The Hunt for Bruno Manser
Copyright 2001
Independent on Sunday (London)
September 23, 2001
By Richard Lloyd Parry
In any country and in any age, the peaks of Batu Lawi would be a sacred site, a place of spirits and mysteries. The world's great holy mountains, like Fuji and Olympus, may be higher but, for gravity-defying spectacle, none surpasses Batu Lawi's two immense stone pinnacles, which thrust up out of the jungle in a remote part of Malaysian Borneo. One peak is broad and squat, draped with clinging trees; the taller is thin and sharp with bare, vertical sides rising to its 6,700ft peak. The Penan people, whose homeland this is, speak of them as a husband and wife. From where I stood, rinsed in sweat from the climb, they looked like the bunched knuckles of a fist, its index finger pointing into the sky.
In legendary times, the husband and wife of Batu Lawi overcame the malevolent god of the fire mountain, Gunung Api - without their victory, the whole world would have burned. "If the peaks of Batu Lawi ever fall," said Along Sega, the Penan chief with whom I was walking, "then on that day all of Sarawak will be destroyed." With a three-day hike through the rainforest, the female peak can be climbed easily enough, but only a handful of climbers have ever scaled the male pinnacle. I was five days into my walk, and the simple up and down of the jungle paths was enough for me. Anyway, I had come looking not for a mountain, but a man. For it was close to here, 16 months ago, that Bruno Manser was seen for the last time.
The Penan are among the most obscure of the world's races, yet many people remember their name and that of Bruno Manser, the man who made them famous. Manser, the story went, was a Swiss cowherd who travelled to the rainforest to live as one of the nomadic Penan. For six years he hunted with a blowpipe, lived off snake and monkey meat and helped the Penan in their struggle against the logging companies which were stripping the rainforests where the nomads roam.
A decade ago, theirs was one of the most fashionable of causes. There were petitions and boycotts; Prince Charles gave a famous speech in which he described the Penan as victims of genocide; headlines described Manser as the "Wild Man of Borneo" and the "Swiss Tarzan". Malaysian commandos hunted him through the jungle. Twice he was captured, and twice he escaped, before being smuggled out of Sarawak to continue his campaign from Switzerland.
Bruno travelled around the world to plead for the Penan but, as years passed, the campaign lost its momentum. Environmentalists drifted away, to new and more fashionable causes; the jungle dwindled still further; and more and more of the nomadic Penan were forced into settlements. Manser persevered, increasingly disillusioned. Finally, in the spring of last year, he went back to Sarawak to see his old Penan friends and make one last effort on their behalf.
He travelled first to the Indonesian side of Borneo, then walked alone over the mountains into Sarawak to meet his old friend, Along Sega, who now stood beside me. "I had a message that Bruno was coming again to Sarawak and that I should wait for him," Along said. "I waited, but he didn't come. Then we heard that he was missing. We found his tracks but we could not find him."
Month after month, the Penan have continued to search. A group of Bruno's friends flew out from Switzerland last December. One team scoured the base of Batu Lawi on foot, while another circled the peaks in a helicopter. Yet another team led by his brother went back again last month. Of his clothes, his boots, his knapsack, or of Bruno himself, they found not a trace. The best that anyone can say is that at some time on or after 25 May, 2000, Bruno Manser vanished into thin air. Why, then, do so many of those closest to him believe that he was murdered?
IT IS NOT EASY TO make an appointment with a nomad, certainly not a tribe as small as the Penan in an island as large as Borneo. In Sarawak today, there are some 9,000 Penan but little more than 300 of them live a purely nomadic life. I was looking for one of them in particular - Along Sega, the most charismatic and respected of the Penan leaders, and a great friend of Bruno Manser.
It took four days to find him. The first day was spent on a flat riverboat, and bouncing along rough roads in the open back of a pick-up truck. The next two were spent trekking through the jungle, the hardest walking I have ever done. Finally, at midday on the fourth, my two Penan guides and I limped into the settlement of Ba Sepia. "The reason I came to Sarawak has never been to make politics," Bruno Manser once wrote in a letter from the jungle, "but to join for some years a tribe, which is still living in the untouched hands of mother nature." In places like Ba Sepia, he found what he had been looking for.
