Flesh of the Ancestors (revisited)

On 17 March 2010, forty busloads of Orang Asli descended on Putrajaya to air their grievances directly to the prime minister. They were prevented by police from marching to the PM's office, but their strong showing and vigorous protest made the headlines in Malaysiakini. I am heartened to note that the worm has finally turned and that our indigenous tribes are no longer politically passive. As a tribute to their semangat (fighting spirit), I'm reposting this essay originally published here on 29 January 2007 and reposted 17 March 2010...


I can relate to the French painter Gauguin who took a libidinal shine to the native girls of Tahiti. There is something irresistible about bronze, rubbery, supple, brown skin - and the edenic innocence that flashes in their shy smiles. Pagan eyes that turn prudish at puberty, because their mothers keep yelling "Malu!" ("Shame!") when they skinny-dip with ripening bosoms and pubes. Contact with "civilization" taught them to feel ashamed of their own simplicity, made them into "primitives" living below the poverty line.

And yet, seeing a bunch of Orang Asli kids play like otters in the river is nothing less than a glimpse of paradise. You can't stay cynical or depressed in such an environment. The verdant landscape itself is balm for the eyes, as much as the sparkling waters are a treat for the senses.

The Orang Asli soul is bonded with the land, the living earth, nature itself. In mythic terms they regard their wild habitats as the petrified flesh of their ancestors.

Just as Native Americans once revered the buffalo as a benevolent manifestation of Wakan Tanka (Great Spirit), a parental sacrifice to feed the children, the Temuan view each species of flora and fauna as a gift from heaven, as food, medicine, friend, or shelter.

The younger ones have all but forgotten, born as they were into homes with TV sets bombarding all and sundry with images of a Brave New World, where ancient wisdom and traditional ways are dismissed as irrelevancies or mere superstition. But the older ones know there is no separation between the land and life itself.

To destroy nature is to murder the Life Force that sustains all existence - and therefore it is viewed as the ultimate wrongdoing, akin to forgetting one's roots and turning one's back on all that is considered divine.

Well, that's a very general overview of the Temuan mythos, which applies to just about every indigenous culture you can name - at least the ones that haven't been completely assimilated and subsumed by industrial society. However, admiring their resilience of spirit, their innocence, and their wealth of hand-me-down knowledge is one thing. Living with them at close quarters is quite another. They can certainly drive an essentially middle-class, former urbanite like myself round the bend with exasperation.

There seems to be a testosterone-related problem with the males: as soon as they turn 18, a sullen surliness bordering on xenophobia grips them. The modest wages they earn cutting grass on road verges or gathering bamboo for the Chinese towkays are mostly spent getting totally pissed at the local bar; and then they fall off their motorbikes and the rest of their hard-earned pay goes into repairing them. If they happen to be married with kids, their wives quickly turn into nags - because it's not uncommon that their husbands will stagger home late at night stinking of cheap plonk, without any food for the family. Apparently, this happens wherever indigenous "dreamtime" cultures collide with industrial "machinetime" societies. Anthropologists generally agree that the trauma of "culture shock" so disorientates the tribal folk they become dispirited - and therefore attempt to regain their spirits by imbibing vast amounts of the bottled variety.


But as long as our tribal folk have the forest to return to, they have a chance of eventually regaining their psychic equilibrium. My chief contractor on the Bamboo Palace project, Yam Kokok, really enjoyed the process of gathering about 3,000 bertam leaves to weave into roofing material for Anoora's hut. First he built a cozy lean-to while his wife began lining bamboo tubes with fragrant leaves, before stuffing them with rice to boil on a woodfire. The widow Lumoh had packed some salted fish and bottles of clear spring water. They were all set for a long day's work, cutting the thorny bertam leaves and carefully weaving them into attap. Yam Kokok's grandson and nephews all came along to help and I could see that the six days they spent "camping out" in the forest reminded them of the good old days - even though every evening I'd pick them up in my van and chauffeur them back to the village and some home comforts.

The forest is the Orang Asli's briar patch; their racial memory of being sustained by Mother Nature goes back thousands of generations. Chop down the trees and replant the land with cash crops like rubber and oil palm - and the Orang Asli become rootless, disconnected from their own past, insecure about their future and therefore apathetic.

True, some of the younger generation have adapted quite well to video games and factory jobs; a handful of Semai and Semelai have even made it all the way through university, and have become academics and doctors.

A year ago or so I was contacted by three enterprising young Temuans with university degrees. They told me they had stumbled upon my website back in 2003, but waited till they were fluent in English to send me an email! One of them, Shahar Koyok, is a fine arts graduate who's beginning to make his mark in the local art scene; another, Mor Ajani, graduated in multimedia design and maintains a Temuan blog. What deeply gratified me was their passionate interest and pride in their own mythic roots.

It's easy to demonize the Jabatan Hal Ehwal Orang Asli (Aboriginal Affairs Department) but it's really just a case of horribly misaligned worldviews. JHEOA officers, mostly urbanized Malays, scorn their own humble ancestry and sincerely believe they can persuade the Orang Asli to join the mainstream Malay community. Their strategy is two-pronged: first, systematically convert the jungle into plantations, so the Orang Asli can't hide in the past; and then convert these diehard animists into pious little Muslims.

I've long advocated that the JHEOA (instituted in 1954 during the Emergency years) be dismantled, as it serves little real purpose today except to breed the most loathsome varieties of bureaucratic ineptitude and corruption.

Think about it: how would you like being treated as a minor all your life and have some government agency manage your affairs as if you were severely retarded? If everybody else who enjoys Malaysian citizenship is free to live without an official guardian, why must our first peoples endure such an ignominy?

