The Smoke Came First

 

The smoke came before the fear.

That’s how Ryan remembers it now, decades later, turning the memory over like a stone he can’t quite put down: the smoke came first, and the fear came after, and by the time the fear arrived it had nowhere left to go but into your lungs—same as everything else that year.

In 1997, Akhmad Ryan Pratama was still an elementary-school kid in Balikpapan, the kind who thought summer vacation was something you earned rather than something the world could simply take. He didn’t yet understand that some years don’t ask permission before they rewrite themselves into your bones. He has bitter memories of his school shutting down for weeks—not the good kind of shutdown, not the electric thrill of no school today (Balikpapan doesn’t get snow, of course, but you know what I mean)—because thick haze blanketed his hometown like a held breath that never got released. It sat over the rooftops for days. Weeks. It got into the curtains, into the cracks of the window frames, into the taste of the rice at dinner. You could see it hanging in the beam of a flashlight at night, thick as a held secret. If you stood very still and listened, the whole city sounded like one long cough that never quite finished.

The haze became a severe public-health crisis. And here’s the thing about crises, the thing Riyan Septa readers learn to expect by page forty of any of his fat paperbacks: they don’t care who you are. Regardless of age, wealth, or status, people suffered respiratory illnesses after breathing the toxic fumes. That is the democratic cruelty of smoke. It doesn’t check your bank balance at the door. The rich man’s air conditioner filtered a little better, maybe. The poor man’s lungs gave out a little sooner, maybe. But in the end everybody in Balikpapan that year learned the same lesson at more or less the same time: the sky can turn against you, and when it does, there is nowhere in the whole wide world to hide from it.

The forests around Ryan’s city were ablaze—not metaphorically, not the way a politician says a “city is on fire” with outrage or unrest, but literally, actually, biblically on fire. Hundreds of miles of green went up like kindling under a match the size of a monsoon season. Balikpapan wasn’t the only place paying for it. The fire and the smoke didn’t respect provincial boundaries any more than a hurricane respects a welcome mat. It rolled over Samarinda. It smothered Palangkaraya. It crossed into North Kalimantan and kept going, kept climbing, until it drifted clean across a national border into Sabah and Sarawak, as if the smoke itself were saying, You thought this was just Indonesia’s problem? Think again. I don’t carry a passport.

Research by Afid Nurkholis lays it out in the flat, merciless language of academic prose—the kind of writing that tries so hard to be neutral that the horror leaks out around the edges anyway, the way blood will find the seam in a bandage no matter how tightly you wrap it. The 1997 forest fires in Riau and Kalimantan, Nurkholis concludes, were the worst in recorded history, at least up through 2015. A report from The Asahi Shimbun, dated 23 September 2002—five years on, and still totaling the wreckage—put a number to the devastation almost too large for the mind to hold: no less than 16 million acres, 6.5 million hectares, of forest and land consumed. Try to picture that. Really try. Most people can’t. The number is too big, too abstract, a ghost-shape in the imagination. It’s easier—it’s always easier—to picture one small thing burning. One tree. One animal.

Which brings us to Si Pongi.

One moment Ryan remembers vividly, the kind of memory that fixes itself behind the eyes like a photograph left too long in the developing tray, is the story of Si Pongi (also called Pony in some accounts), a young Bornean orangutan—Pongo pygmaeus, a protected species, a name that sounds almost tender when you say it slow—limping out of the inferno. The cameras loved her. The country loved her, for a while, the way a nation will sometimes fall in love with a single suffering creature because loving one is so much more bearable than grieving sixteen million acres.

“Si Pongi was a young orangutan who survived the forest fires and was saved by a park ranger,” Ryan recalls in his thesis. There’s a particular flatness to the sentence, a scholar’s restraint, that makes what comes next hit harder. Because here the story stops being a nature documentary and starts being something closer to one of those late-night stories people write about because they can’t sleep after finishing them.

Tragically—and there is no gentler word—after losing her natural habitat, Pongi was later forced into prostitution. Kept as a sex slave by a brothel owner. Routinely abused by patrons who paid actual money, counted out in actual bills, to do to her what should not be done to any living thing. Sit with that a moment. The fires in Kalimantan did not merely destroy habitat. In the chaos that followed displacement and loss, they helped strip away the last restraints on human cruelty. What emerged underneath had been there all along; the disaster simply gave it room.

Today the wild population of Pongo pygmaeus stands at roughly 50,000—a number that sounds almost hopeful until you remember what it used to be, until you remember that their once-lush habitat has been cleared and cleared again, replaced acre by acre by palm-oil plantations and open-pit mines, the green going first to ash and then, eventually, to money.