In the midday twilight beneath the forest trees, were four wall-less shelters. The word hut would be too grand for them. A week ago, there had been nothing here, and in a few weeks' time - when the fruits were all gathered and the wild boar had run away - the Penan would have moved on. But, for now, their dogs skulked beneath the shelters, beside snickering pet monkeys on the ends of chains. Beautiful pale -skinned children stared at us as we approached, their black hair long at the back and cut straight along the fringe in the characteristic Penan helmet cut.
My guides called out, there was a brief conversation, and we clambered into one of the shelters. Up here an entire family cooked, ate and slept - eight human beings in a space no larger than 8ft by 20ft. The eldest daughter gave us water from an iron kettle. Soon a meal of sago paste and roast monkey was served. The monkey's singed right arm, with its tiny hand still attached, rested on a stack of firewood.
It transpired that Along Sega had gone to the town of Bario, a nine-hour walk away. All day I sat in the shelter, waiting for him to return, as the life of the settlement went on quietly around me.
The Penan are just one of the many tribes of indigenous people known collectively as the Dayaks. For centuries before the arrival of the white colonisers, the Dayaks lived in communal long houses, and survived by hunting and slash-and-burn agriculture. The rainforest was a rich environment and the Dayaks lived in peace, apart from periodic head-hunting raids on rival tribes. None of these tribes is wealthy; many of them still live in harsh isolation. And the Penan are the most marginal of them all. I had seen destitution in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and East Timor. These, though, were the poorest people I had ever met.
Yet, every few hours a new meal was produced - deliciously fatty roast boar; rich dark monkey meat; precious rice bought for cash from a distant town. The family shared it all with us, although it was obvious they had nothing to spare.
Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur, 600 miles away, has five-star hotels and McDonald's outlets. To the national government, the situation of the Penan is an international embarrassment.
"There is nothing romantic about these helpless, half-starved and disease- ridden people and we will make no apologies for endeavouring to uplift their living conditions," the prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad has said. Or as Taib Mahmud, the chief minister of the state of Sarawak, put it: "We don't mind preserving the Sumatra rhino in the jungle, but not the Penan."
But what do the nomadic Penan want? In his book Voices from the Rainforest, Manser quoted an old Penan man who had seen enough of the world to compare his home with life outside. "Our land provides us with food for free, and so, without a sen in our pocket, we have enough," he said. "What is it about the people in the town in their shops? Why do they have to install fans and air-conditioners in their apartments? They live in the heat because they have destroyed their forest. Here, under the big trees, is cool shadow. We don't want to change places with them."
For a nomad, home is not a mark on a map but an environment - and, in the case of the Penan, one that is being destroyed, log by log. Manser saw this, and fought to save it. And that, the Penan believe, is why he was himself destroyed.
BRUNO MANSER really was a Swiss cowherd. He was born in 1954 in the city of Basel, the son of a factory worker. His parents dreamed that Bruno would be a doctor, but when he left school it was not for medical college, but for prison. As a 19-year-old conscientious objector, he refused to do the military service which is required of all Swiss men. After three months in a Lucerne prison, he lived in the Alps, working in the mountain pastures, and learning to lay bricks, carve leather, and keep bees. He wove, dyed and cut his own clothes and shoes. Altogether he lived in the mountains for 12 years, and then he grew restless.
"In my search to understand the deep essence of our humanity," he wrote in the opening sentence of Voices from the Rainforest, "there grew in me the desire to learn from a people who still live close to their source." So, in 1984, he travelled to Sarawak with a group of potholers to explore the caves of the Gunung Mulu National Park. Afterwards he stayed on, and travelled deep into the interior to look for nomadic Penan. One day, he came across a group of them by the Ba Nyakit river. He spoke the only words he knew of the Penan language: "I am Bruno, and I have come from Gunung Mulu." But the people ran away.
For 10 days, Manser followed them, visible but at a distance. Every night he hung his hammock outside their camp, until they relented and invited him in. He stayed in Sarawak for six years.
The nomadic Penan consist of a dozen or so different groups each informally led by a headman or chief. Bruno moved from one group to the next and, in every settlement that I stopped in, people had stories of him. One man talked of the time when Bruno fell out of a tree while hunting a leopard; another remembered going out with him to gather juicy palm hearts. In Pa Tik, a semi-settled village, three hours' walk from the road, they produced an envelope of well-fingered photographs which Bruno had sent after his return to Switzerland, and letters, written in fluent Penan.
