Taming Backwater Blazes Isn"t Easy in Democratic Indonesia

By Eric Bellman

JAKARTA–As Singaporeans and Malaysians cough through another day of haze, calls for less slash-and-burn and more law-and-order in Indonesia are as predictable as the annual spread of the smoke from the south.

Associated Press

Smoke billows from forest fire Saturday in Pekanbaru, in Indonesia’s Riau province.

If Indonesia had better rules and followed them, goes the thinking, then the problem would be resolved.

“The truth, sadly, is that rogue firms thrive in permissive regimes where commercial interests overshadow environmental concerns,” said an editorial the Straits Times, the city-state‘s flagship newspaper. “That situation can be changed only by an act of political will and faithful implementation of laws with sufficient bite.”

Ever since what was previously the worst flare-up of haze back in 1997, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been building new rules, haze-busting groups, educational initiatives and monitoring systems to battle the smoke created when thousands of farmers across the region decide to clear land with fire.

While the Asean Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, which outlines what members are supposed to do, has been in effect since 2003, Indonesia is the only member of Asean that hasn’t ratified it.

Optimists in more organized countries imagine that if Indonesia could just ratify the agreement and start enforcing its principals, then it could win its fight with the fires of Sumatra and Borneo.  Technology will make it so simple to catch the culprits, they say. Satellite photos show the exact location of all the hot spots so if there was a government “Google map” showing exactly which farmers and firms control the land from which the fires are spreading it should theoretically be easy to catch the culprits.

Indonesian officials are not so sure. They say they are doing their best to battle the blazes but do not want to promise more than they can deliver.

Indonesia is putting out fires and even planning to try cloud seeding to stop the haze, but it also has bigger problems so it isn’t scrambling to ratify the agreement just because its neighbors requested it, said Agung Laksono, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for social welfare, on Thursday.

In the 15 years since President Suharto was forced to step down, Indonesia has plunged into democracy. A crucial mechanism to make it work in a country of some 240 million people spread across more than 17,000 islands has been decentralization and giving local leaders more power and money to run their own areas and cities.

Of course even President Suharto had trouble keeping the fires in check. The first famous flare ups were under the waning days of his rule in 1997. Still, analysts say trying to rein in the raging fires in a country that has hundreds of little Suhartos rather than just one is going to be more difficult.

“Decentralization was a Big Bang, giving wide authorities to the local government,” said Ari Dwipayana, Yogyakarta-based political analyst at Gajah Mada University. “Supervision by the central government just doesn’t work well now.”

The new local powers that run the backwaters where the fires are raging are less likely to listen to Jakarta and aren’t interested in relinquishing control of how their regions are run. They are issuing thousands of new local licenses for farming, mining and other things that require some forest clearing so it makes it difficult to create a single map of land control which everyone agrees upon. Meanwhile, the proliferation of power centers has also expanded opportunities for corruption, critics say.

This makes it even tougher to lay down the law in the far-flung areas of the archipelago. Indonesia has trouble enforcing many of its own basic laws, experts say, so it’s unlikely the Asean Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution would make a big difference even if ratified.

–I Made Sentana contributed to this article. 

Taming Backwater Blazes Isn"t Easy in Democratic Indonesia