MSNBC
 NYARU
MENTENG, Indonesia — Seven-month-old Nabima often has nightmares.
She wakes in the night screaming and crying, says Lone Droscher-Nielsen,
who is looking after the little orangutan on Borneo Island. At
only a few weeks old, Nabima and her mother were shot out of a
tree by tribesmen in Borneo’s remote interior. As she lay
watching on the ground, her mother was killed, skinned and eaten.
She was bundled
up and taken to a nearby town where she was sold for about $2
as a pet. Not long afterward, a team of Indonesian wildlife officers
— working on a tip by foreign conservationists — rescued
her and took her to a nearby internationally funded orangutan
rehabilitation refuge.
Like the
66 other apes in the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Reintroduction Project,
Nabima is now being cared for by trained handlers and is due to
be released into a guarded sanctuary in the jungle sometime next
year.
THE ECONOMY
VS. EXTINCTION
With their
natural habitat shrinking at an alarming rate due to rapacious
logging, urban expansion and deliberately lit bush fires, orangutans
and other wildlife on Borneo Island are finding themselves the
first casualties.
Environmentalists
say that in the past decade, the number of apes on Borneo and
nearby Sumatra islands have halved to about 25,000. Within another
10 years, they are likely to be extinct if the government does
not do something about it urgently.
But swift
action to protect the environment is not of the highest concern
to Indonesian politicians at the moment. The economy is in tatters,
a political crisis is occupying the nation’s leaders and
communal fighting is gripping much of the world’s fourth
most-populous country.
Throughout
this sprawling archipelagic country, loggers are wiping out centuries-old
tropical rain forests, much of them illegally, as fast as the
trees can be chain sawed. Even national parks, the last sanctuaries
for many species, are being destroyed.
“There
is no political will in Indonesia to stop illegal logging,”
said Julian Newmon, a member of the London-based Environmental
Investigation Agency. “When the forests are gone, the orangutans
will be gone as well.”
He said his
organization had given Indonesia’s government the name of
18 timber barons responsible for much of the illegal logging,
but little action had been taken.
RAPACIOUS
LOGGING
“The
people who are supposed to be protecting the forests are often
the ones logging them,” Newmon said. “Every river on
Borneo is clogged with cut logs floating downstream to timber
mills.”
Much of the
teak, ramin and other valuable hardwoods are illegally exported
to the United States, Europe, Japan and China, Newmon said.
With the
jungles being plundered, the survival of several other species,
in addition to the orangutan, are also threatened.
Asian elephants
on Borneo and Sumatra are being forced to forage in farms and
gardens for food. This, in turn, is leading to increasing conflicts
with villagers. As in Africa, many of the elephants are also hunted
for their valuable ivory tusks.
The Sumatran
and Javan rhinoceros are also threatened with extinction. Once
they roamed across much of Southeast Asia. Now there are only
about 350 of the single-horned Sumatran rhinos left in the wild.
And only eight
Javan rhinos survive in Ujung Kulong national park on the southwestern
tip of Java. Tens of thousands of the smallest of among half a
dozen rhino species roamed the island before being exterminated
in the past century.
In Aceh province,
on the northern tip of Sumatra, the reclusive animals are finding
themselves the victim of a long-running guerrilla war.
With loggers
encroaching deeper into the dense jungles, Sumatran tigers are
also being forced from their bush hide-outs and are becoming easy
prey for poachers after their valuable pelts.
As well as
being hunted for food or to be sold as pets, hundreds of orangutans
are smuggled every year to the United States and other industrialized
countries where they fetch up to $30,000 on the black market.
For every five baby apes shipped overseas, only one usually survives
the journey.
ACTIVISTS
NOT OPTIMISTIC
Indonesia’s
President Abdurrahman Wahid recently replaced his forestry minister,
saying his government was under foreign pressure to save the jungles.
However, local environmentalists are not optimistic that much
will change.
With their
survival threatened, orangutan rehabilitation clinics, like the
Nyaru Menteng one in Central Kalimantan province, are now more
vital than ever.
“They
are big, gentle giants,” Droscher-Nielsen, a Danish-born
environmentalist, said as she led an orangutan by hand from its
cage. “It’s becoming worse and worse in the wild for
them here. A lot of people are killing them.”
When the
apes come into the clinic, they go into quarantine cages to check
for diseases. With 95 percent of their DNA makeup identical to
that of humans, some suffer from contagious human illnesses, such
as hepatitis B and tuberculosis.
The animals
are then moved to larger cages to learn how to interact with other
orangutans before being released temporarily into a fenced-off
section of forest to learn bush survival skills.
Droscher-Nielsen
said some of the apes have spent most of their lives in a domesticated
environment, making it difficult to rehabilitate them.
One female
4-year-old orangutan called Veve was breast-fed as a baby by its
human surrogate mother, she said. It understands a lot of Chinese.
Another one came into the clinic cross-eyed from watching too
much television.
“It liked
watching Indian films during the day and soccer by night,”
Droscher-Nielsen said.
Droscher-Nielsen
is searching for funding to acquire an isolated piece of jungle
to use as a release site for the rehabilitated apes.
|
