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Rhetoric of Control Amidst a History of Neglect

JAKARTA, H OS LAW FIRM - President Prabowo Subianto's statement promising to crack down on illegal logging after the Sumatra floods sounds firm, but it feels late and paradoxical. When the disaster had already claimed victims and left giant logs floating down the river, the state was busy crafting a narrative of action. In fact, illegal logging is not an incidental event, but a long-standing practice that has flourished under lax state supervision—or deliberately loosened for economic interests.

Ironically, amid the discovery of neatly cut large logs, a statement emerged from a Forestry Ministry official, Dwi Januanto, who said the wood came from naturally fallen trees. This claim not only contradicts the logic of the field, but also reveals the tendency of state officials to suppress the facts rather than expose them. When industrial timber is simplified as a “natural phenomenon,” what is taking place is not scientific clarification, but the normalization of ecological destruction.

This permissive attitude does not stand alone. It is intertwined with the head of state's view of forests and plantations. President Prabowo previously stated that oil palm plantations are the same as forests because they are both green and produce oxygen. This statement is not merely a conceptual error, but a denial of the ecological function of natural forests as life support, water regulators, and protectors of biodiversity. Equating forests with monoculture plantations means reducing nature to a mere visual and economic commodity.

A similar perspective can be traced back to a past statement by President Joko Widodo, who expressed his willingness to prepare thousands of hectares of land for anyone who needed it. In the context of the climate crisis and deforestation, this statement reflects a mentality of unlimited expansion, as if Indonesia's ecological space is still empty and free to be divided up. Instead of tightening forest protection, the state is acting as a provider of cheap land for investment, which often leads to agrarian conflict and environmental damage.

President Prabowo's call for the public to “not be afraid to plant oil palms” further highlights the inconsistency of environmental policy. On the one hand, the government claims it will crack down on illegal logging, but on the other hand, it encourages the expansion of a commodity that has historically been one of the main drivers of deforestation, land degradation, and hydrometeorological disasters. In this context, the crackdown on illegal logging appears to be more of a political cosmetic than a paradigm shift in development.

Even more problematic is the Forestry Minister's admission that twenty companies have been identified but not yet investigated, revealing the classic face of environmental law enforcement in Indonesia: tough in rhetoric, soft in implementation. The secrecy surrounding the names of the companies and the slow pace of legal proceedings reinforce the impression that the law is still blunt at the top and sharp at the bottom. Local communities suffer from flooding and loss of living space, while corporations suspected of destroying forests continue to operate in a legal gray zone.

The government is once again stuck in a reactive pattern—moving after a disaster, rather than preventing damage before it occurs. Promises of reform will lose their meaning if officials' statements contradict each other: on the one hand, they talk about law enforcement, while on the other, they deny the damage, equate forests with plantations, and roll out the red carpet for land expansion.

If the state truly wants to stop illegal logging and prevent ecological disasters, then it is not only the chainsaws in the forests that need to be regulated, but also the mindset of policy makers. As long as the environment continues to be positioned as a secondary variable in development, and public officials are more concerned with defending economic narratives than ecological facts, then floods, landslides, and forest destruction will continue to recur. Promises of reform will ultimately be buried—along with mud and logs—in a cycle of disasters created by the state itself.




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Location: East Jakarta, East Jakarta City, Jakarta, Indonesia

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