Jakarta – A leading Indonesian environmental watchdog said Thursday it had filed suit against President B.J. Habibie over a failed government project to develop one-million hectares (370,000 acres) of peat bog in Borneo.
The legal program coordinator of the Indonesian Environmental Forum (Walhi), Julia Kalmirah, said the case was filed to the central Jakarta district court on Monday. "The trial is expected to start early September," Kalmirah told AFP.
Named as co-defendants in the case were nine cabinet ministers in the Habibie government, six director generals of institutions involved in the project and Central Kalimantan governor Warsito Rasman. Kalimantan is an Indonesian province of Borneo, which also includes the tiny state of Brunie and two Malaysian states.
She said the suit did not specify the amount of conpensation demanded from the defendants. "We only demand that the government take measures to deal with it," she said.
Asked why Walhi had filed the suit against Habibie, when the project was started under the rule of former president Suharto, Kalmirah said: "We are suing the institution [of the presidency], because the project is implemented under a presidential decree."
Kalmirah was quoted by Indonesian Observer as saying the peat bog project in Central Kalimantan province, implemented under a 1996 presidential decree issued by Suharto, was ill-conceived. It also represented a significant abuse of power by Suharto, Habibie's predecessor and patron, who resigned in May last year.
The project, aimed at transforming unproductive peat land into rice fields and a housing complex, turned out to be one of the worst ecological disasters of the 20th century, she said.
It was carried out with no good planning, was rife with corruption and nepotism, and so far had wasted two trillion rupiah (260 million dollars), she said. "It is the most expensive project in the world, using from the national budget for the fiscal year 1996 up to 1999 plus forestry funds," Kalmirah added.
Walhi's coordinator for forest advocacy, Longgena Ginting, said the project was carried out before a study on environmental impact analysis was completed.
The project in Central Kalimantan province in the Indonesian part of Borneo island, Ginting said, has inflicted immense damage on the environment there that would be practically irreversible for decades. The destruction of water quality and damage to the hydrology system had turned 500,000 hectares of land into a near desert, he added.