Why is Indonesia Burning?
10/4/97
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: Why is Indonesia Burning?
Source: WW Publishers
Date: 10/4/97
Author: John Catalinotto
Copyright Workers World Service
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the October 9, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
WHY IS INDONESIA BURNING?
An Indonesian Garuda Airlines Airbus crashed near Medan,
Sumatra, on Sept. 26, killing over 200 people. Twenty-eight
sailors were lost the same day when two cargo ships collided
in the Straits of Malacca.
The suspected cause of these accidents? A smoky haze that
drastically cut visibility.
The criminals behind the smoke? A military regime created
in Washington that allows wild capitalism to squeeze workers
and ravage rain forests.
These two crashes highlight a less dramatic but more
persistent danger to millions of people in that Southeast
Asian region: smoke from fires in the jungles of Borneo and
Sumatra.
These fires are caused not by lightning strikes or a
sloppily discarded cigarette. They are deliberately set by
giant plantation-owning firms aiming at the quickest,
cheapest way to clear wide tracts of land for exploitation.
For these super-profits, they destroy the environment, kill
wild animals, and have already killed hundreds of people
with smoke from Malaysia and Thailand to the Philippines.
According to environmental activists collecting
information on the fires, the greatest harm is taking place
on the large islands of Sumatra and Borneo. In some places
schools and kindergartens are being closed.
People are wearing face masks. Medical facilities are
treating cases of breathing problems and eye irritation.
WILD CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION
The environmental group IPPL learned that 193 square miles
of the Batang Hari Hutan Lindung forest area in east Sumatra
is to be clear-felled to make way for palm-oil plantations.
These forests protect the watershed of one of the two
biggest rivers in Sumatra.
Such rampant environmental destruction recalls the
ravaging of the Mississippi River's watershed forests by
wild capitalist exploitation in the 19th and early 20th
centuries, which led to disastrous flooding in the
Mississippi Valley.
According to the Sept. 25 New York Times, the worst danger
to humans arises where the persistent smoke mingles with
industrial pollution in urban areas. In some regions of
Sarawak--a Malaysian state in northern New Guinea--the
pollution is almost as great as that produced by the "killer
fogs" that plagued industrial London until the mid-1950s.
One such fog killed 4,000 people there in 1952.
ROLE OF INDONESIAN GOVERNMENT & U.S.
While setting these fires is illegal under Indonesian law,
the firms' connections with the Indonesian military
government have allowed them to clear-burn areas without
even a slap on the wrist.
This same government calls out the army to put down
workers' strikes. Firms like Nike and Reebok can then
subcontract sneaker production in Indonesia, taking
advantage of dirt-cheap labor in the world's fourth most
populous country.
On Sept. 19 the regime broke into the second congress of
the non-government trade union SBSI and arrested 10
unionists.
It released them a day later, after an international
outcry. But on Sept. 23 it arrested eight more unionists for
encouraging workers in the area surrounding parliament to
join in a march to the Department of Labor in Djakarta,
Indonesia's capital.
This anti-worker, environment-destroying regime, it should
be recalled, was put into office by a CIA-inspired coup in
1965-66. Washington's policy was aimed at destroying the
influence of the mass-based Indonesian Communist Party,
which U.S. strategists feared could bring workers' rule to
the archipelago.
With Gen. Suharto at their head, the U.S.-backed coup
makers murdered up to a million Indonesians in the six
months after October 1965. Not a word of criticism came from
Washington or from the big-business U.S. media. Ever since,
the U.S. government has been a staunch backer of the Suharto
military regime, despite its cronyism, corruption and
repression.
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint
granted if source is cited. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to:
info@workers.org. Web: http://workers.org)