Indonesia Arrests 72 Over Fires Choking Malaysia
Indonesia Arrests 72 Over Fires Choking Malaysia
The News
Indonesian police arrested 72 people on Sunday suspected of deliberately setting forest and peatland fires that have blanketed central and western Indonesia in a choking haze and pushed smoke across the border into Malaysia.
Investigators say most of the suspects burned land to clear it for plantations at lower cost — and that the case is unlikely to stop with them.
The suspects are tied to 89 separate forest and land fire cases across five provinces on the island of Borneo and four on Sumatra, said Mohammad Irhamni, director of special crimes at the National Police's Criminal Investigation Agency. The charges carry penalties ranging from heavy fines to as much as 15 years in prison.
Timeline
In Malaysia's eastern state of Sarawak, one district recorded "very unhealthy" air quality and eight others posted unhealthy readings. The Sarawak government closed nearly 600 schools, affecting about 200,000 students.
President Prabowo Subianto flew to Central Kalimantan province, where more than 18,700 acres have burned, and promised helicopters and water pumps to bring the haze under control.
Police announced the 72 arrests at a news conference in Jakarta. Indonesia's Environment Ministry recorded more than 3,700 hot spots on Borneo and more than 1,700 in South Sumatra, where visibility fell to 33 feet in some areas. Cloud-seeding resumed over Kalimantan, with 30 helicopters flying water-bombing and aerial patrol missions there and another 22 covering Sumatra.
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Irhamni said investigators are tracing financial records to determine whether companies financed or ordered the land clearing, signaling the probe could expand well beyond the people arrested.
"We will not stop at the perpetrators on the ground," he said in Jakarta. "We will determine who benefited from these activities and who was ultimately behind them."
Prabowo vowed to hold accountable any company found to have contributed to the fires. "I hope we can control this soon," he said during his visit to Central Kalimantan. "We have experienced worse forest and land fires in the past, and we were able to overcome them."
Prasetyo Hadi, the head of the State Secretariat, who accompanied the president, said at least four companies in West Kalimantan province are already under investigation for allegedly using fire to clear land. If they are proven to have set the fires intentionally, he said, they could lose their operating permits.
What's Next
The 72 suspects face investigation across the 89 fire cases, with sentences of up to 15 years on the table. The separate corporate probe — the financial trail and the four West Kalimantan companies — is where the case could grow.
Putting the fires out is the harder problem. Suharyanto, the chief of Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency, or BNPB, said fire activity has increased in West, Central and South Kalimantan, where peatlands drag the burning out. Fires that look "extinguished on the surface may still contain embers underneath, so sufficient rainfall is crucial to rewet the peat and fully suppress the fires," he said.
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Indonesia has been fighting the blazes through an intensifying El Nino pattern and a prolonged dry season, according to BNPB, which said the resulting smoke crossed into Malaysia.
Fires are a recurring problem in Indonesia and routinely strain relations with its neighbors. Borneo, the world's third-largest island, is shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, with Indonesia administering about three-quarters of it — which is why smoke set on one side of the island ends up closing schools on the other.
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