The devastating impact of forest and peatland fires on humans last year went beyond our tolerance. Dozens were killed, more than 500,000 others suffered from respiratory infections and 43 million people across Indonesia and neighboring states had to brave smog, according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB).

With the fires recurring in Riau and Aceh, two of the regular hotspots in the country, last week, it is very much understandable that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo immediately called a Cabinet meeting Friday, during which he repeated his order for law enforcers to do whatever it takes to ensure justice is served over the forest and land fires.

Missing from his opening statement Friday was the intimidating threat he conveyed early this year to dismiss police and military commanders for failure to act against the fires, but it was already crystal clear that law enforcement remains a kind of Achilles’ heel in the country’s struggle to stop the man-made disaster once and for all.

Many companies held responsible for forest and land fires have escaped either criminal or civil charges in court, or at least received light sentences for various reasons, ranging from a lack of evidence to the judges’ poor knowledge or ignorance of environmental laws.

Worse still, in some cases, law enforcers, instead of going all the way in collecting incriminating evidence, have thrown in the towel too early.

Enforcement of the law has therefore hardly created any deterrence as is evident in the repeated, rampant use of fire for land clearing. Too many parties responsible for the environmental calamity have been let off the hook.

The South Jakarta District Court’s verdict Thursday, however, keeps our hopes of winning the fight against forest and peatland fires alive.

The court found sago producer PT National Sago Prima guilty of burning 2,000 hectares of local community plantations around its concession on the Riau island of Meranti in 2014 and fined the unit of the Sampoerna Strategic Group 1 trillion rupiah ($76 million) for the economic and ecological damages caused.

While the company has the right to contest the verdict, a change is happening in the way this country is dealing with forest criminals. The Forestry and Environment Ministry will seek every way to make the forest burners pay dearly. As in the case of PT National Sago Prima, when the Bengkalis District Court in Riau acquitted the company’s management of criminal charges in January last year the ministry filed a civil lawsuit against the firm and eventually won after 1 1/2 years of battle.

The government has a number of instruments to punish industry players that defy forest fire prevention mechanisms. Apart from law enforcement, forest and plantation companies face administrative sanctions even for failure to provide firefighting equipment. The problem, as always, rests with implementation.

No doubt the world, in particular the neighboring countries that have constantly borne the brunt of Indonesian forest fires, is closely watching the moves of Jokowi’s government to prevent an environmental disaster on last year’s scale from recurring. Perhaps he needs to show the face of a punisher this time around.

(Asia News Network/The Jakarta Post)
Editorial