Note : New Straits Times is at it again in its wild and not surprising if
it's a baseless reporting on Rainforest Action Network. NST Editorial can be
contacted via :
News Straits Times,
31 Jalan Riong,
59100 Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
Tel : + 60 3 - 282 3131
Fax : + 60 3 - 282 1434
Source : News Staits Times
Date : 11th Sept 1993
Page : 10 (Home News Section)
Dateline : Kushing, Sarawak
Unabridged
Rainforest Action Network's Campaign to Discredit Sarawak
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KUCHING, Fri. - The executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network
(RAN), Randall Hayes, who visited the Mulu National Park on an organised
jungle safari in June, has embaked on a glocal campaign to discredit
Sarrawak.
Among other things, Hayes has alledged abuse of human rights by claiming
loggers are raping Penan women while their men are being "beaten by loggers
or policemen".
Hayes had sent out appeal letters to 35,000 members throughout the world as
well as made a video film on the so-called "genocide of the Penan people."
In his letter to RAN members dated July 28, he called on them to write to
the Malaysian and Japanese Prime Ministers and American President Bill
Clinton to urge them to "enforce a morratorium on all logging of customary
tibal rainforest land in Sarawak".
Hayes also urged the members to donate a minimum of US$25 (RRM64) to RAN to
support his "Sarawak Cause". He claimed he had visited a Penan blockade and
interviewed the "victims".
Howeverr a check with the tour company which brought Hayes to Kuching showed
that he had not visited any blockades during the two week tip.
"There is no logging activities along the headhunters trail and there is no
way he could have sneaked off alone", a spokeman from the company said.
The leader of the tour goup to Mulu, Mr Eric Hansen, an American who wrote
the book 'Strange in the Forest', had called the NST (News STraits Times)
here from San Francisco to complain, saying that he was upset with Hayes'
pamphlet which was "fabrication".
At no time did we visit any area with logging activities or seen any logging
blockades," Hansen said.
The Sarawak Forestry Depatment is working on the theory that Hayes
fabricated the story to make it appear as though he had visited a Penan
blockade at Long Iman and taken film footage of widespread deforestation.
In fact there is no logging activity at Long Iman and all the blockades have
been dismantled. This was confirmed by Datuk Leo Chai, Sarawak's Director of
Forestry.
Long Iman is the home of a Penan activist Mutang Tuo who had made a
worldwide anti-logging tourr with several others, including Anderson Mutang
Urud and Bruno Manser, to discredit Saawak in late 1990.
Long Iman has been earmaked as the venue of a Penan Service Centre to be
built in the near future. The Sarawak Government will spend about RM500,000
to prrovide amenities and facilities such as health clinics, schools and a
community hall and an agriculture station.
Hayes, who first visited Sarawak together with an official goup in 1988, met
Prime Minister Datuk Sri D Mahathir Mohamad during the Earth Summit in Rio
in 1992.
Excerpts from his pamphlet to RAN members read : "I just retuned from the
world's oldest rainforest in the Malaysian State of Sarawak... It's been
four years since I was there and I was stunned by what I saw."
"I walked to the same spot where I had stood years ago beside a spakling
iver, under s green canopy of vines and trees ... now there were had-baked,
bare dirt logging roads. The stream was clogging with mud. Dust from the
riverbank choked my nostrils."
"I heard only the whinning motor of a logging truck, loaded with trees torn
from the heart of the oldest rainforest on the planet. The Penan tibe has
blockaded that same logging road. They told me how it feels. As a giant tuck
rumbles toward the blockade, belching putrid diesel smoke and smashing into
the mud all forest creaturs that dare cross its path, their stomachs clench
with fear."
"Their women and children stand in silence, armed only with thei courage.
They know they could be thrown in jail cells. They know they risk of being
beaten by loggers or police. They know loggers have raped Penan women
before."
The pamplet continued : "While standing beside the Penan people in the
afternoon heat, I realised how easy it is - for all of us who work from the
sarety of the United States - to lose touch with what the fight for the
rainforest is all about."
"I saw for myself the horrible fate of the tribal members once their
prristine rainforrests home is gone. The prroud people ... are being heded
into slums rife with disease and malnutrition .. or sterile alien government
housing projects."
Hayes also talks about the "noble wok" done by Sarawak's Baram MP Harrison
Ngau who had been "fighting for the Sarawak Rainforests for overr a decade
without a break" and defending the tibal people and their lands.
He said that RAN had nominated Harrison for the Goldman Environmental Award
(which came with US$60,000) which he won in 1990. Ngau, an opposition member
belonging to the Parti Bangsa Dayak Sarawak - Sarawak Dayak Party (PBDS),
became an MP of Baram in the 1990 parliamentary election. Ironically, Hayes
had told the NST in seperate interviews in San Francisco and Kuching that US
environmental goups did not have the full facts and that he was in Sarawak
on a fact-finding mission.
On May 14, he told the NST that the American environmental groups had an
abysmal record in terms of telling the facts regarding the logging issue in
Sarawak and about the Penans.
Later in Kuching on June 4, apparently refering to the demonstration by
eight Western Environmentalists who chained themselves to a bage at the
Kuala Baram long pond in Miri in early 1990, he said "I'm in Sarawak to ty
to chain myself to the truth and not a timber barge. The truth seems to be
that Sarawak needs economic alterrnatives."
-END
--- * Origin: Asia Pacific Solidarity - Sarawak (90:600/108)--