[moki]

Jungle tribes losing war against loggers
From Andrew Drummond in Upper Baram, Sarawak

IN FORMER days the people here would have taken heads with their machetes in retaliation for what has happened to their land and livelihood.

But at a dayak longhouse 160 miles up the Baram River in Sarawak, Borneo, a headhunter’s descendant in a land ravaged by logging companies was almost apologetic as he welcomed me into his home.

“I’m so sorry there are not so many people here to greet you,” Dato Stephen Wanollock, a member of the Kenyah tribe, said. “Most of the young people have gone to the towns. Our community has dropped from nearly 1,000 to 400.”

In the Second World War his ancestors took Japanese heads when the Borneo tribes went to war behind enemy lines under Major Tom Harrison, of the British Special Operations Executive.

They won that jungle war, but they have now lost the war against the Malaysian Government and private logging companies. Parangs (machetes) and blowpipes are no match for the guns of the police who support the business interests.

It has been a bitter 15-year war, with the Government under Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the former Prime Minister, who castigated foreigners for interfering in Malaysian affairs and talked of the inevitability of the tribal people coming into the 21st century.

The population at Dato (the Malaysian equivalent of “Sir”) Stephen’s village, Long San in the Upper Baram, has diminished because logging has destroyed its food sources and polluted its water. Instead the Orang Uluâ, Sarawak’s upriver people, are fast becoming urban squatters in the seedy coastal towns of Malaysian Borneo.

Their tragedy is little reported. Environmental activists are frequently deported and then blacklisted by the Government. But Long San’s experience is repeated in longhouses — huge wooden communal dwellings accommodating up to 2,000 people — the length of the Baram.

The river has been replaced as the main highway into the interior by unmarked logging roads that carry the machinery in, and the inhabitants away to drugs, alcohol abuse, and prostitution.

The Times flew to Long Akha, the SAS’s former jungle training base, then travelled 300 miles along those poorly marked roads after being invited by environmentalists to view the destruction.

At Long San young Kenyah girls came out to demonstrate their hornbill dance, gently swaying and bobbing and weaving their hands to make patterns in the air with hornbill feathers.

In a few years time most of these girls will be gone. Where once it took a month to paddle down river to the coast and back for basic provisions such as salt, today they can get there in a day and many do not come back.

Dato Stephen, 66, quit his community at Long San as a youth. Educated at a Catholic mission school, he came back years later as a respected lawyer. He is one of the lucky ones. But even his legal skills could not stop what the Government calls natural progress.

From a hill outside Long San one can see vast swaths cut from the jungle. The forest canopy, once up to 150ft high, has been partly replaced by sprawling plantations of 10ft palm oil trees. Logging lorries kick up huge dust clouds on the ridges.

Hopes were raised by a landmark anti-logging case in 2001 when Ian Chin, a Malaysian judge, ruled that the indigenous people of Borneo had “native customary land rights”.

But no sooner had the Ibans, Kelabits, Kenyahs, and Kayans started drawing the natural borders from which their communities fed than the Government’s land office banned their mapping and fined or imprisoned those who flouted the law.

Road blockades have failed to stop the loggers. The last blockade was last September along the Peluta River, a tributary of the Baram, when jungle-dwelling Penans with spears and blowpipes lost to the bulldozers of Rimbunan Hijau, a logging company which, according to Greenpeace, “arms its staff, makes people sign agreements at gunpoint and also uses torture”.

Sahabat Alam Malaysia, the local Friends of the Earth group, concede that the battle is lost in circumstances uncannily similar to the American Wild West: “The sand is already in the cooking pot. At a time when the rights of the indigenous people are increasingly being recognised by governments the world over it is appalling that the Sarawak state government is going in the opposite direction,” the group says.

Saging Anyi, a Sahabat representative, said: “My own Kayan community, Uma Bawang, has dropped by 30 to 40 per cent. They go to the towns and the lucky ones get good jobs, but others become part of the social problem. Young girls take jobs in bars and nightclubs here. God knows what goes on in these places but it is the sex trade.”

The openness of the tribal women is sometimes cited as one of the reasons for their exploitation. It is something Major Harrison had to warn his men about when they parachuted into the Upper Baram in 1945. With women and borak — rice alcohol — his men found it a “wonderful way to go to war”.

Kelabit women are known for making the first sexual advances to men. Iban girls were traditionally encouraged to sleep around, not laying with one man more than three times, before picking a mate. Most have converted to Christianity, but it is a Christianity mixed with animist traditions.

