Print | Send to friend | Email update

Greenpeace slings mud over disaster

Sep 27, 2006 11:43 PM

The environmental group Greenpeace dumped 700 kilograms of mud at Indonesia's welfare ministry in protest over the government's handling of a mudflow disaster.

A business group owned by the family of Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie holds a controlling stake in Lapindo Brantas, the company blamed for the mud oozing unchecked from an exploratory oil well in Sidoarjo in East Java province.

The firm has denied the mud is directly linked to the drilling operation.

The mud has swamped four villages over an area larger than Monaco, displacing more than 10,000 people and highlighting the chequered environmental practices in exploiting resources in Indonesia.

Police looked on as Greenpeace activists poured buckets of black-greyish mud taken from the site of the disaster at the gate of the welfare ministry in the capital, Jakarta.

"It's a symbolic move. It's utterly shameless for the minister to distance himself from the disaster when his corporate group owns the controlling shares of this operation," Greenpeace Southeast Asia director Emmy Hafild told reporters.

Hafild said the government had not done all it could to mitigate the disaster and called for steel barriers to be built to contain the mud.

She said the government must force Lapindo and its affiliates to shoulder all costs for the evacuation and compensation of the villagers as well as containment and rehabilitation.

Lapindo is controlled by listed firm PT Energi Mega Persada, which is in turn controlled by Bakrie.

The crisis has forced the local government in East Java province to allow the channelling of the muddy water into a nearby river, despite concerns it could pollute the ocean, a source of income for millions living on Java's eastern coast.

Hafild said the fate of the displaced people should override environmental concerns in the short term.

"We don't have a solution. We are an environmental group but right now the focus should be to evacuate people who live in the immediate vicinity of the mudflow," she said.

Engineers hired by Lapindo, including US and Australian experts, have failed to stop the flow of around 50,000 cubic metres of hot mud every day.

Several experts have said the mudflow, which started to spurt in late May, could have been triggered by a crack about 1,800 metres deep in East Java province's Banjar Panji well.

However, a group of international scientists said this week the mudflow might be a natural phenomenon that could be impossible to stop.

Dykes built to control the mud have been breached several times. Greenpeace estimates that by December almost 10 million cubic metres of mud would have covered 390 hectares of land.

Jakarta officials want to remove the water from the mud, treat it and then allow it to flow into the sea through a 20 kilometre pipeline, a plan that may take months to be approved.