Fire comes into

Music

01.00.00.00

focus, fires

raging, smoke billowing

Maher:  Kalimantan's environmental clock is at one minute to midnight.

Fierce fires have rolled juggernaut-like across great tracts of land - reducing everything in their path to ash and darkening the sky with suffocating smoke.

00.28

Smoke coming out of chimney, timber, child walking in burnt out field, map of Borneo

But this isn't one of nature's curses, this disaster is man-made.  It's a full scale assault led by timber and plantation companies which threatens to destroy an island the world can't afford to lose.

People on smoky street, motorbikes

Palangkaraya lies in the heart of Kalimantan.  For the past six weeks the people of this remote city hewn out of the jungle haven't seen the sun. 

01.02

They've been condemned to live in an eerie twilight, a world cloaked in acrid smog spawned by the surrounding fires.  Air services were cut off in August.  Now Palangkaraya's isolation is almost complete.

01.13

People coughing, doctor with patients

At a smoke filled clinic, the heavy toll exacted by this crisis is painfully clear to Dr. Roestina and her hard pressed staff.

The number of patients seeking their help for respiratory complaints has doubled in just one month.

Intv with Dr. Roestina

Dr. Roestina:  People cough, have colds and suffer from bad throat infections.  Because of the bad air quality these suffering from asthma, have found it very hard to breathe.

Doctor with crying baby, doctor speaking to parent, people waiting, doctor with patients

Maher:  Deni Rachman is only seven months old.  He has a fever and has been coughing for the past three days.  His young mother worries that the smoke is making his condition worse.

01.46

The clinic's medicine supplies are now low and it's run out of face masks.  As for the future, Dr. Roestina knows that for some of her patients the trauma will continue long after the smog has lifted.

Intv with Dr. Roestina

Dr. Roestina:  Patients will get worse.  They will find it hard to breathe and may die.  For babies and children who have a lack of oxygen, I'm afraid it could cause brain damage.

02.42

Smoky street, Maher to camera

Super:

MICHAEL MAHER

Maher:  There were no pollution meters in Palangkaraya so it's difficult to precisely gauge just how harmful these appalling conditions are.  The doctors say that breathing in this air for just one day is the equivalent of smoking cigarettes. 

Maher: I've only been here for two days and can already feel the impact of the smoke on my eyes and throat but the poor people of Palangkaraya have had to endure this poisonous scourge for more than a month - with little or no help from their government.

03.16

People handing out masks

It's been left to young activists like Weli Yesi to fill the void created by the government's neglect.

03.33

On a smog bound city street, Weli and her colleagues from the Indonesian environment forum hand out cheap face masks.  There are  simply not enough to go around.

Intv with Weli Yesi

Weli Yesi:  I'm angry, very angry.  We are non-existent.  The government doesn't care about the ordinary people.

03.52

People trying to put out fires

Maher:  Outside Palangkaraya - in the countryside, people are also being left to fend for themselves.  The indiscriminate nature of these fires makes them very difficult to fight.

Impoverished farmers like Sugung and his family are pathetically ill-equipped for this desperate, back-breaking task.

Intv with Sugung, people trying to put out fires

Sugung:  I'm trying to make a living but I also have to fight fires.  For ten days I've been fighting fires with my wife and children.  I use buckets and banana branches to put out the flames.

Intv with Weli Yesi

Weli Yesi:  This is the worst environmental crisis in my lifetime.  The government used to say that Kalimantan is the earth of the future - now it's gone.  It's burnt.

04.50

Tracking shot on water, monkey in tree, tracking of trees, birds, monkeys, 

Maher:  The Kalimantan that is disappearing so rapidly is unique.  It's tropical rainforests are the largest in Asia. 

05.11

They're home to some of the world's rarest and most remarkable flora and fauna.

More than three thousand species of trees and some one thousand species of birds, fish and primates can be found here - including the endangered orangutan and these rare proboscis monkeys.

05.28

pan of forest, tree falling, man climbing on trunk

Sadly though, the forests of Kalimantan are being cut down at an alarming rate.

05.55

of tree

Intv with Emmy Hafild

Super:

EMMY HAFILD

Environmentalist

Emmy Hafild:  In 1953 we still had about 143 million hectares of forest.  The most recent satellite photo in 1993 our forest is only 94 million hectares so in only eleven years if we calculate from 1982 to 1993, we lost about 2.4 million hectares per year.

06.02

Maher:  That's a remarkable rate.

Emmy Hafild:  It's scary actually - it's the highest rate in the world at the moment.

Timber yard

Maher:  Forestry experts say that it's the practices of timber and plantation companies which have led to most of the fires.

They either leave large mounts of waste on the forest floor - waste that can easily catch fire during dry spells or else deliberately start the fires to clear land.

06.40

Maher walking with Bob Hasan,

Bob Hasan is Indonesia's timber tycoon and close confidante and business partner of President Soeharto's.  He claims the experts have got it wrong.

Intv with Hasan

Bob Hasan:  The problem comes from newcomers.  The newcomers - or sometimes you have also roving farmers along the sea or near the river, they just like to have a few hundred metres.  They don't have any equipment so they just cut the tree.  Then to clean up the roots, where they don't have duty equipment, they burn it.  It will cause a lot of damage if the dry season is very long.

07.03

Maher:  But the Minister for the Environment has quite clearly said that the majority of these fires have been set by plantation and timber companies.

Bob Hasan:  He's wrong,  I mean, he's wrongly quoted.  Yes, the plantation companies but not us, the industry.  So we are not that stupid to burn our raw materials.