"He spoke our language so well," said Along Sega. "He learned quickly and if there was ever a word he didn't know he would ask us to repeat it and write it down in his book." Manser acquired Penan nicknames: Laki Kubung, or "Flying Squirrel Man", because of his habit of sleeping in a hammock like a rodent clinging to the trees; and Laki Neba ("Helmet Crop Man") because of the traditional style in which he wore his hair.
He wore a necklace of bears' and leopards' teeth, walked barefoot and carried a long hardwood blowpipe and a quiver of poisoned arrows for hunting. Only his wristwatch and his thick round spectacles marked him out from the Penan hunters themselves. So the nickname that caught on was the highest compliment of all: Laki Penan, which simply means "Penan Man".
Apart from hunting, Bruno compiled a meticulous record of the nomads and their environment. "He made so many pictures," said Along Sega. "They were very good, just like a photograph. He wrote down everything - I'm not telling you the half of it!" Manser's paintings show beetles and butterflies, bats and birds, and minute cross-sections of forest plants. He drew the faces of the Penan he met, and recorded their testimonies. The Sarawak government later spread rumours that he had taken a native wife, and had two children. But all the Penan I spoke to indignantly denied this.
He repeatedly got into scrapes. He almost died of malaria; he had several bad falls from trees; and three times he was bitten by poisonous snakes - the last time, in 1989, he nearly died again. A green pit viper had bitten him on the shin, and for two months he was virtually paralysed. The writer James Barclay visited him as he was recovering. "The wound on his shin was open," he wrote. "One of the muscles had atrophied, and started to go gangrenous where it joined the bone. In a makeshift operation he inserted a fishhook inside his leg, and hooked out the useless muscle. He lay it on a piece of wood, and, jokingly, contemplated it as a tasty snack."
Throughout his life, Bruno's friends complained of his recklessness, his will to push himself to extremes. In 1993, he became seriously weak after a 60-day hunger strike in front of the Swiss parliament. Two years ago, he travelled to Arctic Canada with two friends, and terrified them by disappearing on a solo canoe journey.
One incident, recounted by Barclay, in retrospect becomes ominously significant. In 1989, Bruno climbed the male peak of Batu Lawi, alone and without ropes. "He described his fearful sensation using the old, partly rotten ropes left behind by a previous expedition," Barclay wrote. "He would climb where the Penan feared to tread." But the greatest gamble of his life was the battle with the timber companies and with the governments of Sarawak and Malaysia.
There has been a rainforest in Sarawak for as long as 10 million years; in the past 40 years alone, 90 per cent of the virgin jungle has been logged to make plywood for construction in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Licences for the logging are awarded by the Sarawak government to Malaysian companies with intimate connections to the political establishment. The logging industry has brought fantastic wealth to a small number of Sarawakians, and welcome employment - as chainsaw operators, truckers and bulldozer drivers - to many more. But for those who live in the forest, it has been a catastrophe.
To outsiders, the effect of the logging is deceptive for, even at its worst, it does not level the jungle, like a forest fire. From a distance, it stretches on, an unvariegated green; the logged areas can be identified only by the jagged red wounds which run through them, opened up by the tractors and aggravated by the tropical rain. The Sarawak government and logging companies always insist that they log selectively: only the largest trees are permitted to be sold. The problem is that a 4ft-thick, 100ft- tall tree cannot be lifted out with a helicopter. For every log which is dragged out of the jungle, as many as 10 smaller ones are destroyed by its fall, and by the huge vehicles which extract it.
Among them are the creeping rattans which the Penan use to make their baskets, and the ipoh tree from which they extract poison for their arrows. Deprived of its binding cover of plants, the soil washes down and clouds the rivers. Then there is the impact of the logging workers themselves, thousands of them in areas which previously had to support only a few dozen. There are stories of communities robbed or harassed, of women molested and the desecration of Penan graves. The bored loggers hunt animals themselves, and not with blowpipes but shotguns.
For generations, the jungle had provided the Penan with everything they needed; by the mid 1980s, they found themselves struggling to survive. It was this that drove so many of them into long houses and settlements - not a desire for development, but the fear of starvation. "There is no hunting, no fishing," Seman Ngang, the headman of a sad little village called Long Kevok, told me. "The birds and the animals have nearly all run away... It was very good before, but now we cannot live on the food from the forest. We have no choice but to live here, because if we go to the jungle nowadays there's nothing left."
Local Dayak leaders had tried reasoning with the loggers; with the help of Dayak NGOs, they sent petitions, and even tried applying for the logging licences themselves. (They were repeatedly refused.) And so, at around the time that Bruno came to live with them, they began to resist.
