Clear the air – and make sure those responsible are held accountable

Over the Merdeka holidays, I went fishing with some friends off the Pahang and Johor coast. We started off from the Kuala Rompin jetties on a lovely morning with mist shrouding the mangrove and hovering over the river. It was a beautiful, peaceful sight.

Then the sun started getting hotter but the mist remained… and remained, acting in a most un-misty way. When we sailed away from the river mouth we could still see this “mist” all around us. It wasn’t mist. It was the haze, right there on the east coast hundreds of kilometres from the nearest Indonesian territories, yet enough of it was visible even in Pulau Tioman.

Over the last few months, I’ve been saying “I’ve never seen haze this bad, only to update it again multiple times on subsequent days. The haze last week was especially bad, but I’m sure as records go this too will be broken soon.

What can I say about the haze that hasn’t been said by many for years? I’m relatively healthy for my age and don’t have any bad allergy problems, but I still get headaches and nausea because of it. I can’t bear to think about what those with actual health issues must be going through.

The current haze seems worse than previous ones. It hangs heavy and feels thick and foul, often covering the sun and hills and gloomily blocking vision to barely a kilometre or so on the highway.

Everybody is frustrated with it, including an Indonesian official who slammed his Malaysian and Singaporean neighbours for complaining about the haze from Sumatra without acknowledging it also gives us oxygen during better days.

Hello! Our Indonesian official friend forgets his high school chemistry. Sumatra is passing us more than oxygen now, this time the said oxygen is all bound up with carbon and sulphur and nitrogen and other elements to form noxious and poisonous monoxides and dioxides and ozone!

Not exactly the kind of trade among friends. After decades of “importing” this stuff for months most years, we deserve a breather, if you’ll pardon the expression.

The Indonesians are also experimenting with clearing the haze with dry ice, which is supposed to lift the smoke particles higher into the atmosphere and clear the land.

Great – now the smoke particles will go even higher into the Indonesian skies to catch the stronger monsoon wind up there and even more of them can waft their way to Malaysia. Thank you again Indonesia!

In reality, Indonesia’s forest fire problem has gotten out of hand. The fires have literally gone underground, setting off the uncontrollable burning of dry underground peat. Once this catches fire, only the deluge of a monsoon can put it out.

This year a combination of factors, including a more severe El Nino, is exacerbating the problem; perhaps a madder-than-usual rush to burn forests, because there’s less of them left every year, is making things worse.

What we need to see is a more aggressive attitude among the political leaders of the region in fighting this menace. Our own leaders must also start demanding more be done by Indonesia to stop this perennial curse.

Of the culprits setting the forest on fire in Sumatra and Kalimantan are believed to include some big Malaysian plantation companies. If that is so, bring them to account and throw the book at them: I can guarantee there’ll be loud cheers from us ordinary Malaysians.

And ordinary Indonesians too. If it’s bad for us hundreds of kilometres away from the worst of it, just imagine how bad it must be for the unfortunate people living right there.

They can’t go fishing away from the haze, like I did. They can’t get into private jets and fly out of the country to foreign clearer skies, as some people did. They just have to stay there and suck it all in literally and suffer now and/or die earlier later.

Our problems are not with the ordinary Indonesians, many of whom suffer even worse than us because of this haze. Our issues are with the Indonesian authorities who we don’t see treating the problem as the emergency it actually is.

And our issue is also with our own leaders who are more interested in maintaining peace and harmony while our people are literally choking with illness and maybe even death.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

Subscribe to our newsletter and get news delivered to your mailbox.