Nomadic Rain-Forest Dwellers in Malaysia Fear Extinction
8/16/99
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE
Following is an update of the couple decade long struggle by the Penan
of Malaysia to continue their lives in their forests. Despite the
best efforts of many, the brutal repression of indigenous cultures in
Malaysia continues, as the Penan and other rainforest dwellers
increasingly worry of extinction. In the Borneo state of Sarawak,
home of the Penan, 70 percent of one of the world's oldest forests has
been denuded, at a rate nearly twice that of the Amazon. While the
destruction of indigenous cultures has been a universal component of
western style development; it is indefensible that outright land
theft, persecution and genocide continues to this day against those
that are most in touch with their land. Shame on Malaysia.
g.b.
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Nomadic rain-forest tribe in Borneo fears extinction
Source: Associated Press
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: August 15, 1999
Byline: BETH DUFF-BROWN
IN THE BORNEO RAIN FOREST (August 15, 1999 1:26 a.m. EDT
http://www.nandotimes.com) - The Borneo headman drew his clenched fist
to the midnight fire, opened his palm to the moon and revealed the
flint he had kept in a bamboo box around his neck. "This was handed
down by my grandfather and he got it from his grandfather," says Along
Sega.
"I'll show them that I have more power in this fire-maker than all the
loggers put together."
The next morning, a shotgun blast boomed through the jungle. It
silenced the shrilling cicadas. One young tribesman reached for his
poison blowpipe, another for his spear.
The gunshot, almost certainly fired by a hunter from a nearby logging
camp, was a reminder that here, hundreds of miles from paved roads and
electricity, seemingly centuries from modern civilization, Along and
his Penan tribe are fighting a losing battle.
All the loggers put together greatly overpower the people known as the
lost tribe of Borneo, among the last rain-forest nomads in the world.
Along believes only 260 Penans still live in the jungle. He can't be
sure because they don't count one another. Nor do they track time or
age.
"But we are dying," Along said. "Of this we can be sure."
The timid nomads are being stampeded out of their dark jungle
homeland. Logging, and the tug of city life and modern ways, are
pushing them to extinction with the turn of the new millennium.
Environmentalists estimate that in the Borneo state of Sarawak, home
of the Penans, 70 percent of one of the world's oldest forests has
been denuded, at a rate nearly twice that of the Amazon.
Most of the 9,000 Penans on the Malaysian side of Borneo have moved
into temporary government settlements. Only some 63 families remain in
the jungle, living off hearts of palm, wild fruit, bear and boar.
The wild game has dwindled, the rivers are polluted by logging waste,
and many trees whose bark and leaves provide everything from snakebite
antidotes to contraceptives have died out.
"Tell them to stop the bulldozers," Along urged a rare Western visitor
who had slipped across logging territory in northeastern Sarawak and
hiked into the rain forest with a Penan guide. "Tell them to give us
back our lives."
In the jungle, bare-chested with loincloth, Along was a compelling
sight. A man in his late 50s, his dense black hair was severely
cropped at the forehead and shaved above his ears. Each earlobe was
pierced with a three-inch hole, then jammed with a tight spiral of
bamboo that dangled to his neck.
Three weeks later and 350 miles west, in the Sarawak capital of
Kuching, he cut a different figure. He seemed sadly out of place among
the McDonald's restaurants, the businessmen with cell phones, the
Muslim women on mopeds with helmets over their headscarves. He wore
the blue jogging pants that his Western visitor had left at his camp.
He and a dozen other Penans had come to the city to mount yet another
protest against the loggers.
At the center of attention was a short, wiry man with a shaved head
and an infectious laugh, a former shepherd from Switzerland named
Bruno Manser whose lone battle for the Sarawak rain forest has won
international attention.
If the Penans regard anyone as their savior, it is Manser. The 45-
year-old Swiss has spent 15 years crusading for the Sarawak rain
forest and lived with the Penans from 1984 to 1990. He joined
thousands of them in confronting the bulldozers in highly publicized
logging blockades. Expelled from Sarawak, he has returned secretly
several times.
On his latest visit, he had just walked 150 miles from the Indonesian
side of the island to elude authorities and mount another stunt to get
the government's attention.
He intended to fly a paraglider into the compound of Chief Minister
Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak's highest official. But he kept crashing or
getting tangled up in trees. Finally the propeller broke. Things
didn't look good.
Manser's difficulties would cause few Malaysians to shed tears.
Malaysia, which shares sovereignty over Borneo with Indonesia and
Brunei, is famously prickly about Westerners telling it what to do,
and the logging issue is part of that broader East-West standoff.
