Malaysian PM vows to punish offenders as haze crisis worsens

Malaysian PM vows to punish offenders as haze crisis worsens

Elisia Yeo, Agence France-Presse/Kuala Lumpur

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi vowed on Friday to punish
the Malaysian owners of plantations in Indonesia whose clearance
methods were blamed for sending a choking haze across Malaysia.

Malaysia would cooperate with Indonesia to punish Malaysian
companies if they were found to have created the smog, Abdullah
said, adding that plantation minister Peter Chin would be
responsible for dealing with the matter.

"I leave it to Peter Chin to handle that. He may have to speak
to the Indonesian authorities or ask them to let us deal with
them and impose whatever penalties for what they have done,"
Abdullah said.

The plantation companies "should have realized that by burning
there, it could affect their own country," he added.

Anger over Indonesia's inability to douse the forest fires
which have smothered parts of Malaysia with a dangerous haze have
mounted as the crisis worsened on Friday in the capital Kuala
Lumpur.

Some 60 members of the opposition Democratic Action Party
(DAP) held a protest at the Indonesian embassy in pollution-
shrouded Kuala Lumpur, handing out paper face masks and calling
for compensation.

"The Indonesian government must know the Malaysian people are
angry," DAP secretary general Lim Guan Eng said, adding that
these were "the sentiments of all Malaysians."

Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak said a team of 100
firefighters was waiting for permission to head to the Indonesian
island of Sumatra to help extinguish the fires and eliminate the
clouds of smoke engulfing the west coast of Malaysia.

He said Indonesia had accepted the offer of help but that
"bureaucratic" hurdles were holding up the firefighters'
departure.

Malaysia declared a state of emergency on Thursday in two
towns on the west coast which have borne the brunt of the smoke
from Sumatra, separated from peninsular Malaysia by the narrow
Malacca Strait.

The air pollution index (API) on Thursday reached 529 in Port
Klang, a major shipping center, and 531 in Kuala Selangor. An API
above 300 is considered hazardous and 500 triggers a state of
emergency.

By Friday morning the haze had cleared slightly on the west
coast, but in Kuala Lumpur the index jumped from 321 to 365,
shrouding the city in a white mist reeking of wood smoke.

Meanwhile, travel agents said Malaysians and expatriates began
streaming out of the capital Kuala Lumpur Friday to escape the
choking haze by taking a long weekend in cleaner locations.

Families with young children were especially concerned about
the effects of the haze which began closing in 10 days ago,
especially after the government declared a state of emergency in
two coastal towns Thursday.

Worried Europeans who had planned to return home for the
northern summer once schools go on vacation in two weeks were
hurriedly changing their plans, said Stephanie To from Samfo
Travel.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono responded to the
tensions on Friday by pledging to take action against those
responsible for the hundreds of fires raging on Sumatra, where
farmers use fire to clear land.

His spokesman Dino Patti Jalal said the president told
Abdullah in a phone call "that the government would do all it can
and utilize local and national apparatuses to put out the forest
fires."

Malaysia has conceded that Malaysian-owned palm oil and rubber
plantations on Sumatra were at least partly responsible for the
pollution crisis.

Environmentalists in Indonesia, however, said corruption and
law enforcement problems were frustrating efforts to bring to
justice plantation companies accused of causing forest fires.

They said big palm oil producers in Sumatra and Kalimantan,
the Indonesian part of Borneo island, had for years used the
slash-and-burn method to clear land for their plantations but
little action was taken by the government to stop the practice.