Dear Indonesia,
We know you have your problems, like dealing with protestors because you decided to up fuel prices. But we hope you realise that your little neighbour here is choking to death because you’re burning another type of fuel.
Look… our Government says it can’t interfere in your domestic affairs and you obviously don’t think Asean can do much to make you do what you don’t want to do. (After all, you’re the Big Brother of Asean). So we’d like you to hear from the people of Singapore, all four/five million of us and countless of PRs, foreign workers, including your Indonesian citizens.
The haze, or rather this unhealthy pollution, coming from your end has become way too much of us. We are watching PSI figures like we we’ve just taken a huge bet on the stock market. Even the stock market doesn’t rocket up by 100 points in an hour. So the PSI is 290 now at 10pm and reaching hazardous levels. We feel as though you’ve launched some kind of chemical warfare against us, although we know it’s really just dirty smoke.
We’re more than willing to help with your slash-and-burn problem. So what would you like from us? $100 million worth of helicopters and fire trucks? More policemen to stop illegal de-forestation? Your civil service replaced by our squeaky clean ones? Our CPIB is quite free now that the sex-for-favours cases are out of the way.
Or you really don’t care about what we think or how we’re faring? We’re hurt…we thought we were friends… Plenty of your politicians shop here, by the way. They even get hospitalised here. Your fabulous rich shop here although they are probably giving the Great Singapore Sale now on a miss. Or maybe it’s even worse in Indonesia? Like in Riau? What about the capital Jakarta or anywhere the rich people stay? Is Bali affected?
Our ministers have been on the phone with you but all you can say is that some of those fire-starters are greedy capitalists based here. So give us their names and we’ll deal with them. Name them. Shame them. Boycott them. Crash their servers. Vandalise their buildings. Seems our laws can’t quite reach them since they are burning in YOUR land. You have, however, our permission to do as you like with them, except take their money.
So bro, can you give us some face or not? Take those cloud-seeding offers. Take the money. Take whatever. We assure you we won’t think you are any weaker for accepting our aid.
How can we? We’re just a little red dot after all.
And maybe that’s the problem.
Sincerely,
Singapore
Bertha Henson
*The author is a former editor of The Straits Times, she is now the co-founder of Breakfastnetwork.sg