Researchers D.O. Fuller, T.C. Jessup, and A. Salim tallied the damage with the cool precision of coroners: nearly 7.4 million acres—3 million hectares—of Kalimantan’s forest gone in the wake of the prolonged El Niño drought that fed the fires like gasoline poured on a pilot light. Much of that vanished land had once been protected—conservation areas, sanctuaries, places that were supposed to be safe. Since then, the researchers note, Kalimantan’s forests have been judged unfit for conservation or breeding efforts without aggressive management—a very careful, very academic way of saying: we broke something, and we’re not sure it can be fixed.

But here is where the story turns, and turns ugly—not with a monster jumping out of the closet, but with the slow, sick realization that the real monster has been standing in the room the whole time, wearing a government badge.

Ryan also highlighted how cigarette butts and slash-and-burn practices became part of the official narrative—the story the New Order regime wanted people to believe, repeated on the radio and in the papers until repetition did the work that evidence should have done. Instead of conducting serious investigations into the real culprits, the regime scapegoated unnamed individuals and, worse, an entire people’s agricultural traditions.

“The official conclusions claimed the 1997–1998 fires weren’t caused by timber barons owning 2,500-acre plots,” Ryan writes, and you can almost hear the dry, disbelieving edge, “but by someone tossing a cigarette butt from a bus on the Balikpapan–Samarinda highway, or by Dayak locals using slash-and-burn techniques on small farm patches.”

A cigarette butt. Sixteen million acres, and the official story wanted you to believe it started with a cigarette butt tossed from a bus window—as if the truth were a monster too big to look at directly, so they built you a smaller, more manageable monster instead, something the size of a matchstick, something you could blame without ever having to ask who really owned the land that burned.

Let’s talk for a moment about what slash-and-burn actually is—because the New Order needed you not to know, needed the practice to stay a shadow-shape, sinister and unexplained, rather than what it really was: knowledge. Old knowledge. Earned knowledge. Slash-and-burn is a standard practice for local farmers working rotational fields. The Dayak people have farmed this way for generations, adapting themselves patiently, the way water adapts to the shape of a riverbed, to Kalimantan’s soil—soil that, unlike the rich volcanic dirt of Java, has no free gift to give. Most of Kalimantan is peatland. Thin. Stubborn. Ungenerous. Controlled burning became not a careless habit but the most efficient method of clearing that stubborn ground, woven so deeply into Dayak tradition and ecological wisdom that it stopped being a technique and became something closer to a language, passed mouth to mouth, season to season.

As Suyadi Jelai writes: “Rotational farming technology supports natural soil fertility recovery and suppresses weed populations by reducing the viability of weed seeds stored in the ground.” Dry words for a living process—but true ones.

Kalimantan has no active volcanoes. No red rivers of lava creeping down a slope to enrich the fields the way Java’s volcanoes do, generous even in their violence. There is no ash falling from a crater to feed the ground. The only ash Kalimantan’s farmers have ever had is the ash they make themselves, deliberately, carefully, turning nutrient-starved dirt into something that could hold a crop—coaxing life out of ground that would otherwise refuse it.

And yet this careful, ancient, deliberate practice was, again and again, weaponized against the very people who perfected it. In reality, as the writer Mochtar Lubis documented, farming practices in Borneo stretch back ten thousand years—ten thousand years of trial and error, of knowledge tested against real hunger and real land, refined the way a river refines a stone, slowly, patiently, without cruelty.

Even if you want to argue that Lubis’s work leans into fiction (and fair enough; fiction and I have always been on friendly terms), the customs he describes aren’t hard to find. You can still watch them—the nataki technique practiced by the Kendayan Dayak in Bengkayang Regency, West Kalimantan, alive and ongoing, a living rebuttal to every accusation ever leveled against it. When the fires came and the finger-pointing started, the Dayak people did not stay quiet. They pushed back, hard, the way anyone pushes back when the truth is theirs and someone else is trying to steal it.

“It’s not meant to destroy the forest! Our ancestors taught us how to clear land safely,” said Felisianus Kimsong, a tribal elder of the Gajekng sub-tribe in Salamantan District, Bengkayang, quoted in National Geographic. There’s a weariness in that line, the weariness of a man who has had to say the same true thing over and over to people who’d already decided not to believe him.

The same holds in Lung Anai Village, Kutai Kartanegara Regency, home to the Dayak Kenyah Lepoq Jalan, a community whose roots trace back to the Apo Kayan highlands. Their land-clearing process isn’t the reckless free-for-all the New Order’s press releases implied. It is, in fact, almost bureaucratic in its care—which is its own kind of irony, given who was doing the accusing. Before any burning begins, the community gathers at the Rumah Lamin, the communal longhouse, for deliberation. They agree on timing. They select specific plots carefully, to minimize risk—the way a surgeon selects an incision site, not at random, not out of carelessness, but with intention.

