Jakarta – A group of movie stars, soap opera personalities and celebrities took a break from their busy agendas Monday to join Greenpeace to demand an end to logging activities in Indonesia.
Greenpeace submitted a petition, signed by around 60,000 "forest defenders", to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, urging he put a moratorium on logging.
The green activists submitted the two plastic container-loads full of signed petitions through the State Secretariat. A the time of the rally, however, Yudhoyono was busy undergoing a medical checkup necessary for the July 8 presidential election.
Greenpeace also collected some 500 letters from elementary school students in Jakarta, Bandung and Semarang, asking the President to stop deforestation.
The green group had submitted a similar petition to Yudhoyono during the climate change conference in Bali in December 2007, during which he had made some encouraging statements about forest protection.
After their visit to the secretariat, the activists moved to the National Monument park to erect a banner with a map of Indonesia on it.
"Our forests are massively important. If the forests vanish, so do we. It's as simple as that," actor Krisna Mukti said while holding up the huge banner tied to a corner of the park facing the palace.
"The environment is an issue which everyone needs to be involved in. The government, corporations and us – the community – need to fight together against deforestation."
According to Greenpeace, at least a half of the 150 million hectares of forests in Indonesia has been destroyed, partly due to overlapping forest concessions and conservation forests.
Even national parks have been cleared to make way for plantations and are vulnerable to logging, Greenpeace activist Yuyun Indradi said.
In 2002, for example, East Kalimantan administration built a 60 km road connecting Bontang and Sengata, dissecting Kutai National Park. Later, the project turned some of the forest areas into seven villages and two districts, damaging the orangutan habitat.
The population of the primate in the park has dropped sharply from 600 in 2004 to 30 in 2009. At present, the official record shows there are now only 60 left. The habitat campaign manager of the Center for Orangutan Protection, Yon Thayrun, said the park had changed into a city complete with an airport, gas stations, marketplace, BTS towers, bus terminal and prostitution complex.
According to Greenpeace, the Indonesian government has allowed 1.8 million hectares of forests to be cleared annually.
"That's equal to an area five times the size of Bali," Yuyun said. (iwp)