Indonesia: smoke from the fires killed 3,560 people in September

According to Le Monde, air pollution from the fires caused the deaths of 3,560 people in Indonesia in September alone. The country, hit by a drought worsened by the El Niño phenomenon, has been fighting forest fires for months which, according to the organisation Nusantara Atlas, have ravaged more than 1.9 million hectares during the first nine months of the year.

That is what we know. The dispatch does not say who lit these fires, on what land, or for the benefit of which companies. We will not invent it. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, a word about these 3,560 people. They did not die "of climate" the way one is struck by lightning. They breathed, for weeks, air that had become toxic. They are children, the elderly, the sick: those with the least means to flee the smoke or buy an air purifier. The catastrophe has a social address.

Next, El Niño makes for a convenient culprit. The drought dries out the soil, but it is not the only thing preparing the ground. Marxists speak of a "metabolic rift": an economy that demands ever more materials and energy shifts its costs onto ecosystems and onto the populations who have contributed least to emissions. A burning forest is also, too often, a forest that was first opened up, drained or converted. What remains to be established, in this specific case, is the exact share of each cause. Today's figures do not give it.

This is where the long history comes in. In the archipelago, as elsewhere in the South, the economy was shaped to supply the centre with raw materials: palm oil, pulp, ore. Independence changed the flag; the extraction apparatus, however, often found new local managers, which is what Fanon and Cabral feared. Concessions, land grabs, the conversion of commons into private capital: this is what is called accumulation by dispossession, a process that never stopped. Here too, we pose the question rather than pretend to answer it: for whom were these burned hectares intended?

We will be told that Indonesia must develop. No doubt. But a development paid for with lungs, whose bill falls on those who never received the dividends, bears an uncanny resemblance to an old acquaintance: the externalisation of costs.

The questions to put to the authorities and economic actors are simple. Who held the land that went up in smoke? What prosecutions, what sanctions, what compensation for the families? As long as the answers remain vague, the next drought will find the same ground, and the same victims.