Already in 1992, on the eve of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro,
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was denouncing Manser's
campaign as "the height of arrogance." Today his words are echoed by
Barney Chan, general manager of the Sarawak Timber Association.
"I know that it's not politically correct to say, but you have a bunch
of white guys running around telling the brown man what to do," said
Chan. "It's a situation whereby very few people, 260 Penans, are on
one side and on the other side you have a few hundred thousand people
benefiting from logging."
By "white guys," he meant U.S. Vice President Al Gore and other
international luminaries who have lent public support to Manser's
cause.
The timber industry produces $1.5 billion in annual revenue and
provides good livelihoods for 100,000 families. It says it's tired of
Manser and others crying environmental and human devastation. And it
is offering to set aside land for the Penans.
"With or without Bruno, we - meaning the government of Sarawak - are
on the side of the Penans and we're willing to help the Penans," said
Chan.
Logging began sweeping across Mississippi-sized Sarawak in the 1970s,
and Malaysia quickly became the world's No. 1 exporter of tropical
hardwoods for scaffolding, chopsticks and furniture.
But by 1991, even the pro-logging International Tropical Timber
Organization warned that Sarawak would be denuded within 13 years if
the 150 timber concessions didn't cut production drastically. It
recommended halving exports and halting logging on steep slopes to
prevent erosion.
The government insists it responded well. Within five years, it says,
exports were more than halved. And last year, Sarawak's state
government passed legislation banning all commercial hunting in an
effort to protect tribal food sources.
Asia's 1997 economic crisis also intervened. Japan, Taiwan, South
Korea and Thailand, the biggest customers for wood, cut their
purchases and by the following year exports were down 30 percent.
Four-fifths of Sarawak is covered in forest. More than half of it is
licensed for logging under a system that fells 8 to 12 trees for every
2 1/2 acres, replanting and then allowing the forest to regenerate for
25 years.
About 12 percent of the rain forest has been set aside as protected
areas for national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
But while the plan appears solid on paper, environmentalists say it it
isn't happening in reality, that erosion and river silt have already
destroyed ecological gene pools long before regeneration can occur.
"Only the most remote areas of Sarawak haven't been affected by
logging," said Thomas Jalong, coordinator of the Sarawak branch of the
environmentalist Friends of the Earth. "Logging activities are now
carried out right in the interior and most of these areas are
sensitive ecological zones."
Only seven hours by foot from remote Penan territory, many patches of
balding cliffs are visible where trees have been uprooted.
"We may be on the losing end now," said Jalong. "Despite all the
campaigns and all the concerns, both locally and internationally, the
logging activities still go on undeterred."
Logging, poaching and man-made fires to clear land for palm-oil
plantations have cut deep into Sarawak's rich wildlife. The red-haired
orangutan, found only in Borneo, faces extinction, its numbers down
from an estimated 180,000 a decade ago to no more than 30,000 today.
Also on the endangered list is the hornbill, Sarawak's state bird,
which is known for its huge curved beak and piercing call.
It is revered by the Penans.
"When the hornbill calls, it's like hearing our father speak, it makes
us feel warm," said Along. "But now we don't hear our father speak to
us anymore."
---
Before daylight fades - early in a land where sunshine rarely breaks
through thick vines of mossy elephant ears - the Penan men clear the
jungle at the bank of the Limbang River. They whack down wiry palms
and put up a platform so everyone can sleep above the wet ground and
leeches massing at the scent of human flesh.
The women weave a rooftop of palm fronds for protection from the
never-ending drizzle and the children clip kindling for the fire. They
flick bloated leeches off their ankles as they boil a thick paste of
sago palm and tapioca starch.
Later they will wrap themselves in faded batik sarongs and hum and
rock one another to sleep.
While most Penans who have moved into the settlements have been
converted to Christianity, nomads are largely animists who believe
nature has a soul and forest spirits must be protected and
undisturbed.
Their poison darts, made of "tajem" from the latex of the ipoh tree,
are only used to kill big game. A hunter will often return with a baby
bear or monkey which becomes part of the clan and will never be eaten.
The Penans never walk directly toward another person and when they
pass by, they bend slightly and bow. Eye contact is rare.
"Never once in the course of six years did I see a Penan interrupt
another, let alone shout at or assault another," Manser writes in his
1996 book, "Voices from the Rainforest."
They are a people unsuited to confrontation. But the ruin of their
habitat has forced many of them into an existence of pleading and
demanding and blockading, all contrary to their nature.
One of the main problems, according to some environmentalists, is that
the government and loggers are one and the same.
