President Suharto of Indonesia has ordered government officials to mobilise to combat Indonesia's bush fires crisis which a world environmental leader has called an international catastrophe. "The President has instructed officials in the central government and the regions to mobilise to overcome the disaster," the State Secretary said. The Environment Minister, Mr Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, said co-ordination was improving among various ministries to deal with the situation. The Co-ordinating Minister for Welfare, Mr Azwar Anas, said Mr Suharto had called the situation a national disaster, but he had stopped short of declaring a state of emergency.
The forestry ministry has 8,437 people engaged in fighting the fires, mainly on Sumatra and in Kalimantan on Borneo Island. They were joined in Sumatra yesterday by more than 1,000 Malaysian firefighters.
He said priority would be given to fighting the smoke, which has caused health alarms over neighbouring Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, and has reached as far as the southern Philippines and parts of Thailand. Malaysian C-130 planes would be used in cloudseeding in an effort to induce rain.
Indonesia has been affected by drought and the monsoon is already late following the development of the El Nino weather phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean.
The president of the World Wide Fund for Nature, Mr Syed Babar Ali of Pakistan, said in Jakarta yesterday: "It's an international catastrophe, the magnitude is so big." The WWF country representative in Indonesia, Mr Agus Purnomo, said satellite imagery indicated the areas burned or on fire totalled between 1.2 million and 1.5 million acres. Forestry experts said they feared an ecological disaster if lignite coal and peat beneath the rain forests of Kalimantan on Borneo island and in Sumatra caught fire. Diplomatic sources said the government had been caught off balance by the scale of the disaster, although it had been aware of the impending drought caused by El Nino for some time.
The bush fires through the archipelago have sent a choking, health-threatening haze across neighbouring Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. The smoke has also drifted as far as the southern Philippines and parts of Thailand. WWF officials also blamed plantation firms for much of the damage, rather than small farmers who, like the companies, use slash-and-burn techniques to clear land during the dry season.
WWF's international president said he hoped the government would enforce a ban on slash-and-burn practices in the future. The pollution has already been directly linked to two deaths in Indonesia. More than 32,000 people on Sumatra and Borneo islands have suffered respiratory problems.
The death toll from famine and disease from drought in the Indonesian half of New Guinea has reportedly climbed to 265 as the smoke haze prevented relief planes from reaching desperate villagers.
Meteorologists say El Nino has triggered the worst drought in half a century and has delayed monsoon rains. The greatest tragedy so far has been in Irian Jaya province, the western half of New Guinea, about 1,250 miles east of Jakarta, where food gardens have withered and wells and streams have gone dry. Early reports said many victims had died of cholera or hunger.
Meanwhile, the World Bank has said it would study the causes of the thick smog in the hope of preventing any future outbreak. World Bank chief Mr James Wolfensohn also made a broad offer of emergency funding if needed.