07.37

Intv with Emmy Hafild

Emmy Hafild:  Almost all timber plantations that we have witnesses are using fire in land clearing.  They are even putting the land clearing by fire into their costs when they submit their loans to the banks.

07.51

Tracking shots on river, Maher with Weli Yesi in boat, Weli Yesi talking to Maher

Maher:  In Kalimantan, fire has been used to clear land for centuries.  For the indigenous Dyak people of Borneo, it's a vital tool.  Weli Yesi is a Dyak, a member of the Ngaju tribe.

08.15

She's taking us downriver from Palangkaraya to visit her family's ancestral home.

Weli Yesi:  It takes twenty years to create a forest with good timber quality.

08.35

Maher:  But now?

08.40

Weli Yesi:  It's not there because the big logs have already been taken by forestry companies.

08.50

Smoky tracking shot of river, boat, timber burning, boat docking

Maher:  As our boat motors into the muddy reaches of the Kahayan, what we see is frightening.  Visibility is close to zero.

The river is lined with saw mills, still processing thousands of logs a day.  Despite the extreme conditions, they continue to burn off waste and pump pollution into the air.

09.01

Finally we emerge from the smoke to dock at the village of Buntoi.

09.16

Drum, statue,

Music

man, people

dancing

Maher:  Once the infamous head hunters of Borneo, the Dyaks of Buntoi now lead more peaceful lives but remain proud of their traditions.

Tonight - in the village long house, they're welcoming Weli back to her family home.

09.38

Canoe on river, tracking shot of saw mill, Maher speaking with Chief Frantika Dewel

These Dyaks are farmers.  They used to hunt as well.  But as we pass saw mills on the way to the fields, village Chief Frantika Dewel tells us, those days are gone.

09.52

Chief Frantika Dewel:  A long time ago, the Dyaks used the land for rattan plantations, for fishing and for hunting.  Now they all disappeared so the Dyaks find it difficult to find fish to eat.

10.04

Man clearing land

Maher:  To clear their land, the Dyaks slash and burn.  But they do so with meticulous care.  Fire breaks are prepared and waste is carefully gathered before a flame is lit.

10.26

It's rare for the Dyaks to allow the fires to get out of control.

Intv with Chief Frantika Dewel

Chief Frantika Dewel:  Twenty years ago forest fires never happened.  Now the forest fires, I guess, are caused by the logging companies.  They cut through the forest and take the big logs.  What remains often catches fire.

10.42

Smoking earth, Maher to camera

Maher:  In Kalimantan if you play with fire it's crucial that you know exactly what you're doing.  A lot of the land here is peat, like this.  And when it's dry, as it is at the moment because of the drought, it becomes highly combustible.

11.06

Now the dangerous thing about peat fires is that they don't just go out after a few days, they can burn for months.  Worse still there are coal seams all over Kalimantan and some of those have been known to burn for years.

Smoking peat, trees

Of all the fires burning in Kalimantan, it's these on peat land which pose the gravest threat to the environment.  The peat here contains huge amounts of carbon.

11.35

Setting fire to it contributes to the build up of green house gases.

It also releases sulphur and nitrous oxides into the atmosphere which pose dangerous health risks.

Men on timber,

Music

smokestack,

timber being loaded, saw mill

Maher:  Further down river from the Dyak's land - in the city of Banjarmasin, the story is just as grim.  This is an industrial free for all.  And the government seems unable or unwilling to clamp down on these powerful, logging and plantation conglomerates.

12.13

Intv with Soemarsono

Super:

Mr. SOEMARSONO

Forestry Ministry

Soemarsono:  We emphasise that we want to stop land clearing by burning - not activities of logging, not activities of timber plantation, but how to stop land clearing by burning because this is the source of our fires. 

13.31

We can't stop the activities of logging, plantations otherwise the development may stop.

Chain saw, trees falling, men in forest with chain saws

Maher:  Some companies found guilty of lighting fires have now had their licences revoked.  But the biggest companies operating here in Kalimantan are protected by high level backers in the government and the military.

12.56

Emmy Hafild:  It's very difficult to move a bureaucracy if at every level of bureaucracy there's widespread corruption.  Everybody knows about it. 

13.09

Our masks for instance have been confiscated by the government in the field and were sold to the people.  You know this is very bad when people are suffering.

Child in burning forest, burning peat, kids in smoke

Maher:  And it's not as though this disaster struck without warning.  For more than a decade now Kalimantan has been plagued by fires but each year fresh blazes are lit to clear land.

13.41

Where urgent action was required - instead neglect and indifference prevailed.

Intv with Bob Hasan

Bob Hasan:  That's the perception of the NGOs from abroad.  It's always like that, always looking for faults.  And they don't do anything.

14.00

Maher:  Shouldn't this be given the utmost urgency?

14.08

Bob Hasan:  We are giving it the utmost urgency.  The only fault we have is, we don't have a very good public relations company.  Maybe we have to look for one.

Maher:  So you think it's a PR problem?

14.26

Bob Hasan:  Yes, it's just a PR problem, because we immediately addressed that problem.

Fires raging

Maher:  But this is much more than a mere PR problem.  This is the worst man-made disaster to strike southeast Asia in living memory.

14.36

It's impact on the health of millions and the region's environment will be felt long after the fires have died out.  As for Indonesian Borneo, many fear this shocking wake-up call has come too late.

Emmy Hafild:  It's not like Borneo was thirty years ago with the jungle, the jungle in Borneo now - that image will be gone forever.

ENDS

15.34