JAKARTA, Indonesia: Roads turned to murky brown rivers, homes were swept away by strong currents and bodies were pulled from mud during deadly flash floods and landslides after torrential rains hit West Sumatra in early March, marking one of the latest deadly natural disasters in Indonesia.
Government officials blamed the floods on heavy rainfall, but environmental groups have cited the disaster as the latest example of deforestation and environmental degradation intensifying the effects of severe weather across Indonesia.
“This disaster occurred not only because of extreme weather factors, but because of the ecological crisis,” Indonesian environmental rights group Indonesian Forum for the Environment wrote in a statement. “If the environment continues to be ignored, then we will continue to reap ecological disasters.”
A vast tropical archipelago stretching across the equator, Indonesia is home to the world’s third-largest rainforest, with a variety of endangered wildlife and plants, including orangutans, elephants, giant and blooming forest flowers. Some live nowhere else.
For generations the forests have also provided livelihoods, food, and medicine while playing a central role in cultural practices for millions of Indigenous residents in Indonesia.
Since 1950, more than 74 million hectares (285,715 square miles) of Indonesian rainforest — an area twice the size of Germany — have been logged, burned or degraded for development of palm oil, paper and rubber plantations, mining and other commodities according to Global Forest Watch.
Indonesia is the biggest producer of palm oil, one of the largest exporters of coal and a top producer of pulp for paper. It also exports oil and gas, rubber, tin and other resources. And it also has the world’s largest reserves of nickel — a critical material for electric vehicles, solar panels and other goods needed for the green energy transition.
Indonesia has consistently ranked as one of the largest global emitters of plant-warming greenhouse gases, with its emissions stemming from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and peatland fires, according to the Global Carbon Project.
It’s also highly vulnerable to climate change impacts, including extreme events such as floods and droughts, long-term changes from sea level rise, shifts in rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures, according to the World Bank. In recent decades the country has already seen the effects of climate change: More intense rains, landslides and floods during rainy season, and more fires during a longer dry season.
But forests can help play a vital role in reducing the impact of some extreme weather events, said Aida Greenbury, a sustainability expert focusing on Indonesia.
Flooding can be slowed by trees and vegetation soaking up rainwater and reducing erosion. In dry season, forests release moisture that helps mitigate the effects of droughts, including fires.
But when forests diminish, those benefits do as well.
A 2017 study reported that forest conversion and deforestation expose bare soil to rainfall, causing soil erosion. Frequent harvesting activities — such as done on palm oil plantations — and the removal of ground vegetation leads to further soil compaction, causing rain to run off the surface instead of entering groundwater reservoirs. Downstream erosion also increases sediment in rivers, making rivers shallower and increasing flood risks, according to the research.
After the deadly floods in Sumatra in early March, West Sumatra Gov. Mahyeldi Ansharullah said there were strong indications of illegal logging around locations affected by floods and landslides. That, coupled with extreme rainfall, inadequate drainage systems and improper housing development contributed to the disaster, he said.
Experts and environmental activists have pointed to deforestation worsening disasters in other regions of Indonesia as well: In 2021 environmental activists partially blamed deadly floods in Kalimantan on environmental degradation caused by large-scale mining and palm oil operations. In Papua, deforestation was partially blamed for floods and landslides that killed over a hundred people in 2019.
There have been some signs of progress: In 2018 Indonesian President Joko Widodo put a three-year freeze on new permits for palm oil plantations. And the rate of deforestation slowed between 2021-2022, according to government data.
But experts warn that it’s unlikely deforestation in Indonesia will stop anytime soon as the government continues to move forward with new mining and infrastructure projects such as new nickel smelters and cement factories.
“A lot of land use and land-based investment permits have already been given to businesses, and a lot of these areas are already prone to disasters,” said Arie Rompas, an Indonesia-based forestry expert at Greenpeace.
President-elect Prabowo Subianto, who is scheduled to take office in October, has promised to continue Widodo’s policy of development, include large-scale food estates, mining and other infrastructure development that are all linked to deforestation.
