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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