Photos smuggled out from a blockade in Malaysia's remote eastern territory
of Sarawak show whole Penan villages turning out to barricade the road in a
brave attempt to halt the logging trucks reaching the "cutting zone", the
Penan's forests.
If the logging in the Sarawak highlands continues at present rates,
according to the International Tropical Timber Organisation, the last
remaining pristine tropical rainforest from Sarawak will be gone within
about four years. But resisting efforts to halt logging has become a matter
of national pride for the Malaysian Government.
The current blockades at Long Ajen in the Ulu Baram area in Sarawak have
been maintained since February despite efforts by the military to tear them
down.
Sixty members of the Malaysian Field Force are reported to be at the
blockade site with officials of the Forest Enforcement Unit, police from the
Malaysian Special Branch and logging workers from the Syarikat Samling
Timber Company.
A sign hung on the blockade reads: "This is a place of worship. We will stay
here because these are burial sites, farmlands and our place of origin."
The Penan, numbering 5,000 and one of the 37 groups making up the indigenous
Dyak peoples of Sarawak, live in the highlands area where are the last
untouched tropical hardwood forests, believed to be the oldest in the
world.
The rainforests are estimated to contain thousands of undiscovered plant
species with commercial and medical potential. However, Sahabat Alam
Malaysia (Friends of the the Earth Malaysia) reports that logging reduces
the complexity and species diversity to only 10 per cent of the original
condition.
Sarawak, since decolonisation in 1963 and East Malaysian State, is being
logged at the rate of 300,000 hectares a year. Logging in the Baram district
continues 24 hours a day in three shifts.
Malaysian environmentalists said that leaders of the blockades were now in
hiding following death threats.
The wife of one of the Penan leaders claims government authorities and the
timber company are using scare tactics to threaten the people because they
cannot arrest the leaders. The timber companies have reportedly hired thugs
to intimidate the blockaders.
For the Dyak, the law may not protect their forest but they intend to do so
themselves for as long as they can. But Malaysian Government attitudes make
the likelihood of their success somewhat low.
"The political will to apply proper selective felling procedures is lacking
when 70 per cent of the forests are given over to concessions, 42 per cent
of which are associated with major political figures," said Dr D.S. Chin of
the Botany Department of the University of Malaya.
Allegations that Westerners - like Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser -
have manipulated the Penan to oppose the logging have set the Malaysian
Prime Minister, Dr Mahatir, against the international green movement and
have helped to promote him as a champion of the Third World.
"It is about time that you stop your arrogance and your intolerable European
superiority. You are no better than the Penans," Mahatir wrote in a letter
to Manser last year before the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
But Alex Ryan of the Sydney-based Rainforest Action Group says Westerners
have not incited the Penan.
"The Dyaks have been blockading for over 15 years - it only came to public
attention when Manser got involved," she says. "The voices of the Dyak, who
comrise 44 per cent of the Sarawak population, are not heard."
Ryan believes the case of the Penan and other Dyak peoples deserves
international attention and says the Penan have asked for Australians' help
by banning tropical timbers.
"We are buying timber which is unsustainable," she says.
Timber exports overtook petroleum as Malaysia's main export commodity in
1988, valued at $3.6 billion and totalling 35 million cubic metres,
approximately half from Sarawak. While the main customers of Malaysian sawn
timber are Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Malaysia provides about 80 per
cent of Australia's tropical timber imports, with 141,300 cubic metres in
1990-91.
As the Penan maintain their blockades, says Ryan, the Australian Government
has bowed to Malaysian Government's pressure to not support any bans of
tropical timbers until 2000 when, she says, it will be too late. The
old-growth forests largely will have been destroyed.
"Because of our consumption, and consumption all around the world,
indigenous cultures are suffering," Ryan says. "They are losing their
homes; they are losing their lives."
--- * Origin: Pactok project (email: pactok@peg.apc.org) (90:612/990)--