Environmental watchdogs also warn that environmental protections in Indonesia are weakening, including the passing of the controversial Omnibus Law, which eliminated an article of the Forestry Law regarding the minimum area of forest that must be maintained at development projects.
“The removal of that article makes us very worried (about deforestation) for the years to come,” said Rompas.
While experts and activists recognize that development is essential for Indonesia’s economy to continue to go, they argue that it should be done in a way that considers the environment and incorporates better land planning.
“We can’t continue down the same path we’ve been on,” said sustainability expert Greenbury. “We need to make sure that the soil, the land in the forest doesn’t become extinct.”
In Indonesia, deforestation is intensifying disasters from severe weather and climate change
https://arab.news/jsg8g
In Indonesia, deforestation is intensifying disasters from severe weather and climate change
- Experts warn that it’s unlikely deforestation in Indonesia will stop anytime soon as the government continues to move forward with new mining and infrastructure projects
‘Thrown out like trash’ from Iran, Afghans return to land they hardly know
- More than 1.2 million Afghans deported from neighboring Iran since March 2024, IMO says
- Tehran had pledged mass deportations to counter growing local discontent over refugees
ISLAMABAD: Ghulam Ali begins his days in pain, his muscles aching from hauling grain on a rickety cart through the streets of Kabul, homesick for the country he called home for nearly four decades.
Ali is among more than 1.2 million Afghans deported from neighboring Iran since March 2024, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), after Tehran pledged mass deportations to counter mounting local discontent over refugees.
Thousands have also fled this month after Israeli and US airstrikes hit Iranian military targets.
For Ali, 51, whose family left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s when he was just 10, Iran was home.
“I grew up there, worked there, buried my parents there,” he said during a midday break from work in Kabul, sipping green tea with a simple lunch of naan bread.
“But in the end, they threw us out like trash. I lost everything — my home, my little savings in cash, my dignity,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by video link.
Like many others, he has returned to a homeland he barely knew and one that has changed drastically.
Outsiders in their own country, many men struggle to support their family while women face severe restrictions on their daily life under the ruling Taliban.
Since late 2023, an estimated 3 million Afghans have been forced out of Iran and Pakistan, where they had sought safety from decades of war and, since the Taliban’s return to Kabul in 2021, from extremist rule.
Unwelcome abroad, they have returned to a homeland facing economic collapse and international indifference.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in his latest report on Afghanistan, called on countries hosting Afghan refugees to protect those in need and abide by international obligations to ensure any returns to Afghanistan are voluntary.
“Returnees face immense challenges... in particular securing housing, employment and access to basic services,” he said.
Up to 10,000 Afghan women, men and children are taking the Islam Qala border crossing from Iran on a daily basis, according to the Taliban authorities. Inside Afghanistan, humanitarian aid agencies say conditions are dire, with inadequate shelter, food shortages and no road map for reintegration.
“They return to a homeland that is dramatically unprepared to receive them,” warned Arafat Jamal, the UNHCR representative in Afghanistan in a statement last month.
The Taliban’s deputy minister for border and refugees affairs, Abdul Zahir Rahmani, also told local media this week that Afghanistan had seen a sharp increase in refugee returns since this month’s 12-day air war in Iran.
Many said they had no say in the matter.
Ali said he was arrested at a construction site in Mashhad, Iran’s second-biggest city, lacking documentation during a crackdown on refugees by the Iranian police.
He and his wife, six children, two daughters-in-law and five grandchildren were deported in March.
“We were treated like criminals,” he said. “They didn’t care how law-abiding or in need we were. They just wanted all Afghans out.”
The extended family — 15 people aged 5 to 51 — is now packed into a two-room, mud-brick house on Kabul’s western fringes.
Ali said his Persian-accented Dari draws sneers from fellow laborers – another reminder he doesn’t fit in. But he brushes off their mockery, saying his focus is on feeding his family.
“We can barely afford to eat properly,” his wife Shahla said by video as she sat cross-legged on a worn rug.
“Rent is 4,000 afghanis ($56) a month — but even that is a burden. One of my sons is visually impaired; the other returns home every day empty-handed.”
For women and girls, their return can feel like a double displacement. They are subject to many of the Taliban’s most repressive laws, including restrictions on their movement without a “mahram,” or male companion, and curbs on education and employment.
