Raping Borneo.

Indonesia's wildlife never had it easy under the dictator Suharto. For 32 years he controlled a logging-and-mining apparatus that steadily eroded the forests and polluted the rivers of this 17,000-island archipelago. The country's population of orangutans--literally, "people of the forest"--has dwindled to around 25,000, less than a tenth its size a hundred years ago, and the primates are facing extinction. But when Suharto's rule came to an end three years ago, things got even worse.

Suharto's departure left a power vacuum that has yet to be filled. The country's 210 million people have suffered chaos and unruliness--the judiciary is corrupt, financial markets are depressed and law and order have broken down--but at least they've also won some freedoms. For the orangutans and other wildlife, Indonesia's brand of democracy is an unequivocal disaster. Logging and mining industries run by feudal warlords operate under virtually no constraints. Logging has soared on Borneo, Sumatra, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya, says the World Bank. So has gold mining, which is polluting the waters with mercury. Abdurrahman Wahid, the country's first democratically elected president, showed little interest in stopping the destruction.

Wahid was impeached on July 23 by the National Assembly for corruption and incompetence after a yearlong power struggle. His successor, Megawati Sukarnoputri, faces an economic crisis, tens of millions of unemployed and growing separatist movements in two resource-rich provinces. Wildlife will not be high on her agenda. "The tragedy of democracy is going to be the environment," says Jatna Supriatna, country director of Conservation International, a U.S. environmental group. "It's anarchy. People are trying to grab what they can."

Orangutans in Tanjung Puting National Park, a 3,000-square-kilometer reserve on Borneo, have suffered a full-scale assault on their rain- forest homes. Since 1998 these creatures, one of the closest relatives to humans, have dwindled by a third. The apes live only in Indonesia and Malaysia and are now near the top of the world's endangered-species list; in 20 years they could be gone altogether. At Tanjung Puting and in dozens of other protected areas, sun bears, gibbons, proboscis monkeys and clouded leopards are also under threat. The population of sea turtles on the tourist island of Bali has dropped to a fifth of what it was in the 1940s, say Australian experts.

Tanjung Puting has come to symbolize the corruption and lawlessness of Indonesia's forestry sector. Government and independent figures show that about two thirds of the 70 million cubic meters of timber produced in Indonesia annually is illegally felled, costing the cash-strapped government about $720 million a year in tax revenues. About 70 percent of all sawmills are illegal. Indonesia contains 10 percent of the world's tropical rain forests, but the country is losing up to 2 million hectares each year. "Indonesia is losing a huge amount of its natural capital," says Tom Walton, a senior environmental specialist with the World Bank. "It has abundant natural resources, and they're being plundered for the benefit of a relatively small number of people." Commercial forests on Sumatra are expected to be logged out by 2005, and those on Borneo by 2010. Deforestation is already causing droughts and floods on farmland across the country, mudslides that bury entire villages and massive soil erosion. Locals have no say in how their resources are used and receive no money from the plunder.

Under pressure from foreign-aid donors, the government signed an agreement last fall to crack down on illegal logging and prosecute the timber barons, but none of a dozen cases referred to the attorney ...