Hardi  Baktiantoro

I was at a location in Jakarta so secret that not even I am sure where I was, although that's probably true about most of Jakarta for me.

In any event I listened for two hours to Hardi  Baktiantoro, a man born in a small mountain village on the island of Java who is the first Indonesian to set up an organization within Indonesia fighting for orangutans and the rainforest.

Hardi is my kind of guy. He has a nice village-grown smile and likes to sit in the forest and watch and listen, rather than hang out at bars. He told me that when he was young he sat in one place in the forest for three days just to observe.

Then he worked for conservation groups in Sumatra and Borneo until he was so fired up that in March 2007 he set up the Centre for Orangutan Protection based in Jakarta but operating mostly in Kalimantan. The organization rescues orangutans and creates opposition to the destruction of rainforest. He told me proudly that recently his organization had saved 42,000 hectares of forest in Central Kalimantan with 1,600 orangutans. Impresssive!

Hardi's organization has a paid staff of ten. The office is professionally run and Hardi showed me a graphic short documentary about the destruction of rainforest and cruelty to organutans that was filmed by his journalist wife Yuyun.

Hardi, with a family of three girls, is supported by his wife, a necessity in this line of work. He's so concerned for their safety that he has them stashed in a village somewhere. The location of the office is also kept a secret.

Apparently not everyone in Indonesia believes it's a good idea to save rainforest from palm oil and pulp and paper. This is a country where Hardi says members of the army organize illegal logging in Sumatra with the "mafia."

 Hardi has seen some pretty depressing scenes -- orangutans staggering over land that has been logged and reduced to stubble, orangutan faces swollen from being used as punching bags, orangutan fingers cut off as a cruel joke. Makes you wonder about our species, doesn't it?

But Hardi is not intimated like others in Indonesia by a sense of corruption and powerlessness and has put together a group of young, like-minded Indonesians. He's quietly vehement about what he is doing, saying that the hands of some are stained "with the blood of orangutans." He means that literally.

Yet he smiles at the victories he and the home team are winning.

This is a tough place to find wide support. Hardi has no illusions about that.

See: http://www.orangutanprotection.com/indexeng.php?menu=main1.php&lang=eng