Ruled for a century as a private fiefdom by the Brookes, an
adventurous English family, Sarawak was ceded to Britain in 1946. In
1949, the British awarded a timber concession to James Wong Kim Min,
who pioneered hill logging with bulldozers and made a fortune.
Wong is now Sarawak's environment minister.
Taib, the chief minister, is also the forestry minister, whose
department grants logging concessions and approves environmental
impact statements.
Wong and Taib declined to respond to questions for this report, but
Wong sent a copy of his book, "Hill Logging in Sarawak," an emotional
33-page defense of logging practices in which he proclaims, sometimes
through poetry, his love of the land.
He blames most deforestation on centuries of slash-and-burn
cultivation by islanders and warns that a boycott of Sarawak hardwoods
would result in fewer reasons to protect the forest.
"It would be nice of course if a country could afford to leave its
natural resources in a pristine state," Wong writes. "Every nation
exploits its natural resources to survive and provide better living
for its people."
Wong has hostile words for Manser:
"He went around encouraging the nomadic Penans to continue living in
their primeval and unhealthy way of life, but he himself after a few
years of vacation decided he had had enough ... - no doubt he missed
his Swiss cheese and the comforts of civilization - and ran away from
his friends."
The Penans call Manser "Lakei Dja-au," or Big Man. The loggers have
dubbed him the new White Rajah, alluding to Sarawak's past as a corner
of the British Empire.
"Bruno has some special power; he's like a god sent down to us," says
Kayan Etek, another tribal headman.
Manser says he never set out to be a crusader. The Swiss Alpine
pastures had become too congested, and Borneo was a magical land he
had mused over for years. So he came here "as a human being who loves
nature, who loves life and who also loves adventure."
"That's when I found the Penans. I joined their life for six years and
they asked me for help. If a child is drowning and crying for help,
what would you do?"
Manser has consistently badgered the Malaysian government to honor its
decade-old promise to create a 1,280-square-mile forest reserve for
the Penans in what they regard as their ancestral land.
But a 1958 British colonial law designates all uncultivated native
land as state forests. Since the Penans are nomadic and don't clear
land for annual harvest, the law gives them no ownership rights.
"They don't live for dollars. They don't ask for anything," Manser
said. "They live only for all the resources that they find in the
virgin forests, for the wild game and the wild fruit."
Government policy is to encourage Penans to move into mainstream Malay
culture, become rice farmers, get modern medical care and educate
their children under the Malay curriculum.
But the Penans describe the government settlements as little more than
tin-roofed refugee camps with dirty water beneath the dreaded tropical
sun. They are heartsick for home.
"We want the choice to go back to the forests," says James Lalokeso, a
spokesman for the 1,500 partially settled Penans in Ulu Baram in
northeastern Sarawak. "But so far, we have no reserved land, no
protected areas, and loggers are operating on our land even as we
speak."
In 1990, the European Community passed a resolution calling for the
protection of tropical forests. Al Gore, then a U.S. senator,
introduced a resolution in Congress demanding that Malaysia end "the
uncontrolled exploitation of the rain forests of Sarawak."
Even some Manser antagonists have a grudging respect for him - such as
Chan of the timber association, who has known him for years.
When Manser called Chan to tell him he was going to paraglide into
Taib's compound, Chan tried to talk him out of it.
"I told him, `Don't be stupid. This is not the Asian way."'
---
On the second day of the holiday to celebrate the end of the Muslim
hajj, or pilgrimage, Manser and his small crew from Europe, armed with
a more powerful propeller, tried again to get his paraglider up over
Kuching and into the chief minister's compound.
"I hope the chief minister will celebrate by helping to protect the
Penans and one of the most beautiful forests in the world," Manser
said just before he took off, successfully this time.
A dozen Penans had come from around Sarawak to cheer him on. Dressed
in loincloth and holding their spears, they stood in an open field
next to a Muslim cemetery as Manser took flight with his blue
parachute that read: "Taib + Penans."
As soon as he landed by Taib's compound, he was hustled into a jeep
and put on a first-class flight back to Switzerland.
One of those squinting up as Manser glided over the blue-tiled dome of
the state mosque was his old friend Along, a veteran of logging
protests who once spent two weeks in jail. He had been promised an
audience with Taib and was prepared to remain in the big city until he
had his say or was thrown in jail.
"Our government is like an old grandfather," Along said. "If the chief
minister is not yet ready to talk with his children, then we will just
wait until he will see us."
But there was no audience. The next day, Along was put on a bus and
told to go home, back to the jungle where now even fewer trees stood.