Willy Smits, a Dutch advisor to the former Minister of Forestry, recently appeared on television screens throughout the world, personally fighting fires in Kalimantan and asking for Western aid to help endangered orangutans. The situation seems straightforward: the massive fires that raged from July to November 1997 have returned to East Kalimantan (East Borneo) this year as a result of El Nino, the weather pattern responsible for prolonged drought throughout the region. Orangutans, once again, are in danger.

But, like so much else in Indonesia, the situation is not as it appears. Willy Smits is not the hero he appears to be in front of television cameras and reporters. Quite the opposite: Smits allegedly helped write and implement the forestry policy that has destroyed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres of tropical forest, and that has brought orangutans to the edge of extinction. Knowledgeable sources in Indonesia acknowledge that Smits has working ties with Mohamed "Bob" Hasan, the timber and plantation tycoon who headed Indonesia's monopolistic plywood cartel. Last month Hasan was named Minister of Trade and Industry, a position made even more pivotal by Indonesia's economic crisis, which has earned the country the term "Asia's sickest tiger."

Smits is not a primatologist nor does he have any formal training in medicine or wildlife management. Rather, he is an expert in fungi and in grafting technology for the timber industry. He had been in Indonesia many years before he suddenly became interested in orangutan conservation. Coincidentally, with Dutch government support, he became director of an orangutan rehabilitation center about the time Indonesia switched from a policy of selective logging of ancient tropical forests to clear-cutting vast tracts of forest for plywood, a more profitable but far more destructive endeavor. In Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, some have whispered that Willy Smits's forestry and orangutan rehabilitation programs are smokescreens under which the powerful elite of Indonesia, such as Bob Hasan, destroy vast areas of tropical forest to convert the land to timber and palm oil estates.

Smits's insistence that "rehabilitated," wildborn orangutans be sent and released to distant mountainous forests, which have never been occupied by wild orangutan populations, conveniently concentrates orangutans into a small corner of Kalimantan that is difficult to log. It removes the visible endangered orangutans from the most profitable lowland forests, much as earlier programs relocated the Penan hunter-gatherers so that their ancestral forests could be logged at will.

The end result of this orangutan relocation policy will be orangutan extinction throughout much of Borneo. Soon there will only be tiny populations of wild orangutans in parks and reserves. Most orangutans in the "wild" will consist of a genetically mixed population of orangutans from all over Kalimantan concentrated in an ecologically peripheral area that probably cannot support orangutans long-term. Thus, the elite who profit from the conversion of Indonesia's forests will not be bothered by the inconvenience of a large, charismatic species such as the orangutan going extinct in full view of the world, especially if the fires can be blamed. Smits will have taken care of the problem for them.

To complete this removal policy, Smits advocates a strict policy of isolating orphan and older orangutans from human contact. He argues that isolation is necessary to protect wild populations from diseases contracted from humans. Over the past quarter century, hundreds of rescued wildborn orangutans, nursed and reared by people, have been released at various sites in Borneo. There is no evidence of the spread of contagious diseases to wild populations, such as the polio epidemic that occurred among chimpanzees at (then) Gombe Stream Reserve. Rather, these rehabilitation sites have begun to attract ecotourists, who create jobs for local people and put much needed cash into local economies. The true reason for removal seems to be that if orangutans are out of sight, they are out of mind.

In addition, Smits takes care of the problem by "leading the charge" against anyone who dares dissent from the publicized forestry "party line" designed by Smits as Forestry Minister advisor. He also runs the forestry computer network and wages email wars against dissidents.

The victims of the fires and this forestry policy have been the people of Kalimantan, the forests, and wildlife such as the orangutans. Beginning in July of last year, forest and brush fires raged across vast areas of Indonesia, particularly in Kalimantan and Sumatra, blanketing much of Southeast Asia with smoke that spread as far as Darwin, Australia and Bangkok, Thailand. Throughout the region, the toxic haze closed schools and airports, disrupted both sea and ground transport, inflicted eye, skin and respiratory illnesses on millions of people and probably caused numerous deaths among the weak and elderly.

Last year commentators repeatedly noted that efforts to fight the fires were too little, too late and that many government agencies seemed to be paralyzed. Indonesia's then Minister of the Environment was the first to speak out, warning as early as March 1997 of expected drought conditions and then later blaming commercial interests for using the fires to clear forested land. The Minister of the Environment mobilized the Indonesian NGO's, many of which established and maintained fire monitoring posts and distributed face masks and other equipment in the field. Teams of volunteers, many students, went out under the auspices of the Environment Ministry to fight the fires directly. The Minister of Forestry also spoke out strongly, even offering to resign, but took little or no action against those setting the fires.

Few governments are willing to admit that palm oil and pulpwood plantations are being installed immediately after the clearing of ancient primary tropical forests. Indonesia is an exception. A 1995 report by the World Wide Fund for Nature notes that "Indonesia is perhaps the only country where the planned expansion of the pulp and paper industry openly involves the clearfelling of substantial areas of rainforest." Fire, of course, is an effective tool for clearing forests.