Today the husbands of the migrating Orang Ulu are as likely to be foreign — European, Japanese or Malay. At the Kayah longhouse, at Long Bedian on another Baram tributary, two families produced pictures of their daughters’ weddings — to Scottish and Welsh workers from the oil town of Miri.

Jungle tribes losing war against loggers
From Andrew Drummond in Upper Baram, Sarawak

IN FORMER days the people here would have taken heads with their machetes in retaliation for what has happened to their land and livelihood.

But at a dayak longhouse 160 miles up the Baram River in Sarawak, Borneo, a headhunter’s descendant in a land ravaged by logging companies was almost apologetic as he welcomed me into his home.

“I’m so sorry there are not so many people here to greet you,” Dato Stephen Wanollock, a member of the Kenyah tribe, said. “Most of the young people have gone to the towns. Our community has dropped from nearly 1,000 to 400.”

In the Second World War his ancestors took Japanese heads when the Borneo tribes went to war behind enemy lines under Major Tom Harrison, of the British Special Operations Executive.

They won that jungle war, but they have now lost the war against the Malaysian Government and private logging companies. Parangs (machetes) and blowpipes are no match for the guns of the police who support the business interests.

It has been a bitter 15-year war, with the Government under Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the former Prime Minister, who castigated foreigners for interfering in Malaysian affairs and talked of the inevitability of the tribal people coming into the 21st century.

The population at Dato (the Malaysian equivalent of “Sir”) Stephen’s village, Long San in the Upper Baram, has diminished because logging has destroyed its food sources and polluted its water. Instead the Orang Uluâ, Sarawak’s upriver people, are fast becoming urban squatters in the seedy coastal towns of Malaysian Borneo.

Their tragedy is little reported. Environmental activists are frequently deported and then blacklisted by the Government. But Long San’s experience is repeated in longhouses — huge wooden communal dwellings accommodating up to 2,000 people — the length of the Baram.

The river has been replaced as the main highway into the interior by unmarked logging roads that carry the machinery in, and the inhabitants away to drugs, alcohol abuse, and prostitution.

The Times flew to Long Akha, the SAS’s former jungle training base, then travelled 300 miles along those poorly marked roads after being invited by environmentalists to view the destruction.

At Long San young Kenyah girls came out to demonstrate their hornbill dance, gently swaying and bobbing and weaving their hands to make patterns in the air with hornbill feathers.

In a few years time most of these girls will be gone. Where once it took a month to paddle down river to the coast and back for basic provisions such as salt, today they can get there in a day and many do not come back.

Dato Stephen, 66, quit his community at Long San as a youth. Educated at a Catholic mission school, he came back years later as a respected lawyer. He is one of the lucky ones. But even his legal skills could not stop what the Government calls natural progress.

From a hill outside Long San one can see vast swaths cut from the jungle. The forest canopy, once up to 150ft high, has been partly replaced by sprawling plantations of 10ft palm oil trees. Logging lorries kick up huge dust clouds on the ridges.

Hopes were raised by a landmark anti-logging case in 2001 when Ian Chin, a Malaysian judge, ruled that the indigenous people of Borneo had “native customary land rights”.

But no sooner had the Ibans, Kelabits, Kenyahs, and Kayans started drawing the natural borders from which their communities fed than the Government’s land office banned their mapping and fined or imprisoned those who flouted the law.

Road blockades have failed to stop the loggers. The last blockade was last September along the Peluta River, a tributary of the Baram, when jungle-dwelling Penans with spears and blowpipes lost to the bulldozers of Rimbunan Hijau, a logging company which, according to Greenpeace, “arms its staff, makes people sign agreements at gunpoint and also uses torture”.

Sahabat Alam Malaysia, the local Friends of the Earth group, concede that the battle is lost in circumstances uncannily similar to the American Wild West: “The sand is already in the cooking pot. At a time when the rights of the indigenous people are increasingly being recognised by governments the world over it is appalling that the Sarawak state government is going in the opposite direction,” the group says.

Saging Anyi, a Sahabat representative, said: “My own Kayan community, Uma Bawang, has dropped by 30 to 40 per cent. They go to the towns and the lucky ones get good jobs, but others become part of the social problem. Young girls take jobs in bars and nightclubs here. God knows what goes on in these places but it is the sex trade.”

