The Last Green President


 

There are monsters in this world, friends and neighbors, and some of them wear three-piece suits and carry briefcases full of mining contracts. But this isn’t a story about those particular monsters—not entirely, anyway. This is about a man who saw them coming, a man who understood that sometimes the most terrifying evil isn’t the thing that goes bump in the night, but the thing that goes ka-ching in broad daylight while the forests burn and the waters turn to poison.

His name was Abdurrahman Wahid, though most folks called him Gus Dur, and he was probably the only Indonesian president who ever looked at a strip mine and saw exactly what it was: a grave. A big, yawning grave for everything green and good in this world.

Now, you might be wondering what a horror writer knows about Indonesian politics and environmental policy. The answer is simple: I know about monsters. And if you’ve been paying attention to what’s been happening to our world—any part of our world—you know that the worst monsters don’t have fangs or claws. They have lawyers and lobbyists and a peculiar talent for making devastation sound like progress.

Gus Dur saw through all that bullshit from day one.

The Vision in the Forest

Picture this, if you will: A man sitting in his study late at night, the kind of late night when honest folks are asleep and the only sounds are the settling of old wood and the distant hum of corruption eating away at the world like termites in the walls. This man—this Gus Dur—he’s reading reports about mercury poisoning in Buyat Bay, about forests turned into parking lots, about mining companies that make the vampires in my novels look like Sunday school teachers.

And he’s thinking about what his religion tells him, about this concept called maslahat—which, in the plain English that scares politicians more than any ghost story, means you’ve got to consider what’s actually good for people, not just what looks good on paper or sounds good in a speech.

Dar ‘al-mafasid muqaddam ‘ala jalb al-mashalih, he whispers to himself in the darkness. Avoid the harm before you chase the profit. It’s an old rule, older than the mining companies, older than the corruption that flows through government offices like black water through broken pipes.

The thing about true environmental awareness, Gus Dur understood, is that it doesn’t come from policy papers or environmental impact statements that nobody reads. It comes from something deeper, something that gets into your bones like a fever. It becomes part of who you are, not just what you do when the cameras are rolling.

But here’s where the story gets really frightening, folks. Because while this one man was trying to hold back the darkness, all around him were people who had given up the fight before it even started. Scholars who chose silence over truth. Government officials who had traded their souls for mining concessions and logging permits.

The Judicial Mafia

Gus Dur called them the judicial mafia, and if that phrase doesn’t send a chill down your spine, you haven’t been paying attention. These weren’t your garden-variety crooks in cheap suits. These were the people who were supposed to protect the law, who instead bent it like a crowbar until it snapped in half.

Take the Newmont case in Buyat Bay. Here you had an American mining company—Newmont Corp—pumping poison into the water while the local people got sick and died. The kind of real-world horror that makes my fictional monsters look like cartoon characters. And what happened? The company denied everything. The reports got buried. The investigation got twisted up in legal red tape until nobody could tell what was true anymore.

Gus Dur looked at this mess and saw it for what it was: a crime scene. Not just the poisoned water and the dead fish, but the whole rotten system that allowed it to happen. The government officials who looked the other way. The courts that somehow couldn’t figure out where all that mercury came from. The endless parade of lies dressed up as legal proceedings.

“Just like that, you can’t, why dare to make a decision?” he asked, quoting Orwell and Kafka—two writers who understood that sometimes reality is more horrifying than any nightmare you could dream up.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Want to know something that’ll keep you awake at night? Here are the numbers on mining concessions handed out by Indonesian presidents:

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gave away 35,049,966 hectares to corporations. That’s an area roughly the size of Germany, just… gone. Handed over to companies that see trees as obstacles and rivers as convenient waste disposal systems.

Suharto gave away 9,828,174 hectares. Joko Widodo, 1,614,042 hectares. Megawati, 927,648 hectares.

And Gus Dur? Zero. Not one single mining concession. Not one hectare sold to the highest bidder.

Now, he wasn’t perfect—no human being is, and anyone who tells you different is probably trying to sell you something. He did issue some logging concessions, some plantation permits. But compared to his predecessors and successors, Gus Dur was practically a saint in a world full of sinners.

The man understood something that the others couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp: that there are some things you don’t sell, no matter how much money they wave in your face. Some things you protect, even when—especially when—everyone around you is telling you to cash in.

The Green Declaration

In 2007, in Bali—a place where tourists come to see natural beauty that’s disappearing faster than a magician’s assistant—Gus Dur signed something called the Green Declaration. It wasn’t just political theater, though Lord knows there was plenty of that going around. It was a promise, a covenant with the future.

The declaration asked for something radical: that the government stop giving away protected forests to mining companies. Stop treating the environment like a bargain-basement sale where everything must go.

Three simple guidelines for his political party: explore local traditions that protect the environment, don’t turn green issues into political weapons, and remember that Indonesia was still a country in transition—which is a polite way of saying it was still figuring out how to be decent.

The Real Horror Story

Here’s the thing that makes this story truly terrifying: Gus Dur was an exception. One man, swimming against a tide of greed and shortsightedness that threatens to drown us all. After he left office, the mining concessions started flowing again like blood from a wound.

The forests that he protected? Many of them are gone now. The mining moratorium he established? Lifted. The environmental awareness he tried to nurture? Choked out by the weeds of corruption and the poison of easy money.

But his legacy remains, carried on by his daughter Inayah Wahid and others who remember that some fights are worth having even when you know you’re going to lose. Especially then.

Because in the end, that’s what real environmental awareness is: the understanding that we’re all connected, that the mercury in Buyat Bay and the clear-cut forests of Borneo and the strip mines that turn mountains into moonscapes are all part of the same story. A story about what we’re willing to sacrifice for short-term profit, and what we’re willing to protect for the long haul.

Gus Dur saw the monsters coming, friends and neighbors. He saw them in their boardrooms and their government offices, in their environmental impact statements that read like fiction and their promises that turned out to be lies.

And he stood in their way.

For a little while, anyway. Long enough to show the rest of us what real courage looks like. Long enough to prove that sometimes, just sometimes, one person can make a difference.

Even in a world full of monsters.

The End

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Author’s Note: The real Abdurrahman Wahid died in 2009, but his environmental legacy lives on. In a world where climate change and environmental destruction threaten us all, his example reminds us that the scariest monsters are often the ones we create ourselves—and that sometimes, the only way to fight them is to refuse to feed them.

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