Approximately 2 million hectares (about 5 million acres) of forest burned last year. Analyses of satellite data and land-use maps have confirmed that approximately 80% of the fires originated in lands controlled by palm oil and timber concessionaires. Fire is simply the cheapest way to clear tropical forest once the large valuable timber is removed. The timber industry is regulated, but the wood from palm oil plantations, is not. Not only does the palm oil concessionaire initially get the valuable timber "free," but burning costs about a quarter as much as any other method of removing trees. Some fires are, of course, started by slash-and-burn horticulturists, but these fires are typically small and well controlled. Yet timber and plantation baron Bob Hasan, as well as Willy Smits, continue to blame traditional shifting cultivators for the fires in the face of evidence that strongly suggests otherwise.

The more recent fires reported in East Kalimantan are a result of a predicted second, more severe phase of El Nino, which has again denied rain to East Kalimantan. Decades of unsustainable logging and recent conversion of forest to plantations has degraded millions of acres of once primary tropical forest, leaving the forests unusually vulnerable to fire. Forest that is damaged by logging is eight to ten times more likely to burn than primary forest. Forestry policies related to illegal and legal logging, palm oil and timber estates and other industrial agriculture have provided concessionaires, government contractors and local villagers with incentives to clear large areas of land by fire. Lack of oversight over the large logging and plantation companies has led to a situation where economically powerful business conglomerates appear to be in a league of their own apparently above the law. Finally, weak community rights over land and resources, whether traditional or contemporary, have left local villagers without mechanisms for challenging policies and holding concessionaires and others accountable for forest destruction.

Indonesia had been the darling of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for many years. With its annual economic growth rate of 7%, Indonesia was considered one of Asia's "dragons." The enormous wealth accumulated by the First Family and their friends, such as Bob Hasan and others, was seen as part of the price to be paid for Indonesia's economic miracle. However, in mid-1997, while the sun was obliterated by smoke haze throughout southern Asia, a crisis swept through the stock exchanges and currency markets of Asia, beginning in Thailand and pulling in other nations of the region as well. Indonesia's initial response to the crisis was seen as admirable, but this rapidly changed. Soon Indonesia was also forced to compromise with the IMF. Among other reforms imposed by the IMF, Bob Hasan's plywood monopoly was dismantled.

Indonesia's economic crisis means that there are now even fewer resources to fight the fires. But the crisis has another more important effect. Adding fuel to the fire, companies and concessionaires are accelerating forest clearing and conversion in a scramble to make up the dramatic losses incurred since the economic crisis hit last year. Before the crisis, Indonesia had plans to increase pulpwood plantations to about 15 million acres during the next decade. Now the plans for forest conversion to pulpwood and other plantations have increased dramatically the size of the areas to be cleared.

The fires and the forest conversion to plantations have wreaked havoc on the orangutans. During the last twenty years at least 50% of orangutan habitat has been destroyed and the wild orangutan population halved. Current estimates of the number of orangutans in Borneo range from 20,000 to 30,000 individuals. Last year's fires resulted in several thousand orangutans slaughtered and their infants taken into captivity and the pet trade. Last year Indonesia's rehabilitation programs were deluged with newly captured infants under dire emergency conditions. Orangutans, flushed out of the forest by fires and lack of food, were frequently killed by local villagers, themselves suffering from illness and poor harvests from the fires. In the battle for diminishing resources, local villagers have shown no hesitation in killing or capturing any wildlife, including orangutans. In booming times, the killing and capture of orangutans held less interest. This year's burning season may be even worse, if current predictions hold. The orangutan has never been under greater threat.

The United States should be very careful in aiding Indonesia. Indonesia is too important a player in the world ignore. Harsh demands might backfire, plummeting the fourth largest country in the world into political and social chaos. But there is no reason to support destructive forestry policies and an unaccountable system of environmental regulation. There is no reason to support giant pulp mill complexes owned by Bob Hasan and others in East Borneo or the huge mega-rice swamp clearing project proposed by another tycoon who saw an opportunity to make even more millions of dollars at the expense of villagers and wildlife in the area.

The US has voiced concern about Indonesia's economy and political future, focusing on Indonesia's monopolies, weak banking system and "fat cats" at the center. But it has said little about the fires that ruin people's health and lifeways, as well as hastening the destruction of biodiversity and wildlife.

North American governments should also support the local NGO's, some of them tiny indeed, which as a group attempted to monitor the fires and took leadership action in local communities. But these NGO's must be of the soil, of the land and of the forest and they must be run by Indonesians for Indonesia.

The Ministry of the Environment needs to be supported with technological and financial assistance at all levels.

Finally, people should realize that while El Nino, is a natural phenomenon, that the forestry and orangutan policies which are causing the orangutans to go extinct are orchestrated by visible people such as Willy Smits, an official advisor in the Ministry of Forestry, and Bob Hasan, timber tycoon extraordinaire. They help dictate the policies that are leaving dead orangutans in charred forests while local villagers, angry and in ill health, wonder why the forests of their youth are gone and why they grow poorer every day while Smits flies in helicopters inspecting the fires and Hasan -- smiling, counting his fortune, and selling his plywood -- becomes a cabinet minister.

AWI Quarterly Winter 1998, Volume 47 Number 1, p. 6-7.