The openness of the tribal women is sometimes cited as one of the reasons for their exploitation. It is something Major Harrison had to warn his men about when they parachuted into the Upper Baram in 1945. With women and borak — rice alcohol — his men found it a “wonderful way to go to war”.

Kelabit women are known for making the first sexual advances to men. Iban girls were traditionally encouraged to sleep around, not laying with one man more than three times, before picking a mate. Most have converted to Christianity, but it is a Christianity mixed with animist traditions.

Today the husbands of the migrating Orang Ulu are as likely to be foreign — European, Japanese or Malay. At the Kayah longhouse, at Long Bedian on another Baram tributary, two families produced pictures of their daughters’ weddings — to Scottish and Welsh workers from the oil town of Miri.

In Miri, which rates a merit in the World Sex Guide, Iban girls writhe against poles in the Thai-styled go-go bar Coyote Ugly, where a night with an Iban was priced at £15. “It’s as cheap as Bangkok,” said one round and red-faced Briton

[christ]

Originally posted by moki:
Jungle tribes losing war against loggers
From Andrew Drummond in Upper Baram, Sarawak

IN FORMER days the people here would have taken heads with their machetes in retaliation for what has happened to their land and livelihood.

But at a dayak longhouse 160 miles up the Baram River in Sarawak, Borneo, a headhunter’s descendant in a land ravaged by logging companies was almost apologetic as he welcomed me into his home....

... because in former days, he would have taken Andrew Drummond's head.

Progress, heh.

What is your point, moki? That Iraq is better off with intruders, but Sarawak is worse off with intruders?

I expect you to post an article on 'Desert tribes losing war against Haliburton's oilmen' in the interests of balance.

[Mithras]

You ever consider participating in a thread you didn't start? Or even participating in one you did start? We miss you! You need to hang out with us more again!

[lil'babykitten]

Originally posted by Mithras:
You ever consider participating in a thread you didn't start? Or even participating in one you did start? We miss you! You need to hang out with us more again!

Who's this 'we' you speak of?

[moki]

Originally posted by christ:
What is your point, moki? That Iraq is better off with intruders, but Sarawak is worse off with intruders?

I expect you to post an article on 'Desert tribes losing war against Haliburton's oilmen' in the interests of balance.

uh... there was no "point" -- I just found it to be an article of interest. Apparently you're unable to take anything at face value?

For god's sake, what hair-trigger silliness.

[christ]

Originally posted by moki:
uh... there was no "point" -- I just found it to be an article of interest. Apparently you're unable to take anything at face value?

For god's sake, what hair-trigger silliness.

Well, thank-you for sharing. But this is a forum, for discussion, so what did you want to discuss?

Taking the article at face value, as I did - how about answering my questions.

Do you think that Iraq is better off with intruders, but Sarawak is worse off with intruders?

Would you find an article on 'Desert tribes losing war against Haliburton's oilmen' as interesting?

And why are my questions "silliness"?

[angaq0k]

Well. let's make a point.

Corporate greed equals acculturation and is equivalent to a slow and and pernicious genocide.

I invite you to have a look at this link, that covers this topic, including several examples involving corporations from various parts of the world, including the U.S. and France.

Here is an excerpt:

The status quo in the resource extraction business is a lose-lose situation for all parties:

• Businesses see their legitimate revenues paid to governments being misappropriated and squandered, which leads to social divisiveness and an unstable business environment. Investors managing some US$6.9 trillion of funds recently highlighted the significant business risk represented by lack of transparency, stating that: ‘legitimate, but undisclosed, payments to governments may be accused of contributing to the conditions under which corruption can thrive’. Failing to disclose net payments not only lays companies open to ‘accusations of complicity in corrupt behaviour’; it also undermines their social ‘license to operate’, making them ‘vulnerable to local conflict, and insecurity, and possibly compromising their long-term commercial prospects in these markets’. A recent example of these problems is the continuing unrest in Nigeria’s oil region which has led to significant interruptions in oil output.

• Ordinary citizens, who often are the real owners of the resources, are left dispossessed and reliant on donor assistance.

• Taxpayers in the North are required to compensate for state failure in the South in the form of aid: this is inefficient and undermines the current donor emphasis on improving governance in non-transparent countries.