The chosen area is surveyed. Its perimeter is cleared to create firebreaks so the flame cannot wander where it isn’t wanted. Wind direction is tracked and re-tracked, because wind is the one variable no elder’s wisdom can fully tame. Villagers watch the fire the whole time it burns—not from a distance, not with their backs turned, but watching, the way you’d watch a sick child through the night—and they make certain, absolutely certain, that it is fully extinguished before menugan, the rice planting, ever begins.

Land clearing happens in May and June, methodically: brush first, then trees, cut from smallest-diameter to largest, a sequence, a system, nothing left to chance. The burning itself doesn’t start until August. Once it does, the fire’s duration—one week or four—bends to the weather, not the other way around: rain stretches it out, dry spells speed it along. None of this is improvised. It is codified, formally, in Article 19 of the Dayak Kenyah Customary Law, the UHADAK, complete with prohibitions and fines for anyone who breaks the rhythm.

And still—still—the New Order government dismissed all of it as waste, pointing at the seven-year fallow period the land needed to recover as though patience were the same thing as negligence. The government aimed its finger at the indigenous farmers with the small plots and the careful firebreaks, and it kept its eyes very deliberately turned away from its own hand in the matter—the hand that had, for decades, been signing the paperwork that let industrial logging swallow the province whole.

Because here’s the truth the regime didn’t want printed in bold: large-scale commercial logging in Kalimantan didn’t really take off until the twentieth century, but once it did, it hit like a freight train through a nursery. According to Mongabay, between 1973 and 2010, roughly 105,000 square miles—271,819 square kilometers—of forest were logged for timber, and the overwhelming majority of that logging was carried out not by farmers with hand tools and customary law, but by industrial forestry companies operating under concessions the New Order itself had granted.

World Bank data draws the shape of the wound plainly, in numbers that don’t need embellishment to be horrifying. In 1900, Kalimantan held an estimated 43.2 million acres—17.5 million hectares—of natural forest. By 1985 that had dropped to 27.4 million acres, 11.1 million hectares. By 1997—the very year the world watched Kalimantan burn and the government pointed at cigarette butts and rice farmers—it had fallen to just 11.6 million acres, 4.7 million hectares.

Sit with that arithmetic for a second. It’s the kind of arithmetic that convicts a liar all on its own. This data directly debunks the New Order’s claim that the Dayak people caused the 1997–1998 fires. Centuries—millennia—of indigenous rotational farming, and forest cover stayed extraordinarily high right up until 1900. It was the twentieth century that did the damage. It was concessions and chainsaws and boardrooms, not a Dayak farmer’s careful, ancestor-taught fire.

But the scapegoating didn’t stop with rhetoric, with a few quotes fed to reporters and forgotten by the next news cycle. It calcified into law. The government later issued Presidential Instruction No. 11 of 2015, the Enhanced Forest and Land Fire Control decree—and under its weight, Dayak farming rights were crushed, their traditional practices recast overnight as criminal acts.

Arrests followed. Real ones, real people led away from real fields for doing what their grandparents and great-grandparents had done without shame or secrecy for ten thousand years. And fear, once it takes root, spreads the way fire itself spreads—quietly at first, then all at once. Traditional wisdom like nataki was gradually abandoned, not because it stopped working, but because practicing it had become dangerous. And when the knowledge went, the yields went with it.

Before the ban, a Dayak Kenyah farmer might clear two to four acres and bring in 100 to 200 sacks of rice—enough for a family, enough for the uman undrat, the harvest festival that gave thanks to the earth for its stubborn, hard-won generosity. After the decree, ten tins of rice felt like a mercy. Ten tins. Let that sit next to two hundred sacks and tell me which government’s story sounds like the truth.

“The concept of belom bahadat—living with respect toward the environment—is reflected in how the Dayak treat the natural world,” writes Linggua Sanjaya Usop. “In using the forest to meet their needs, Dayak local wisdom ensures environmental sustainability. They do not use chainsaws or heavy machinery that inflict high levels of destruction. Their tradition teaches them how to work with nature without destroying the ecosystem.”

No chainsaws. No heavy machinery. Just fire, used the way a scalpel is used—with precision, with respect, with ten thousand years of practice behind every cut. And somewhere in an office in Jakarta, a government that owned the real chainsaws, the real machinery, the real concessions, looked at that quiet, careful fire and decided it made a more convenient villain than the one wearing a suit.

That’s the part of the story that stays with you, isn’t it? Not the smoke, though the smoke was bad enough. Not even poor Si Pongi, though God knows she’ll haunt you. It’s the lie. The lie dressed up as a conclusion, printed in official reports, repeated until it hardened into something that looked, from a distance, almost like truth. And Ryan—that elementary-school kid who once watched his hometown disappear into haze for weeks on end—grew up to spend a thesis, an academic life, pulling that lie apart thread by thread, number by number, until what was left standing was the truth the smoke had tried so hard to bury.