Law enforcers blamed for failing to stop environmental damage

Law enforcers blamed for failing to stop environmental damage

By Budisantoso Budiman

BANDAR LAMPUNG, Lampung (Antara): Environmental destruction is continuing unabated, while legal redress goes nowhere as hardly any cases have been satisfactorily resolved.

Koesnadi Hardjasoemantri, an expert on environmental law from Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, said Indonesian law enforcers did not have the same interpretation about the laws.

Addressing a recent seminar on the environment sponsored by the Indonesian Police in Bandar Lampung, Koesnadi urged law enforcers to learn about environment laws to remedy the situation.

One of the laws -- Law No. 23/1997 on Environmental Management explicitly prescribes punishments against perpetrators. However, law enforcers still maintain different interpretations of the law.

Watoni Noerdin, chief of the Indonesian Legal Institute division in charge of land disputes in Lampung, said that the authorities failed to take the initiative in solving environmental disputes. Watoni said they would act only after somebody reported an incident.

"The authorities should act with or without reports from the public," Watoni said.

Like major cases of violence sparked by racial, religious, political or social conflicts, environmental cases in Lampung and elsewhere have not been redressed by legal actions.

Lampung chief detective Lt. Col. Heru Winarno flatly rejected the allegation. "Many ecological cases have been brought to trial despite our limited resources," he said.

But Muhammad Akib, an expert on the environment, supported the idea that law enforcers lacked the initiative to handle environmental cases, despite the fact that laws, including the Criminal Code, are in place.

"The laws authorize the police to act without waiting for a complaint if they believe the environmental destruction affects the public interest," Akib said.

Akib said it was currently unrealistic to hope for a quick solution to ecological cases in Lampung because it was not even clear which agencies were supposed to handle such cases. Related law enforcers should make a breakthrough in this area, he said.

Akib pointed out that the 1997 environment laws had many loopholes that perpetrators could easily exploit.

"There are a lot of articles in the law that need clarifying. Consequently, many law enforcers aren't sure what to do when they are handling cases," he said.

Chairman of the Lampung provincial Development Planning Board Rachmat Abdullah acknowledged that the laws did not specify his office's authority in dealing with environmental issues.

"We want to see the perpetrator, be it a company or individual, be arraigned. But the problem is whether the police and prosecutors support this idea," he said.

An expert in the field of conservation, Ali Kabul Mahi, said that all preserved forests across Lampung were under serious threat mainly due to unchecked illegal logging.

According to the official statistics, Lampung boasts 1.23 million hectares of forests. Environmental activists say that the forests are quickly dwindling because of logging.

"It is not only forests which are being destroyed. Coral reefs have the same fate and so do mangroves," Ali said.

He said the catastrophe would continue unless the provincial government took prompt actions to halt the environmental destruction.