central Kalimantan in Indonesia’s National Assembly, and forestry officials have said that the military is involved in his alleged illegal logging operations. “The government lacks the will to go against the barons,” says Walton of the World Bank. The President of Indonesia is a staunch advocate of a unitary state controlled from Jakarta. But the government will likely be incapable of asserting its authority over the timber barons. (From ‘Newsweek’, abridged) Vocabulary. Now read the articles carefully, find the following words and word combinations in the text and learn their meaning. Make it a particular point to use these word combinations in the further overall discussion of the problem.
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