06-06 Indonesia

“Close the Window, Close the Window.” I was screaming to the taxi driver, because the air coming into the back of his cab was burning our eyes. I never experienced anything like it.
We were at the International Small Business Congress in Jakarta and it was 1994. And the day before the annual gathering of small business leaders, we were renewing old friendships.
Well, someone suggested gathering on the roof top of our four-star hotel to have a swim in the pool. And up we went. But that suggestion was good for about ten minutes. The air was so polluted we could barely breathe.
It was all the coal-fired power plants in the area that send so much “poo up the flue”. It is a similar story in places like India and China that also use coal to produce energy. The photo shows a woman tending her sheep next to a generating station that is sending poisons into the atmosphere.
Like all the coal producing nations, and Indonesia is one of the biggest producers and exporters, the coal mines are located in particular regions of the country. And in Indonesia it is the provinces that are part of the Islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan.
And, what I have learned is that there is as much pollution caused by the mining of coal as there is from the burning of coal in that country. The photo here shows homes near a mine that have been abandoned because the air is so polluted by coal dust. And this coal dust is a killer.
A memory from our visit was a nation that seemed ungovernable with so many islands, and so many languages. The government at the time was going from village to village explaining public policy using puppets. And I have one that I treasure.
So, it is no surprise that the government has tried to decentralize decision making by giving more authority to provinces to approve the licensing of coal mining. But like India this has led to massive corruption with people using bribes to purchase permits or avoid regulations.
So, to add to the pollution created by coal we have political pollution created by regulations that local authorities cannot manage.
And forget about climate change. Indonesia is planning to build something like 100 coal-fired power plants between the years 2018 and 2022. And the pollution from these power plants is expected to kill something like 30,000 people.
Do they have a different attitude toward life and death in that part of the world?
During my visit in 1994 I met one of the generals that supervised the assassination of about 600,000 members of the Indonesian Communist Party at the time of the Vietnam War. He was the Director-General of Small Business. And I met his boss then and in 1994, President Suharto.