• The international community faces instability that, in some cases, directly threatens the security of energy supplies. Current policies of energy security seem to rely on leaving failed and failing states alone whilst the resources keep flowing out. The lessons from this report are that this approach does not work: initial problems with accountability are left to become fatal flaws in a state’s whole architecture, eventually causing a collapse that interrupts resource flows and renders states vulnerable to infiltration by criminal and terrorist groups.

[moki]

Originally posted by christ:
And why are my questions "silliness"?

I had typed out a response to your questions, but decided against submitting to your whims here.

It's an interesting article to me, because I've spent some time in both Peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo. I found it interesting, but I'm certainly not interested in letting you tie it into Iraq in some ridiculously tangental and obviously logically unsound manner.

[moki]

Originally posted by angaq0k:
Well. let's make a point.

Corporate greed equals acculturation and is equivalent to a slow and and pernicious genocide.

But it is the government of Malaysia that allows it; I do hope you're not letting them off the hook in your "slow and pernicious genocide"? Those companies could not even be there without M'sia's consent. And indeed, these companies are actively courted.

[angaq0k]

Originally posted by moki:
But it is the government of Malaysia that allows it; I do hope you're not letting them off the hook in your "slow and pernicious genocide"? Those companies could not even be there without M'sia's consent. And indeed, these companies are actively courted.

Excellent point.

Check the link I provided; what you are asking for is there. Malaysia is not the only country having to court corporations in need of resources. What is described in the article is only one example of what has been happening elsewhere for several decades and seems to be on the rise with globalization.

On the other hand, I do believe some governments are acting like corporations themselves at times...

These corporations are actively courted but they rarely have an arm twisted to get at the resources generously offered for a high price and small wages.

I invite you to watch The Corporation which is a very interesting documentary on the topic.

Without being objective, it does provide a very interesting outlook at the concept of corporations as well as the various impact on societies. Definitly worth watching.

[angaq0k]

Originally posted by moki:
I had typed out a response to your questions, but decided against submitting to your whims here.

It's an interesting article to me, because I've spent some time in both Peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo. I found it interesting, but I'm certainly not interested in letting you tie it into Iraq in some ridiculously tangental and obviously logically unsound manner.

Although the situations are not identical, nor similar, they do have common characteristics.

The U.S. government took a big political risk in "liberating" Iraq;

1) They used a pretext that was far from solid and had to deny it later on;
2) The motives changed with time;
3) The use of American based corporations to reconstruct what was destroyed prior to the "liberation" is going to benefit these corporations to the point that a possible huge cultural change in the country might leave it in shock for quite while, to the point that it is very difficult to predict its effects.

The future of Iraq is far from certain, whether the coalition stays or not, whilst a sponsored revolution by the population might have been preferable since the population would have earned and own fully its freedom.

But foreign interests were at stake... and this is where the similarities are.

Of course, we cannot talk of genocide, since the apparent goal was the removal of Saddam Hussein (good ridance) but the take over by an alien nation has shown very costly in human lives.

I am not saying the U.S. is evil, I am saying that the coalition-led action to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein has an important drawback for the population.

Yesterday, the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs apparently made a declaration during the negotiations at the U.N. to the effect that they need to have a word on the actual presence of the coalition forces. That means something important, I believe, about the perception of the Iraqis about the presence of this foreign force.

Hopefully, Iraq will get what it wants, whatever that is; but that is not the business of any other nation, as it happened already with Bechtel and Halliburton's involvement.

But then again, once the Monetary Fund (or is it the World Bank?) and other WTO piloted institutions will get involved, who's to say that Iraq's government will stay as democratic, and not see a repetition of what is described in your article about Malaysia, or Bolivia, or Congo-Brazzaville?

Time will tell I guess.

[christ]

Originally posted by moki:
I had typed out a response to your questions, but decided against submitting to your whims here.

It's an interesting article to me, because I've spent some time in both Peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo. I found it interesting, but I'm certainly not interested in letting you tie it into Iraq in some ridiculously tangental and obviously logically unsound manner.

After all, discussion is the last thing that you want - what you really want is sycophantic agreement with your point of view. all else is silliness.

It's an interesting article to me, because I've spent some time in both Peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo. I found it interesting, but I'm certainly not interested in letting you tie it into Iraq in some ridiculously tangental and obviously logically unsound manner.

And yet you post it here (in the Pol/War Lounge, of all places) where few if any others share your interest and/or first hand knowledge of Malaysia, and object if people find relevance in your article as applied elsewhere, to subjects which are relevant in this forum.

So, again - why did you post it?