Indonesian President's New Strategy on Illegal Logging is an Improvement, Say Indonesian Green Activists

Fidelis E. Satriastanti, Jakarta Globe 14 Apr 10;

After deriding President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s call to go after the “mafia” involved in illegal logging last week, some environmentalists are now applauding his decision to assign the Judicial Mafia Eradication Task Force to help tackle the issue by targeting legal system flaws that block convictions.

“Illegal logging is a serious crime, meaning that it’s an organized crime,” said Rhino Subagyo, executive director of the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law. “It has very complex elements, including corruption, money laundering and environmental disasters. It cannot be handled just by one institution, like the KPK [Corruption Eradication Commission], because they are only equipped to deal with corruption issues.”

In 2005, Yudhoyono issued a presidential instruction involving 12 ministries, the Attorney General’s Office, National Police, Army, State Intelligence Agency (BIN), governors and district heads. The instruction was meant to herald the start of a concerted campaign against illegal logging, but resulted in few convictions among hundreds of cases.

Critics took his April 7 announcement as a sign that his previous efforts to halt illegal logging had been a complete failure

“There’s nothing wrong with the instruction as it had a good purpose: To ensure his subordinates coordinated with each other to make sure the massive policy movement supported the action. But its implementation turned out to have little effect because too many conflicts of interest between sectors and ministries caused them to only halfheartedly [execute the instruction],” Rhino said.

One of the most visible examples of lack of coordination and conflict of interest, Rhino said, was when the police closed active investigations into 13 major pulp and paper companies in Riau that were allegedly committing serious violations.

“That is a blatant example of a dispute between the forestry ministry and police,” Rhino said.

Indonesia currently has about 10 percent of the world’s remaining rainforests, but officials estimate the country has lost over 10 million hectares to illegal logging. Indonesia Corruption Watch estimates state losses from the practice could be as high as Rp 30 trillion ($3.33 billion).

Hariadi Kartodiharjo, a forestry expert at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, said the missing link in addressing illegal logging lies in the justice system, where the Ministry of Forestry rarely wins cases.

“We already have the institutions who are in charge, but they don’t effectively work because there’s something wrong in the legal process, including at regional levels,” Hariadi said, adding that the country’s legal system has not revised its burden of proof requirements for environmental and forestry cases, making it difficult to obtain convictions against large-scale illegal logging enterprises.

“Illegal logging cases are treated like regular criminal acts, where they require eyewitnesses to really see that someone chopped down the trees. It’s obvious that there is a gap [in the law] between everyday rationality and legal rationality. You can’t eradicate illegal logging within the conventional system,” he said.

However, Hariadi said, the task force should not busy itself with policy matters, which are supposed to be the domain of the government, including permit issues, but should rather focus on aggressively targeting illegal logging’s major players.

“Just use intelligence data and information and aim at one big target, whether in Sumatra, Papua or Kalimantan, because many players in illegal logging are actually the [legitimate companies], considering that it’s actually an expensive business that only those with lots of money are able to join in,” he said.

Mas Achmad Santosa, a member of the anti-mafia task force, said the team was assigned to fight organized criminals operating in the forestry sector, meaning that they will be working in the context of legal enforcement.

“We will be there to help ministries to deal with the ‘bottleneck’ concerning plenty of failed illegal logging cases as a result of the legal process. Our job is to seize on any indications that those failures are being caused by case brokers,” Mas said.

Legitimate Companies to Blame for Much Illegal Logging: Expert
Fidelis E Satriastanti, Jakarta Globe 14 Apr 10;

Successfully breaking up large-scale illegal logging operations will require authorities to re-examine their definition of the crime, an expert on environmental law said on Wednesday.

Law enforcement agencies must focus on legitimate companies that manipulate the law to gain unfair access to forests, rather than individuals chopping down a handful of trees to construct a house or groups of criminals working in the black market, said Rhino Subagyo, executive director of the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law.

“Illegal logging operations cannot just be simply translated as people cutting down forests without permission, but must include also companies with permission that chop down trees outside their contracted areas. This can also be considered illegal logging,” Rhino said. “Basically, illegal logging is concerned with legal licenses to chop down trees.”

Furthermore, he said, there was still a lack of monitoring by the government, which allows companies to ignore the harvesting limits dictated by their permits. The result is widespread clear-cutting of forests.

“One of the biggest weaknesses is that we don’t normally do field work to verify and check on those legal companies to see whether they have done their activities in legal ways,” he said, adding that the government should adopt a new methodology to identify illegal logging.

Wirendro Sumargo, executive director of Forest Watch Indonesia, said there has been a shift in defining illegal logging since the massive expansion over the last decade of plantations, especially those devoted to palm oil.

“There has been huge movement over the last 10 years to change forest areas to palm oil plantations, and from what we have been monitoring, deforestation has a significant link to the land use changes,” Wirendro said. “The government should have paid more attention to this shift because they have claimed that the illegal logging rate has decreased. However, the deforestation rate is still high.”

That lack of monitoring, he said, allows many companies to harvest natural timber illegally by applying for permits to grow crops on lands they claim are deforested, but actually contain natural forests with high-quality trees.

Indonesian President orders examination of illegal loggers` light sentences
Antara 16 Apr 10;

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered the task force for eradication of judicial mafia to examine the light sentences passed by courts in illegal logging cases.

He issued the order at a limited cabinet meeting on forestry and environmental problems and revitalization of the defense industry here Friday.

At a press conference after the meeting, Informatics and Communications Minister Tifatul Sembiring said, according to available data, out of a total of 92 illegal logging cases heard in courts recently, 49 ended with acquittals, 24 with jail sentences averaging only one year and 19 with jail sentences between one and two years.

"This will not have a deterrent effect. Therefore, the President has ordered the task force to examine the court verdicts to see why they were so mild," he said.

At the meeting, the President also asked National Police chief General Bambang Hendarso Danuri and Attorney General Hendarman Supandji about operations in the field against illegal loggers.

On the occasion, Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan gave an expose on forest destruction.

Zulkifli said only 24 percent or 43 million of 130 million hectares of primary forests in the country still remained.

He said 40 million hectares were former production forests and half of them had been damaged or were in critical condition. The rest was no longer forested land, he said.

He said large-scale deforestation reached its peak in 2001-2002 following the euphoria of regional autonomy with the rate of destruction reaching 3.5 hectares per year.

To overcome the problem, he said, the government had no other choice but had to conduct a tree planting movement jointly with the people with a forestation target of at least 500,000 hectares a year and a special program for investors to restore industrial forests with a target of minimally 300,000 hectares a year.

He said the government was also planning to conduct replanting along catchment areas that had been deforested and were causing floods.

To slow deforestation, President Yudhoyono had ordered firm law enforcement against illegal loggers. He would also appeal to provincial governors and district heads to not easily issue a license for opening a forest for industrial or mining purposes.

He said by the end of 2010 at the latest, the economic zoning efforts in the provinces must be finished.

Development projects that must be oriented to environmental preservation would be discussed by the President and his cabinet ministers as well as provincial governors in Tampak Siring, Bali, on April 19-21, he said.(*)