On Kabul’s western edge, 38-year-old Safiya and her three daughters spend their days in a rented house packing candies for shops, earning just 50 afghanis for a day’s work, below Afghanistan’s poverty level of $1 a day.
Safiya said they were deported from Iran in February.
“In Tehran, I stitched clothes. My girls worked at a sweet shop,” said Safiya, who declined to give her last name.
“Life was tough, but we had our freedom, as well as hope … Here, there’s no work, no school, no dignity. It’s like we’ve come home only to be exiled again.”
During their deportation, Safiya was separated from her youngest daughter for a week while the family was detained, a spat over documents that still gives the 16-year-old nightmares.
In Iran, said Safiya, “my daughters had inspiring dreams. Now they sit at home all day, waiting.”
Afghans are also being forcibly deported from next-door Pakistan – more than 800,000 people have been expelled since October 2023, according to Amnesty International.
Born in Pakistan to Afghan refugee parents, Nemat Ullah Rahimi had never lived in Afghanistan until last winter, when police barely gave him time to close his Peshawar grocery store before sending him over the Torkham border crossing.
“I wasn’t allowed to sell anything. My wife and kids — all born in Pakistan — had no legal documents there so we had to leave,” said the 34-year-old.
Rahimi now works long hours at a tire repair shop at a dusty intersection on the edge of Kabul as he tries to rebuild a life.
“I can’t say it’s easy. But I have no choice. We’re restarting from zero,” he said.
Several arrested in Serbia as tensions mount ahead of anti-corruption rally in Belgrade on weekend
- Protesting university students have called Saturday’s rally to press their demand for an early election
- Authorities made similar arrests back in March, ahead of what was the biggest ever anti-government protest
BELGRADE: Police in Serbia have arrested several people accused of allegedly plotting to overthrow the government as tensions soared ahead of a major anti-government rally planned this weekend in the capital Belgrade.
Police said six were detained on Wednesday evening, suspected of “preparing criminal acts against the constitutional order and security of Serbia” and “calling for violent change of the constitutional order.”
At least one other university student was arrested earlier this week accused of preparing “an act of terrorism” based on his private conversations over a mobile phone. Hundreds on Thursday demonstrated against the arrest in Belgrade.
Protesting university students have called Saturday’s rally to press their demand for an early election after nearly eight months of almost daily anti-corruption demonstrations that have shaken the populist government of President Aleksandar Vucic.
Persistent protests started in November after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed that killed 16 people and which many blamed on rampant government corruption and negligence in state infrastructure projects. University students have been a key force behind the nationwide movement.
Vucic and his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party have refused the students’ demand for a snap vote, instead accusing the protesters of planning to spur violence at Saturday’s gathering.
Police alleged the detained group met last week in a hotel in the central town of Kraljevo to plan a violent change of government and attacks on police and pro-government media outlets. One of the suspects had a gun and ammunition, they said.
No other details were immediately available. Serbian media reported that those arrested include an opposition politician, veteran of the wars of the 1990s, and others.
Authorities made similar arrests back in March, ahead of what was the biggest ever anti-government protest in the Balkan country, which drew hundreds of thousands of people.
Vucic’s loyalists also set up a camp in a park outside his office which still stands. The otherwise peaceful gathering on March 15 came to an abrupt end when part of the crowd suddenly scattered in panic, triggering allegations that authorities used a sonic weapon against peaceful protesters, which they have denied.
Vucic, a former extreme nationalist, has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power over a decade ago. Though he formally says he wants Serbia to join the European Union, critics say Vucic has stifled democratic freedoms as he strengthened ties with Russia and China.
Europe rights court condemns France over racial profiling
- Police stopped Karim Touil three times in 10 days in the eastern city of Besancon in 2011
- The court ordered the French state to pay him 3,000 euros ($3,500)
STRASBOURG: A top European court on Thursday condemned France for failing to protect the rights of a Frenchman who had accused his country’s police of racial profiling.
The European Court of Human Rights was unable to determine discrimination in the case of five other French plaintiffs.
