Green Indonesia

The following letter was published this week in the Jakarta Post. It is too good to be lost in their archives. The Suharto who wrote this is not to be confused with the doddering old dictator whose acolytes remain to mishandle the Sidoarjo volcanic mudflow disaster, to carve up the power industry among themselves, to set fire to the forests, to allow timber smugglers to go free, to ……. oh, you get the picture. It’s why we’ve set up Green Indonesia.

With Hiroshima and Chernobyl not forgotten, the inability of Indonesia to even install a tsunami warning system, the handling of the Sidoarjo disaster, the government’s indifference and inaptitude to helping the affected population, where ministers do not relay a tsunami warning because there might be no tsunami after all … how do they dare to build a huge reactor of 1,300 megawatt in Kalimantan that will be run by people with such inept mind-sets? If one day there is a malfunction, how terrible will the impact be? And the government will not want to take responsibility.

In Europe they have/had also atom reactors but with capacities under 400 megawatt and they have been shut down because of protests from the population who understand the dangers of these installations. Why is the use of solar power not advanced and promoted? The source is abundant, free of charge from God and there is no dangerous waste to be disposed of.

And above all, the maintenance is less hazard prone than an atomic reactor — keeping especially in mind the mental attitude of the people taking care of such installations. Even clean water, electricity and phone services do not work properly, though we have to pay for it.

There is money for the monorail and busway and the atomic reactor, but not for repairing roads, the irrigation channels and rivers to solve floods or to extinguish forest fires, which are set on purpose to free land for palm oil plantations. It’s plain greed from those in power to get lucrative projects!

Ethics and moral are words in a dictionary and probably cannot even be explained by them. For sure these terms have no place in their daily life, which only revolves around money and power. The old Roman empire had the device: Dividere et impera, which means scatter and rule, which again translates into “swamp the people with issues to confuse them in their daily lives and do your own stuff without serious interference from them”.

So the busway, the monorail and atomic reactor etc. will be imposed on us, the forests will burn on and the wild animals will perish, the people from Sidoarjo will be left to fend for themselves, all other public services will stay rotten because the responsible parties have no sense of shame about their bad performance, because their conscience is solely revolving around their bank accounts!

Who is there to discipline and correct them?

SUHARTO
Tangerang, Banten