(c) Environment News Service (ENS) 2000
November 21, 2000

BASEL, Switzerland, November 21, 2000 (ENS) - Swiss activist Bruno Manser has been missing in Malaysia since May. Now his family is requesting assistance of the Swiss foreign ministry to talk to Malaysian officials about Manser's disappearance.

The forty-six year old activist has spent years living with the Penan indigenous people of Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. He encouraged their resistance to logging on their traditional forest lands.

Bruno Manser heads upriver in Borneo. Last photo [Manser] of Manser taken at the border of Kalimantan, Indonesia and Sarawak, Malaysia just before he entered Sarawak, May 2000. (Photos courtesy Bruno-Manser-Fonds)

In a statement, the fund established to back Manser's work said, "The family and the Bruno Manser Fund asked the foreign ministry Monday to declare to Malaysian authorities that Bruno Manser is missing and to register an official request for a search in Malaysia."

The ministry promised to take action in the next few days, Fund spokesman told reporters. The Swiss foreign ministry confirmed a Swiss newspaper report that they received a request to investigate the disappearance.

On the Fund's website an appeal has gone out to locate the missing man. "Since May 2000 Bruno Manser is missing. This human rights activist wanted to visit his friends, the Penan forest nomads in the Sarawak, who are surrounded by logging companies, the army and the police. It seems he never arrived. Search parties have had no luck. Now the Swiss Diplomatic Corps has stepped in. Manser could have been arrested, had an accident or could have been murdered."

Manser had many friends in Sarawak and among environmentalists around the world, but he also had enemies.

The Bruno Manser Fund website says, "For the endangered Penan and later worldwide Bruno Manser became a symbol for the protest against the unscrupulous destruction of Sarawak's rain forests. He also started becoming an antagonistic nuisance in the eyes of Sarawak's Chief Minister Taib Mahmud.

"On 15th February 2000, just before he left, Bruno Manser told Online Reports, "Through his logging licence policies Taib Mahmud is personally responsible for nearly the whole area of the rain forests of the Sarawak becoming one big field of destruction in the matter of one generation."

[Manser] Manser in the Borneo rainforest

Manser lived with the nomadic Penans for six years before being arrested in 1987 for encouraging them to protest against logging of their traditional territory. He escaped from police custody and went to North America where he toured, speaking on behalf of the Penan.

In March last year he returned to Malaysia, where he embellished his standing as an enemy of the government's forestry concession preferments, to perform a paragliding stunt over Kuching, the state capital. He was deported after landing near the home of the state's chief minister.

The Bruno-Manser-Fonds was founded in Basel. In 1993 Manser did a 60 day hunger strike in front of the Bundeshaus in Bern to raise consciousness in the Federal Council and among Swiss consumers for the necessity of a compulsory declaration of all woods and an import embargo of tropical woods. This strike was supported by 37 organisations and political parties, the parliament of the town of Basel and many well known persons. Switzerland still has no compulsory declaration.

On the Manser Fund website Bruno is quoted. In May 1998 he said, "As long as logging goes on in Sarawak and as long as the bulldozers continue their destruction our activities will not have achieved anything. I am tired but I can't stop until all the Malaysian promises have been kept, namely the right of self-determination for the Penan and the protection of their environment in a biosphere reservation promised in 1987."

Visit the Bruno Manser Fund at: http://www.bmf.ch Error: Unable to read footer file.