Borneo Pulp

by John Francis Kinsella

That weekend Hardy had persuaded Martin, that they should do a little of their own journalistic investigation, convincing a very reluctant Ennis to join them. He agreed mainly to keep an eye on them, to avoid overstepping their agreement with the Forestry Department who wished to avoid sensitive issues.

  They had rented a Jeep and planned to go up Martarpura, then on to Barabai, about one hundred and twenty kilometres further north on the so-called trans-island highway. The highway was mostly an unsurfaced track, which crossed more than one thousand kilometres of dense jungles to Pontianak, on the west coast of Kalimantan, with its only branch swinging east to Samarinda on the opposite coast. To the north was Kota Kinabulu, the capital of the Malaysian State of Sabah, which some people said could be reached over the highway, more than one thousand two hundred kilometres over a mostly unexplored jungle covered mountain range, which terminated in the extreme north with the four thousand metre high peak of Gunung Kinabulu.

  Their guide and driver, Hasan, who came with the Jeep, had been recommended by the hotel manager at the Miramar. Hasan spoke passable English; he was a short, round, lively individual, who had jumped at the opportunity of making a few dollars from the Perancis.

  After leaving Martarpura the road started to climb, skirting the foothills of a mountain range, the Pegunungan Meratus, which culminated at 1,892 meters with Gunung Besar. The road was surfaced but not in a particularly good condition, they bumped along slowing down as they passed through a few rare villages, where the small children pointed at them, laughing with surprise and astonishment at Hardy, half hanging out of window with his camera turning, the dogs barked and the chickens scuttled off the road squawking as they passed.

  ‘We wanna see ze barelands wit ze new cultivators,’ shouted Hardy to Hassan, who smiled and nodded his head enthusiastically, though only half understanding.

  He could not for the life of him figure out why the Perancis wanted to see the barelands, as for the cultivators, he was completely lost as to what they meant. He did not want to disappoint them, they were without any doubt important men, and above all, he saw no need to upset his clients who seemed to have plenty of money to spend.

  From time to time, they crossed a logging truck as it rumbled past them raising a cloud of red dust. It was the dry season and the roads were in a relatively good condition. The loggers worked at full speed, in less than a couple of months more the roads would be almost impracticable and logging operations would be suspended, or in the best case, very much slowed down as the rains set in.

  Barabai was like the other villages that they had passed through, a little bit bigger, but just as uninteresting. They decided to continue on a few kilometres further to Pagat, which according to their map was the last village before the mountains about twenty kilometres further on. The road had changed into simple track and the forest fell away behind them, giving way to a vast uninterrupted pale green expanse of grassland, which rippled before them in waves driven by the breeze.

  They stopped and climbed out, Hardy perched himself on the footboard of the Jeep, stretching up for a better view over the tall grass, called alang-alang. He swung his camera up and started to pan half heartedly across monotonous landscape, behind the Jeep he could see smoke rising above the trees, which marked the edge between the forest and the grassland, beyond there seemed to be an access road possibly to a logging area.

  They were disappointed there nothing dramatic, no story, just grass and mountains beyond the forest. They got back into the jeep and indicated to Hassan to drive towards the clearing and the smoke. Under the harsh sunlight, which reflected off a laterite track, a small Kawasaki motorbike slowly wound its way noisily around the bumps and holes, the rider waved to them.

  The track led into a corridor of trees. Suddenly it opened out onto a surrealistic landscape over which hung a pall of acrid smoke. The earth was blackened by fire, dotted with the broken stumps and the corpses of trees, whose naked branches reached up as hands in despair to the sky.

  It was an apocalyptic scene; men and women, blackened by the soot from the fires, carried heavy branches, others pulled on ropes attached to one of the larger trees, which lay at a strange angle across a tangled mass of smoking wood.

  Over to the left, about fifty meters away to one side of the clearing, stood a small group of huts, roughly built from odd pieces of wooden planks, their roofs fashioned from old engine-oil cans and cardboard boxes. There were a few dirty children, the smaller ones completely naked, and a silent dog. From the ground that had been prepared to one side of the clearing, a scattering of bright green shoots already appeared out of the blackened ground. They had stumbled on one of the many tragic examples of the destructive and permanent deforestation by the poor, and the relentless encroachment of the barelands on the forest.

  ‘What is this, where do these people come from?’ Martin asked Ennis.

  It was unlike anything of the easy going people they had seen over the previous week, it was true that Bandjarmasin was not a model town, but most of its population were adequately housed by local standards and well fed, there were schools, mosques, shops, electricity and services, filled with smiling people.

  ‘These are transmigrants,’ replied Ennis.

