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Indonesia targets timber
trafficking racket
By Bill
Guerin
Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono this week pledged an "integrated
crackdown" on military and police personnel and
officials from the ministries of forestry and
immigration suspected of involvement in the
world's biggest timber trafficking racket.
The crackdown comes hot on the heels of a
report by the London-based Environmental
Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Indonesian
non-governmental organization Telapak that shows
that Indonesia, which has the world's worst
deforestation rate, is also the world's
second-biggest exporter of illegal timber after
Russia. The region's booming economic giant,
China, has become the world's largest buyer of
illegal timber.
The report, "The Last
Frontier", said that around 2.3 million cubic
meters of Indonesian timber were smuggled onto the
Chinese market last year. The report accused the
Indonesian defense forces (TNI) and government
officials of smuggling 300,000 cubic meters of
merbau timber every month, valued at US$1 billion,
from Papua to China to feed the timber processing
industry there.
Forestry Minister Malam
Sambat Kaban, National Police Chief General Dai
Bachtiar, Home Affairs Minister Muhammad Maruf,
operations assistant to the TNI chief Major
General Adam Damiri, and the director general of
immigration, Imam Santoso, were all summoned to an
unscheduled meeting with the president on Tuesday.
Under ex-president Suharto's New Order
regime, Indonesia's tropical forests were
exploited to the hilt to reap as much foreign
exchange as possible. Little has changed, except
that the forests have been further depleted and
the huge timber profits now go to international
syndicates and not to the state.
Some 30
million cubic meters of logs are smuggled overseas
annually, causing the state to suffer losses of
about Rp40 trillion ($4.3 billion), according to
the Forestry Ministry.
More than 70% of
the country's original frontier forests have been
lost, and an area the size of Switzerland is cut
down every year. Illegal logging is said to have
destroyed 10 million hectares (2.47 million
acres).
The increasing degradation of the
region's forests to meet China's demand is hardly
surprising. Mainland China consumes nearly 280
million cubic meters of timber a year, but its
domestic capacity is barely half of this. Imports
and illegal logging make up for the shortfall.
Papua quickly became the new target for
logging barons as forests in East Kalimantan
province and Sumatra had been plundered through
huge logging operations over the past decade.
The sparsely populated province, formerly
known as Irian Jaya, covers an area nearly the
size of France and forms the western part of the
island of New Guinea, which, with intact forest
cover at around 70%, contains the last substantial
tracts of undisturbed forest in the Asia-Pacific
region.
"Our research shows trade in
merbau between Papua and China is being controlled
by a few people, a few syndicates, so it's the
biggest sort of smuggling racket in terms of the
volume and value of the timber being smuggled,"
said Julian Newman, a senior investigator with the
EIA.
Indonesia has banned the export of
unprocessed lumber, and in December 2002 signed a
memorandum of understanding with China to take
steps to regulate timber imports by preventing
illegal logging. But three years of investigations
revealed a network of middlemen and brokers
responsible for arranging shipments of the
illegally felled logs to China. The majority of
merbau logs stolen from Papua were shipped to the
Chinese port of Zhangjiagang, near Shanghai, which
in just a few years has become a major log trading
port.
Merbau is prized for its strength
and durability and feeds the demand for hardwood
flooring and garden furniture in China, one of the
world's fastest-growing economies.
"Papua
has become the main illegal logging hotspot in
Indonesia," said Telapak's M Yayat Afianto. "The
communities of Papua are paid a pittance for trees
taken from their land, while timber dealers in
Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong are banking huge
profits."
"The profits are vast as local
communities only receive around $10 for each cubic
meter of merbau felled on their land, while the
same logs are sold for as much as $270 per cubic
meter in China," said the report. Each cubic meter
of merbau, when made into 26 square meters of
flooring, sells for nearly $2,000 in New York or
London.