Beginning in 1987, Penan and other Dayaks organised blockades of the roads along which the logging trucks passed. The biggest of the protests lasted for eight months before being broken up by the police, but there was another wave of blockades in 1989. The bulldozers stood idle, the logging companies suffered huge losses, and hundreds of Dayaks were arrested. But the blockades were reported around the world, and by the time the European parliament adopted a resolution calling for the suspension on Malaysian timber imports, they had become a profound embarrassment. Dr Mahathir and his government were furious and they quickly found an outlet for their anger in the form of Bruno Manser.
That Manser helped with the blockades there is no doubt. But they would have happened anyway. "It was just a coincidence that he was in the interior when the native people started to make intense protests against the logging," says Raymond Abin, a Dayak activist who works for the Borneo Resources Institute. "The government just used Bruno as an excuse - they made it their position that they wouldn't give in because they weren't going to bow down to foreigners."
Bruno drafted petitions on the Penan's behalf, made translations, and sat through long discussions about the implications of the protests with such leaders as Along Sega. "Somehow they see me as a chief," he told an interviewer, "but I always tell them I can't be their chief as they have to talk themselves. I can only be their secretary."
He had a practical reason, too, for keeping head down: by now he was a wanted man. The authorities circulated stories that he was consorting with Chinese communist guerrillas in the jungle. Rather than merely being an illegal visa -overstayer, he was classified as a "subversive element". In November 1986, he was ambushed by armed police, but escaped again into the jungle. Six months earlier, he had attended a meeting of Dayak leaders which was infiltrated by plainclothes policemen, who arrested him and drove him back to the coast.
But the Land Rover ran out of petrol on a high bridge along the logging road and, as the driver refilled the tank, Bruno pretended to relieve himself into the ravine, edged his way to the precipice, and then dived down into the river below as shots were fired above his head.
As the blockades escalated, so did the Malaysian and Sarawakian government's hatred of him - there were rumours about a secret reward for Bruno's arrest. "For the companies there are millions of profits in this region," he told an interviewer. "Already three times I got a warning from persons who want to kill me ... I don't want to die here, but if it should arrive, well..."
BRUNO FINALLY LEFT Sarawak, with characteristic drama, in 1990. He acquired a fake passport and slipped out posing as a tourist. On an internal flight on a tiny propeller-driven plane, he found himself sitting a few feet from the policeman who had arrested and ambushed him four years earlier - amazingly, he was not recognised.
For the next decade, he campaigned relentlessly on the Penan's behalf. He turned up at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, mounting his hunger strike the next year. His most extravagant stunt came in 1999, on an undercover visit to Sarawak, when Bruno flew a paraglider decorated with the Malaysian flag above the palace of his old antagonist, the chief minister of Sarawak, Taib Mahmud. His request for an audience was refused; he was arrested and deported within days.
In the rainforest, the blockades continued intermittently but the Malaysian government and the logging companies were immovable. So it was a despondent Bruno who planned his visit in May last year. "The idea was to try one more time and probably, for Bruno, the last time," says John Kunzli, Manser's friend and secretary of the Basel-based Bruno Manser Fund. "Bruno's goal was to maintain the Penan's traditional lifestyle, but he started to think that they would have to settle down. At times he got very depressed."
Bruno flew to Indonesian Borneo and entered Sarawak alone around 22 May. He passed the night close to Bario from where he, or someone acting for him, posted a letter to his girlfriend in Switzerland. Was this his mistake? "Well, word would have got around," says Kunzli. "It would have been a simple thing for someone in Bario to ring the logging companies and warn them: 'He's back, and he's coming your way.'"
On 23 May, Manser left Bario and walked west to a collection of huts called Long Semirang used by hunters and travellers. There he encountered an old friend, a Penan named Narih Katok. "I was so surprised to see him, and so glad," Narih told me a year to the day after Bruno's disappearance. "He gave me biscuits and medicine, and I offered to guide him to Along Sega. But I had my little son with me, and he said, 'Just take me to the bottom of the mountain'." They spent the night beneath Batu Lawi and parted in the morning. "He seemed happy," Narih said. "He was making jokes and laughing." That was the last known sighting of Manser.
