The charge will be damage to the environment. The problem we have always had is that we cannot find people who saw fires being set. An expert from one of Indonesia's top institutes on plant sciences, Bogor Agricultural University, has been called in to examine samples from burned sites. If he says go ahead with the cases, we will go ahead, says Mr. Sudaryanto. We are optimistic.
Circumstantial evidence linking the fires to plantation companies is strong.
All around Kerinci, a town southwest of Pekanbaru, new oil palm trees are sprouting up in land still full of charred stumps. Some of the land is secondary forest, burned a long time ago and regrown since. But a few years ago some of these plantations were virgin tropical rainforest, some of the last in Sumatra. Since 1997 several bodies have been set up to analyze the satellite photos, most with international funding. The borders of the fires often coincide with the borders of a single plot of land, whose landholder can be identified through map cross-referencing.