  ‘Trans what!’ said Hardy as he pulled off the lens cover.

  ‘Transmigrants from Java or Madura,’ said Ennis, but Hardy had already plunged into the smoke and ash his camera aimed at the scene of desolation.

  ‘They’re immigrants from Java, who need new fertile land to grow their food, so they clear it by cutting down and burning everything in sight,’ Ennis explained, thinking of what they would do with the story.

  ‘Well it seems like something is growing there,’ said Martin, waving doubtfully in the direction of the sparse bright green shoots of hill rice, which were pushing through the ash covered ground of the rough new field that had been torn from the forest.

  ‘The problem is that within about three years the land is exhausted,’ Ennis explained hopelessly. The land, once it had been denuded of its forest cover, was leached by the heavy tropical rains. The nutrients in the soil carried away with the rainwater to the streams and rivers, or deep into the earth leaving the land practically sterile, where only hardy grasses like alang-alang could survive. The subsistence farmers then moved on, burning the next plot of forest for new land, and hewing wood to build new shelters, the old ones being abandoned, firewood to cook their food and to make their tools.

  ‘The result is the barelands that you have just passed through.’

  ‘Can’t they plant trees or something?’

  Ennis tried to describe that on such barelands, the result of shifting cultivation in many tropical countries, governments had developed tree plantation programs and in certain regions of the world, such as in Kenya, they had achieved a degree of success, where aid and development organisations had planted 150,000 trees.

  ‘These people you see are not Dayaks, or other natives of Borneo, they are poor transmigrants who don’t know this land, which is not like the fertile volcanic soil of Java.

  ‘I’m sorry to say its like treating cancer with a fuckin aspirin. Without educating and training for these poor people, they can’t protect and conserve their environment, it’s hopeless. This must start with the governments, only the administration and public services can implement the programs. The poor don’t even know what ecology is, it’s not their problem. In many regions only the old people remember when there were thick forests, when there were animals, fruit and sufficient food for everybody.’

  ‘Is it a government policy, I mean transmigration?’ asked Martin.

  ‘That’s right and according to some people it’s applied sometimes with force.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That’s not too complicated you know. With a population of over one hundred and eighty million in a country of two million square kilometres, that’s about ninety people to the square kilometre. It doesn’t seem to be over populated compared to co
untries in Europe, like Belgium or Holland, where they have a population density of one hundred people to the square kilometre.’

  He paused, watching Hardy and Jean-Pierre filming, whilst Hassan was in discussion with one of the poor transmigrants, it was probably the headman and he was pointing to Hardy.

  ‘But when you realise that more than eighty million are on the island of Java, its mind boggling when you think that Java represents only five percent of the land surface of Indonesia, that’s about eight hundred to the square kilometre and here there’s only seven.’

  Hassan came over with the headman, who smiled shyly, his large uneven white teeth standing out against his soot blackened face transpiring from the heat.

  ‘This is Bak Soemarsono, he is the head of the village, I have told him you are from Jakarta, he would like a present from you.’

  ‘What kind of present?’ said Ennis, thinking he was at least direct.

  ‘Up to you Tuan, maybe money.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ennis dipping into his back pocket and taking out a ten thousand Rupiah note, which he offered to the headman.

  ‘Terimah kasih banyak,’ he said accepting the note in both hands, held together in a prayer like gesture.

  ‘He would also like some gasoline.’

  ‘Do we have any spare?’ he asked Hassan.

  ‘Yes Tuan, I have a jerry can.’

  ‘Can we give it to them?’

  ‘Yes Tuan.’

  They exchange some words and the headman pointed to the huts.

  ‘He wants to offer you something to drink.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ennis nodding in agreement.

  They walked over to their humble huts, as Ennis continued his explanation.

  ‘With the highest population density in the world, Java is a vast political and human problem. The Indonesian government has tried to attenuate it, by a program of transmigration to the vast under inhabited provinces in Borneo, Sumatra and Irian Jaya, each of which is larger than France, with just a few million inhabitants.’

  The children gathered around them and two of the women were given instructions to prepare coffee, as Hardy offered around his Gauloises cigarettes.

  ‘You know this is kind of a long history, it started with the Dutch in 1905, now government policy has programmed millions of people for transmigration to the empty regions, entire communities and villages are transported to distant provinces, sometimes thousands of kilometres from their homes. It’s like landing on another planet for them,’ Ennis told them.

  ‘Ask them where they originally come from?’ said Martin to Hassan, who in turn questioned the headman.

  ‘Central Java Sir.’

  ‘How long have they been here?’

  ‘Three years now.’

  ‘Do they have any money?’