To an outsider, even to a settled Dayak, the word jungle is a metaphor for hopeless impenetrability but to a nomad it is a hospitable, even bustling place. "It's not easy for someone to get lost in that area," said Samuel Melai, who went on one of the first searches. "There are villages, and people passing all the time. We saw the place where Bruno had prepared food. We knew it was him because of the way he'd cut the firewood." They found the notches in the trees where Bruno had hung his hammock, and the plastic packets of the food he had cooked on the evening of 24 May, after saying goodbye to Narih. The trail then veered away from the established track and through dense jungle. At one place several tracks led off in different directions from a single point. Bruno, it seemed, had hacked through the jungle, stopped, changed his mind, retraced his steps, and then set off in another direction.
"I don't understand why Bruno went through there," said Samuel. "The Penan would not do that - it's too thick. Perhaps he had a map and compass and was trying to find a short cut." But it was here that the trail petered out for ever.
There is no shortage of theories about Bruno's fate, some of which are quickly dismissed. However despondent he was about the Penan, his friends say, suicide was never his style; just before his departure for Sarawak, he spoke of plans to have a child with his girlfriend.
At first it was imagined that Bruno was alive, but indisposed - stricken with malaria, perhaps, or injured and convalescing with a remote community. But by now, 15 months on, something would have been heard. One rumour, popular in Kuching, is that he has deliberately gone to ground, and that he is biding his time, planning his next stunt on behalf of the Penan. There have been various reports of Bruno sightings in remote areas, but none has stood up to scrutiny, and those closest to him reject the notion that he would subject them to such anxiety voluntarily.
More likely is a fatal accident. The jungle, depleted though it may be, is still a dangerous place. There are flash floods and tree falls, bears and vipers. But, if so, hasn't some trace of him been found? "If he fell into a ravine, then the people passing would smell his body," says Raymond Abin. "A python could have swallowed him, but I don't think that it would swallow his bag."
That leaves another possibility. There is no evidence, and few will state it outright. But among the Penan in the jungle there is little doubt that Bruno was murdered by people associated with the timber companies or the government.
Penan communities opposing the logging have been harassed in the past by hired thugs; in 1994, the mutilated body of a blockade organiser named Abung Ipui was found in a river after his mysterious disappearance. Between Bruno's destination and the point at which his tracks disappeared is a logging area, which was the site of unusual activity in May 2000. "At that time the army was all around," said Along Sega. "They were flying above the trees and the mountain in a helicopter. Four times they went around. We also saw soldiers walking in the forest, and police. At the logging camp there were a lot of police, and there was a lot of logging going on."
It need not have been a deliberate assassination. One imagines Bruno, hacking through the forest, and coming across a group of loggers, soldiers or police. Perhaps they have been warned of his approach by a phone call from Bario. Bruno makes a run for it, and is pursued. Warning shots are fired, but one of them is aimed too low. Then panic and recrimination. The body is disposed of in such a way that it could never be found. The bag of belongings is carefully burned.
One other possibility remains, although it hinges on a crucial and unanswered question: did Bruno attempt to climb Batu Lawi? Those with whom he discussed his plans, like Narih Katok, remember it as a vague intention, but not a definite plan. He had not taken a rope with him, but then risk - more than calculated risk - was part of Bruno's personality. The first time he ascended the mountain, as James Barclay recounted, he had not bothered with climbing equipment either. Much of the mountain, especially the forest between the two peaks, is inaccessible to anyone, outsider or Penan, on foot or by helicopter.
If that is where Bruno Manser met his fatal accident, then his body may never be found.
But where then is his knapsack, which he would have had to leave lower down the mountain? Only the husband and wife of Batu Lawi know for certain. The Penan continue to hunt for Bruno, because he was one of them, and because he seemed to them like their last hope for survival. The twin pinnacles still rise out of the jungle, but from the forest all around the sound of the chainsaws is closing in. n
The Bruno Manser Fund website is at www.bmf.ch
Captions
Rain man: this page, Bruno Manser with Penan leader Along Sega in March 1999; far right, the twin peaks of Batu Lawi, photographed during a helicopter search for Manser last December
Clockwise from right: Bruno with a lamb called Jumpy which he wanted to give Taib Mahmud, chief minister of Sarawak, as a reconciliation gift; the Penan on a peaceful logging block; Manser walking through a timber camp; pages from Bruno's sketchbook
Left, Narih Katok, the last person to see Bruno, with his dying wife; below left, one of the last pictures of Bruno, on a boat going up to the Sarawak border in May 2000