Indonesia yesterday deployed an extra 1,600 military personnel to fight forest and agricultural fires that have produced a thick haze, as the smog closed schools in Malaysia and worsened air quality in Singapore.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo ordered the military ramp-up on Sumatra after authorities declared a state of emergency in the island’s hard-hit Riau Province on Monday.
One thousand military personnel were dispatched to Riau, while 600 were sent to South Sumatra Province to help local authorities fight fires, Indonesia’s disaster agency said.
Photo: AFP
They join more than 1,000 soldiers sent to Sumatra last week.
Smog-belching blazes, an annual problem in Southeast Asia, have intensified in Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo Island in the past two weeks, sending a cloud of acrid smog across the region.
The illegal fires are set to clear vast tracts of land to make way for palm oil and pulp and paper plantations, and Indonesia has failed to halt the practice, despite years of pressure from its neighbors.
After announcing late on Monday that more troops would be sent to Sumatra, Widodo said he had ordered law enforcement agencies to “take firm legal action against parties responsible for the forest fires.”
About 100 people and 15 companies are being investigated over the blazes, the disaster agency said.
Tens of thousands of people in smoke-choked regions of Sumatra and Borneo have fallen ill, while air travel there — as well as in parts of Malaysia — has been hit by sporadic flight delays or cancelations due to poor visibility.
The Malaysian Ministry of Education ordered schools closed in Kuala Lumpur, three adjacent states and the nearby administrative capital of Putrajaya, as the capital was enveloped in a smoky gray shroud.
Air pollution indices in the affected areas were in the upper range of “unhealthy” and nearing “very unhealthy.”
More than half of the country’s 52 monitoring stations registered “unhealthy” air.
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