But it found that the government had provided no “objective and reasonable justification” for police stopping Karim Touil three times in 10 days in the eastern city of Besancon in 2011.
The court said it was “very aware of the difficulties for police officers to decide, very quickly and without necessarily having clear internal instructions, whether they are facing a threat to public order or security.”
But in the case of Touil, it presumed “discriminatory treatment” that the French government was not able to refute.
It ordered the French state to pay him 3,000 euros ($3,500).
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International last year said racial profiling was “widespread throughout the country and deeply rooted in police practices.”
HRW said young men and boys perceived as black or Arab, some as young as 10, were often subjected to “abusive and illegal identity checks.”
The rights groups said they had lodged a complaint with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
France’s rights ombudsman in 2017 found that a young person “perceived as black or Arab” was 20 times more likely to face an identity check than the rest of the population.
Philippine police face mandatory fitness training to stay in service
- New program is called Pulisteniks, from ‘pulis’ – police in Tagalog – and ‘calisthenics’
- Program mandates police units across the country to dedicate Tuesdays and Thursdays to fitness
MANILA: The Philippine National Police has kicked off a new fitness initiative for officers, vowing to get overweight personnel back in shape or out of the service.
Launched this week, the campaign is called Pulisteniks, from “pulis,” which means police in Tagalog, and “calisthenics.”
The program mandates PNP units nationwide to dedicate Tuesdays and Thursdays to fitness, including various physical activities such as running, walking, jogging, biking, Zumba, and combat sports like arnis – the national martial art and sport of the Philippines – aikido, boxing, karate-do, judo, muay thai, swimming, table tennis, and taekwondo.
“The directive of our chief PNP is clear. We need our police officers to be physically fit. This program has been in place for a long time, but now we’re putting more focus on it because we’re also aiming to meet our target response time,” Maj. Philipp Ines, Manila Police District spokesperson, told Arab News.
“What is happening now is just a reiteration of our ongoing programs. The good thing is we’re now being given time to focus on physical conditioning every Tuesday and Thursday from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. This is a good program to help our officers reduce weight and be able to keep up with the demands of public service.”
Under the Department of the Interior and Local Government Act of 1990 all PNP officers are required to keep their body weight within 5 kg – either above or below – a standard weight based on their height and sex.
“We undergo quarterly check-ups, where they check if our BMI – body mass index – is within the acceptable range. If it’s not, the health or medical officer tells our personnel to lose weight. That’s why now there’s a program in place to help with that because before it was hard for many officers due to the lack of time,” Ines said.
“The Manila Police District Health Service is monitoring our progress so we can track whether we’re able to comply. And every year, there’s a required physical fitness test that we all have to pass. If you fail those tests twice in a row, it could be grounds for separation from service.”
Philippine Police Chief Gen. Nicolas Torre III said that officers are given a target of six months to a year to lose weight.
“After a year, if they don’t meet the standards, they can be removed from the service,” he said in a radio interview.
The fitness program has already gained support from Filipino netizens whose comments on Facebook ranged from “I hope they lose weight to look better” to “It’s embarrassing to see all fat police officers these days,” and “your uniform doesn’t fit you.”
Remedios Borejon, retired National Police Commission public affairs officer, told Arab News the program should help improve how the police are seen.
“I’m in favor of the program. This is also to help make our police officers look prim and proper, like gentlemen. Because it really doesn’t look good if a police officer looks sloppy or overweight,” she said.
“In the past, you rarely saw overweight police officers. I support this. It helps improve their image and boosts professionalism.”
‘Thrown out like trash’; Afghans return to land they hardly know
- Forced back to a changed land that offers little
- Refugees say they struggle to make ends meet
ISLAMABAD: Ghulam Ali begins his days in pain, his muscles aching from hauling grain on a rickety cart through the streets of Kabul, homesick for the country he called home for nearly four decades.
Ali is among more than 1.2 million Afghans deported from neighboring Iran since March 2024, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), after Tehran pledged mass deportations to counter mounting local discontent over refugees.
Thousands have also fled this month after Israeli and US airstrikes hit Iranian military targets.
For Ali, 51, whose family left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s when he was just 10, Iran was home.
“I grew up there, worked there, buried my parents there,” he said during a midday break from work in Kabul, sipping green tea with a simple lunch of naan bread.
“But in the end, they threw us out like trash. I lost everything — my home, my little savings in cash, my dignity,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by video link.
Like many others, he has returned to a homeland he barely knew and one that has changed drastically.
Outsiders in their own country, many men struggle to support their family while women face severe restrictions on their daily life under the ruling Taliban.
Since late 2023, an estimated 3 million Afghans have been forced out of Iran and Pakistan, where they had sought safety from decades of war and, since the Taliban’s return to Kabul in 2021, from extremist rule.
Unwelcome abroad, they have returned to a homeland facing economic collapse and international indifference.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in his latest report on Afghanistan, called on countries hosting Afghan refugees to protect those in need and abide by international obligations to ensure any returns to Afghanistan are voluntary.
“Returnees face immense challenges... in particular securing housing, employment and access to basic services,” he said.
Up to 10,000 Afghan women, men and children are taking the Islam Qala border crossing from Iran on a daily basis, according to the Taliban authorities. Inside Afghanistan, humanitarian aid agencies say conditions are dire, with inadequate shelter, food shortages and no road map for reintegration.
“They return to a homeland that is dramatically unprepared to receive them,” warned Arafat Jamal, the UNHCR representative in Afghanistan in a statement last month.
The Taliban’s deputy minister for border and refugees affairs, Abdul Zahir Rahmani, also told local media this week that Afghanistan had seen a sharp increase in refugee returns since this month’s 12-day air war in Iran.
Many said they had no say in the matter.
Ali said he was arrested at a construction site in Mashhad, Iran’s second-biggest city, lacking documentation during a crackdown on refugees by the Iranian police.
He and his wife, six children, two daughters-in-law and five grandchildren were deported in March.
“We were treated like criminals,” he said. “They didn’t care how law-abiding or in need we were. They just wanted all Afghans out.”
The extended family — 15 people aged 5 to 51 — is now packed into a two-room, mud-brick house on Kabul’s western fringes.
Ali said his Persian-accented Dari draws sneers from fellow laborers – another reminder he doesn’t fit in. But he brushes off their mockery, saying his focus is on feeding his family.
“We can barely afford to eat properly,” his wife Shahla said by video as she sat cross-legged on a worn rug.
“Rent is 4,000 afghanis ($56) a month — but even that is a burden. One of my sons is visually impaired; the other returns home every day empty-handed.”
For women and girls, their return can feel like a double displacement. They are subject to many of the Taliban’s most repressive laws, including restrictions on their movement without a “mahram,” or male companion, and curbs on education and employment.
On Kabul’s western edge, 38-year-old Safiya and her three daughters spend their days in a rented house packing candies for shops, earning just 50 afghanis for a day’s work, below Afghanistan’s poverty level of $1 a day.
Safiya said they were deported from Iran in February.
“In Tehran, I stitched clothes. My girls worked at a sweet shop,” said Safiya, who declined to give her last name.
“Life was tough, but we had our freedom, as well as hope … Here, there’s no work, no school, no dignity. It’s like we’ve come home only to be exiled again.”
During their deportation, Safiya was separated from her youngest daughter for a week while the family was detained, a spat over documents that still gives the 16-year-old nightmares.
In Iran, said Safiya, “my daughters had inspiring dreams. Now they sit at home all day, waiting.”
Afghans are also being forcibly deported from next-door Pakistan – more than 800,000 people have been expelled since October 2023, according to Amnesty International.
Born in Pakistan to Afghan refugee parents, Nemat Ullah Rahimi had never lived in Afghanistan until last winter, when police barely gave him time to close his Peshawar grocery store before sending him over the Torkham border crossing.
“I wasn’t allowed to sell anything. My wife and kids — all born in Pakistan — had no legal documents there so we had to leave,” said the 34-year-old.
Rahimi now works long hours at a tire repair shop at a dusty intersection on the edge of Kabul as he tries to rebuild a life.
“I can’t say it’s easy. But I have no choice. We’re restarting from zero,” he said.
