It seems utterly beyond debate but acknowledging legal rights to clean air has assumed the makings of a slow march over the years. The 1956 Clean Air Act in Britain arose from the lethal effects of London’s 1952 killer smog, which is said to have taken some 12,000 lives. The Act granted powers to establish […]
The post The Right to Clean Air in Jakarta first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Student protests, West Papua independence struggle, monstrous forest fires, an assassination attempt against Coordinating Minister, sinking capital city, earthquakes and a collapsing economy – the increasingly religiously fundamentalist Indonesia is suddenly facing too many disasters. It cannot cope with any of them.
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Most of the people in the West or in North Asia usually never think about it, but Southeast Asia is one of the most depressed and depressing parts of the world.
It has been through genocides, wars and atrocious military regimes.
Then, those monstrous income disparities.
Jakarta beggars at night
According to The Bangkok Post, in 2018, “the 10% poorest Thais had 0% wealth.
There are stories that are unrelated to the news, but can explain much better than many combat reports, why people like me are fighting against the Empire and imperialism, with such determination and vehemence. Not all stories are ‘big’ or ‘heroic’; not all include famous people or iconic struggles. Not all take place on battlefields.
But they ‘humanize’ the struggle.
Once in a while, I like to share such stories with my readers. As I will do right now.
Because without them, frankly, nothing really makes sense.
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You will never read about it, but Dayak people, the “First Nation” of the enormous island of Borneo, are broken, robbed and brainwashed.
“Unity in diversity” it says; the motto of Indonesia. But it could be argued that the opposite is true. There is very little unity, and less and less diversity, as the country is controlled from Jakarta, an enormous, overpopulated stinky and sinking megapolis which is located on the island of Java.
It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.
You can drive for ten or even twenty kilometers through it, and see only ugliness, fences and broken pavements. But there are many miserable cities on this planet, and I have worked in almost all of them, in 160 countries.
So why is ‘Jakarta killing me’? Why am I overwhelmed by depression whenever I decide to film here, or to write about the state in which its citizens are forced to live? Why, really, do I feel so desperate, so hopeless?
Hungry and homeless in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)
Andre Vltchek
21st Century Wire
From Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Samarinda and Pontianak
*****
Several years ago, a prominent Indonesian businessman who now resides in Canada, insisted on meeting me in a back room of one of Jakarta’s posh restaurants. An avid reader of mine, he ‘had something urgent to tell me’, after finding out that our paths were going to be crossing in this destroyed and hopelessly polluted Indonesian capital.
What he had to say was actually straight to the point and definitely worth sitting two hours in an epic traffic jam:
