Indonesia: students confront the fires, and a state accused of looking the other way

According to Le Monde, anger among Indonesian students is mounting against the administration, accused of inaction in the face of fires that have devastated nearly 2 million hectares. The paper quotes this line: "Our country is burning, literally and figuratively." Malaysia and Singapore, also hit by the haze, are raising their voices.

Here is what we know. The file as reported does not say who lit these fires, on which land, or on whose behalf. Nor does it specify what measures the administration took or refused to take. Those gaps matter, and we will not fill them with guesswork. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

The core question is the economy surrounding these flames. Part of the story that Marxists call accumulation by dispossession plays out in landscapes like this one: land, forests and shared means of subsistence are converted, concession by concession, into private capital. The "investment opportunities" touted in the capitals often come with a reverse side of residents cut off from their soil and ecosystems sacrificed. Still to be established, file by file, is who holds the areas that have gone up in smoke. That is precisely what exasperated students are entitled to demand.

Dependency theory helps frame this demand. A country whose economy was shaped to supply raw materials to the rest of the world remains trapped in a logic: produce more, faster and cheaper, whatever the ecological cost. Anticolonial thinkers, Fanon and Cabral foremost among them, warned that independence without social transformation lets a local elite inherit the colonial apparatus. The flag changes, the structure remains. If the Indonesian state is accused of inertia, the right question is not only one of competence but of its alliances: with whom does it govern, and in the service of which interests?

There is also the regional dimension. Smoke ignores borders, and Malaysia as well as Singapore are feeling its effects. Their irritation is understandable. But beware a trap: that of setting populations against one another, Indonesian against neighbour, when everyone breathes the same polluted air. Who benefits from division? Rarely those who are coughing. Governments can pass responsibility back and forth while the economic actors involved keep a low profile.

Indonesian youth, in short, raise a question of sovereignty in the most concrete sense: who decides how land is used, and who pays when it goes wrong? Nyerere placed land, forests and large plantations among the major means of production that should be under the control of peasants and workers. One can debate the recipe, not the question. When the country burns, ownership of and power over that land cease to be abstractions. Answers will be needed, with names and hectares attached.