Hazing rituals

OF COURSE there is an app for it. Air4ASEAN, produced by the Thai government, sends smartphones a pretty if depressing map of the parts of South-East Asia afflicted with “the haze”, the foul smog that has been almost an annual curse for two decades now. It also offers data for each of the ten member countries of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Tap “Indonesia”, however, and the page that loads is one of several with nothing but the word “soon”. That is apt. The haze emerged as a man-made catastrophe in 1997, when forest fires in Indonesia and Malaysia shrouded much of the region, causing severe disruption and untold damage to human health. Ever since, ASEAN, and in particular Indonesia, the biggest source of the haze, have been promising to tackle it. However, ASEAN’s efforts have tested the organisation’s aspiration to become more than a talking-shop among governments and to forge a co-operative “community”.