  ‘Just a little, his two brothers have found jobs working in the logging concessions, but it’s not enough, there are more than thirty people in this group.’

  They nodded as they listened to the story, sipping the weak coffee in small glasses that the women had offered them, on a biscuit tin cover, used as a tray.

  ‘Its like the early settlers in the American West, no return ticket, succeed or die,’ said Hardy filming them as the sipped their coffee and smoked, whilst the children and dog looked on.

  ‘They arrive with the basic needs to set up their new homes, enough rice to see them through to their first harvest, as well as seeds and tools, but without the tissue of intercommunity life that they had known at home, you know, no roots. The government gives each family a few acres of land, but don’t think it’s like traditional farm lands,’ Ennis paused and dug into his pocket, he pulled out a roll of mints, which he offered to the children.

  ‘They can do what they like with the land?’ Martin questioned.

  ‘Yeah, but that’s much easier said than done, they have no construction materials and they abandon their prefabricated houses after a couple of seasons when the rice yield falls off, and then move on. They’ve no roads, markets, schools, places of worship, everything has to be created. In some of the really remote regions, their only link is by radio. If they’re lucky they’re supplied during the initial period by the Indonesian Airforce C5 cargo planes, which had originally carried them to Borneo,’ Ennis continued.

  ‘I see, so survival is their only preoccupation,’ interrupted Hardy.

  ‘Exactly, you’re dead right there and the problems of protection of the environment and wild life are furthest from their thoughts. The jungle is to them a hostile force, which they have to push back to win survival for their families,’ replied Ennis.

  ‘Just as the new Americans had done two hundred or more years ago, felling the forests, wiping out the vast herds of bison and other wild life, destruction of the habitat of the American Indians and even the genocide of the Indians themselves,’ added Martin.

  ‘I suppose you could say that,’ replied Ennis, ‘the new lands of the transmigrants, are in regions which maybe a decade or less back were virgin rainforests. They’d been licensed out as timber concessions to logging companies, who over the years had carried out selective logging. That is the extraction of the commercial timber species, used as veneer for the furniture industry, or wood that can be peeled for the production of plywood panels,’ Ennis paused as if he was tired of trying to justify the world.

  Martin took over. ‘That’s exactly what we saw in the Korean logging camp, three or four very big trees each hectare, another twenty or so smaller trees of no commercial value come down with them when they fall and are left to rot on the ground. Then the bulldozers go in, knocking everything down everything in their tracks. Finally they complete the job, clearing all vegetation and even scrapping the top soil off, to open access roads for their logging trucks.’

  Ennis was a little surprised by his aggressive tone but he could not deny what they had witnessed.

  ‘Yes, I suppose the forest has been pretty seriously damaged, but after a relatively short time if there is no further disturbance, when the loggers have left, new plants and trees start to grow again.’

  It was called logged-over forest covered with secondary growth, after thirty years or more the forest appeared to have has almost completely recovered. Maybe a hundred years latter it would reach its original state of equilibrium.

  The problems start when the transmigrants moved in, or with the setting-up of industries such as panel board plants, then the logged over or disturbed forest areas are clear-cut. That meant they were razed to the ground, squandering natures heritage. In the case of the mills, the owners generally promised that the forest would be replanted. The reality was that they never had been, and secondary forest took over. In the case of transmigration the land was turned over to farming and was lost forever.’

  A great many of the transmigrants abandoned their new settlements and lands after a few years. It was too difficult for them without backup, nearly all the programs were badly managed and they quit, leaving behind them new barelands, migrating to the coastal towns such as Bandjarmasin, which grew at an extraordinary rate. Others became subsistence farmers moving on to neighbouring areas, cutting and burning new sections of forest, totally uncontrolled.

  The visit to the barelands demonstrated the sad results of mans senseless expansion, forests that in just a few years had been transformed into an unending horizon of grassland, uninhabitable either by man or wildlife, apart from a few birds and insects, the source of seasonal fires that swept with regularity across Borneo.

  They returned to the Jeep and rode back to Bandjarmasin. There was little conversation; they had been sobered by what they had seen. Nature’s fabulous creation literally wiped of the face of the earth by mans inability to manage his inheritance.

  ‘And what about you?’ asked Martin pointedly.

  ‘Me?’ said Ennis surprised.

  ‘Yes, Papcon and Finntech, your project is not exactly a conservationist’s dream, it will only worsen the situation,’ he said a
ccusingly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Ennis turning away as if to avoid the subject.

  ‘It’s like a silent war-man against nature,’ said Hardy. ‘I’ve reported on many minor wars and conflicts, when peace returns they reconstruct the roads and buildings-but here there’s no way back.’

  PARIS