President Suharto ordered government mobilization Thursday to fight forest fires spewing smog over southeastern Asia as a world environmental group called for world action to halt a “disaster” to the planet.
“We need a coordinated international effort to stop the Indonesian fires and to prevent recurrence,” Claude Martin, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature, said in a statement issued in Geneva.
Calling the Indonesian fires — many of them deliberately set as a cheap way to clear land — a “planetary disaster,” Martin said, “The sky in Southeast Asia has turned yellow and people are dying.”
A choking, health-threatening haze has covered neighboring Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. It has extended as far north as Thailand’s Phuket resort and northeast into the Philippines, raising alarm throughout the region.
The pollution has been linked to two deaths in Indonesia; 32,000 people on Sumatra and Borneo have suffered respiratory ills.
The United States, Britain and Australia warned travelers of health risks, and the World Bank offered emergency aid.
The statement by the World Wide Fund for Nature said recent satellite pictures showed the fires spreading from scrubland into forests after burning down an estimated 1.48 million acres of plantations and forests in Kalimantan on Borneo island and in Sumatra.
Indonesian State Secretary Murdiono said after a meeting with Suharto: “The president has instructed officials in the central government and the regions to mobilize to overcome the disaster.”
He did not elaborate, but Environment Minister Sarwono Kusumaatmadja said coordination was improving among various ministries to deal with the situation.
He added that it appears that peat is on fire. Forestry experts fear a major ecological disaster if peat and lignite coal beneath the rain forests catch fire, because such fires can last months, even years.
Malaysian planes are to be used to seed clouds in an effort to induce rain. Indonesia has been hit by drought, and the annual monsoons are late because of the El Nino weather phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean.
Fund officials also blamed plantation firms for much of the damage, rather than small farmers who also use slash-and-burn to clear land. They said they believe businesses clearing land for palm oil plantations, particularly in Sumatra and in West Kalimantan, are responsible for many fires.