The rest of the profit goes to
criminal logging syndicates that oversee the trade
and pay bribes of about $200,000 per ship to get
contraband logs out of the country and ensure they
are not intercepted in Indonesian waters. The
EIA/Telapak report said illegal logging in Papua
involves collusion with the Indonesian military,
the support of Malaysian logging gangs, and the
exploitation of indigenous communities.
Kaban, from the Ministry of Forestry, also
admitted that powerful businessmen, whom he
described as "slippery as eels in a pond of
lubricating oil", have involved civil servants in
his ministry, as well as the police and the
prosecutor's office, in illegal logging practices.
Kaban said his ministry had reported 59
businessmen allegedly involved in a wide range of
illegal logging practices to the police and the
prosecutor's office, but not a single case had
been investigated. He said rampant illegal logging
practices by such businessmen led to the rapid
rate of destruction of the country's forests,
including those in protected areas.
Kaban
said EIA and Telapak had given the government
names of 32 financiers of illegal logging
operations in Papua and other provinces. Most were
Malaysians. He was quoted as saying that,
according to the president, "personnel of the
eastern navy, the police in Papua, the Trikora
Regional Military Command [based in Papua's
provincial capital of Jayapura], local offices of
the ministries of forestry and immigration in
Papua, all have indications of being involved in
illegal logging in Papua."
Corrupt police
and military officers are bribed to allow illegal
logging boats to sail from Indonesian waters and
help cut deals with local communities to fell the
timber and guard logging sites, the report said.
"There is a question mark over whether
Indonesia's military is serious to stop its
involvement," Arbi Valentinus, a spokesman for
Telapak, said. The TNI have previously denied the
institution was engaged in the trade, but conceded
rogue elements could be taking part.
A
former police chief of Sorong regency in Papua and
five of his subordinates are on trial for illegal
logging in the province and National Police Chief
General Bachtiar has promised "shock therapy" for
any police personnel suspected of involvement in
illegal logging.
Illegal logging also
exacerbates potentially deadly natural disasters,
such as floods and landslides, and is killing many
of Indonesia's endangered animal species, such as
Sumatran tigers and orangutans. In November 2003
then-president Megawati Sukarnoputri ordered a
drive to catch illegal loggers eight days after a
flash flood blamed on deforestation killed at
least 136 people at the resort town of Bahorok in
North Sumatra.
Senior officials including
Nabiel Makarim, environment minister at the time,
said rampant illegal logging in the neighboring
Gunung Leuser national park helped cause the
disaster. Makarim denounced illegal loggers as
terrorists and hit out at their protectors in the
police and army. He promised a new law making the
crime of illegal logging a capital offense.
Forestry Minister Muhammad Prakosa ordered the
reforestation of 300,000 hectares of land across
the country.
Environmentalists criticized
Kaban last year when he said he would probably
revoke a proposed government regulation that would
have meted out severe penalties to illegal
loggers, while financiers of illegal logging would
have faced the death sentence or life
imprisonment.
Kaban told a hearing with
parliament's Commission IV on forestry that the
judiciary lacks the courage to tackle illegal
logging and said he would prefer to deal with
illegal logging "through consolidation and
coordination between the Forestry Ministry, the
police, the Attorney General's Office and the
courts".
"Nobody engaged in illegal
logging will be immune from the law," presidential
spokesman Andi Mallarangeng quoted Yudhoyono as
saying after the meeting on Tuesday. But
environmentalists have said illegal logging bosses
are virtually never prosecuted due to endemic
corruption in the country's judicial system.
Corruption is said to be worst in the
Attorney General's Office and among the national
police, environmentalists say. Collusion between
the military, police, state prosecutors and the
courts are the main reasons why illegal logging
bosses have so far gone unpunished in Indonesia.
Bill Guerin, a weekly Jakarta
correspondent for Asia Times Online since 2000,
has worked in Indonesia for 19 years in journalism
and editorial positions. He has been published by
the BBC on East Timor and specializes in
business/economic and political analysis in
Indonesia.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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