The argument that Orang Asli need a "protector" because they are still largely illiterate and can't cope with the demands of the modern world is a totally spurious one. First of all, after more than fifty years under the JHEOA's thumb, the Orang Asli have gained little ground in mastering left-brained activities like learning to manipulate alphanumeric symbols. The question is: why not capitalize on their strengths instead?

Most Orang Asli are physically agile, imaginative, fun-loving, and possess incredible stamina: in areas like sports and the arts, they would certainly be champs. Well, some descendants of African slaves in America have made their mark as athletes, musicians, actors, and dancers: would you think of Charlie Mingus, Michael Jordan, B.B. King, Eddie Murphy, Tina Turner, Ludacris, or Will and Jada Pinkett Smith as handicapped or backward?

What keeps the Orang Asli insulated from the outside world is the Jabatan Orang Asli's feudal mentality. That and the noxious effects of a patriarchal bias the Orang Asli got infected with along the way. Traditionally, the menfolk have been the hunters and womenfolk, the gatherers and nurturers.

In Kampung Pertak, there are quite a few unmarried mothers - girls of 17 who got knocked up after some smooth-talking fellow handed them a Guinness at an all-night wedding party. With so many kids bawling and crawling around the house, 12-year-old girls are often forced to look after their younger siblings while both parents are out working. By the time they reach 15 or 16, many end up as mothers themselves, which gives them little time or opportunity to grow mentally. So we have generation after generation of Orang Asli kids raised by completely ignorant mothers with little on their minds apart from neighborhood gossip and a bleak view of marital life.

All this would change if teenaged dating was accepted as something perfectly natural. When I first asked my mother-in-law if I could take Anoora down to town and buy her a meal, I was told we would have to be engaged before she would allow it. In other words, the relationship between men and women is always a sexual one; post-pubescent boys and girls simply cannot be friends and go out together. They end up getting married very young, prompted by hormonal surges, and never really have the chance to interact with a variety of friends, of different ages and genders, and therefore lack the means of acquiring communication skills and a broader perspective on things.

Most families in the past slept together in one large room with no partitions - or only very thin ones, at best. Obviously, sex was something carried out under cover of darkness, furtively, quietly (so as not to wake the kids), almost involuntarily - and never became an artform, or developed any degree of kinkiness, as it has in the cities.

I witnessed what happened when a young friend of mixed parentage from the big city started dating a village beauty from Pertak. On their very first secret rendezvous, she had asked if he was going to marry her (that's what he reported). Soon, the whole village was bristling with resentment at the urban Romeo. Even little children, no more than 8 or 9 years old, would taunt him as he drove past; the men in the village became more and more hostile, sabotaging his vehicle wherever he parked it, glaring at him with hands on their parangs. Posses of grandmothers and babes-in-arm would confront him at his rented lodgings in the village, demanding to know where he was hiding the girl. They gave him no peace until he buckled under the pressure and married the girl in a tribal ceremony.

Now the girl in question has had several lovers, and at 18 gave birth unexpectedly to a baby girl while trying to move her bowels, thinking it was one huge stomach upset she was experiencing. As to be expected, she's a lot more savvy and sophisticated than the other girls in the village. She could certainly learn to cope with life in the city, and has actually expressed a desire to someday get a job in KL.

Now, is there any correlation between an active sex life and intellectual curiosity? Remember that biblical myth about the forbidden fruit? Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll (or hip-hop or techno-rave, if you prefer) are definitely evolutionary triggers - that's why the patriarchy everywhere is so determined to outlaw them. What would happen to the Orang Asli if their youth got into sex, drugs and rock'n'roll in a big way?

Soon, they'd become pretty much the same as you and me, don't you think? And maybe that will prompt cityfolks to adopt more of the Orang Asli lifestyle - to reconnect with the earth, with Mother Nature, fresh air and sunshine. Sort of a cultural exchange: they become more experienced like us, and we become more innocent like them. Perhaps that's how things will ultimately balance out, and paradise will be regained on earth.

------
Recommended reading:

Proposed Orang Asli land policy: Planned poverty? [Aliran]

[First posted 24 May 2014]

Sarawak natives file land rights case

Press Release dated 3 March 2011 from the Bruno Manser Fund...

Kelabit, Penan and Lun Bawang plaintiffs join forces to claim 1770 km2 of tropical rainforests in Upper Limbang, Sarawak – first land rights litigation uniting three ethnic groups in Malaysian Borneo

Sarawak natives file historic land rights case

MIRI (MALAYSIA). For the first time in the history of Malaysia, natives from three different tribes have filed a joint land rights litigation. This morning, representatives from the Kelabit, Penan and Lun Bawang communities of Upper Limbang, Sarawak, on the island of Borneo have filed a joint land rights litigation at the Miri High Court in which they are claiming native customary rights over 1770 km2 of tropical forests in the Limbang river basin. The case is being represented by native rights lawyer Baru Bian who also heads the Sarawak branch of the oppositional Justice Party (PKR).

The joint claim over an area twice the size of Singapore is directed against the Sarawak state government and four Malaysian logging and plantation companies that had been given concessions over the native lands without the communities’ consent. The companies listed as defendants are Ravenscourt Sdn Bhd, Billion Venture Sdn Bhd, Limba Jaya Timber Sdn Bhd and Kubang Sri Jaya Sdn Bhd. Ravenscourt is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Samling group which has recently been blacklisted by the Norwegian government for its involvement in illegal activities and environmentally destructive logging.

Click on map to enlarge

The Kelabit, Penan and Lun Bawang plaintiffs have been living in the Upper Limbang region for hundreds of years. Since the early 1980s, the region has been logged under a number of logging concessions. Currently, the area is being threatened by a major dam project on the Limbang river and the conversion of secondary forests into oil palm and paper tree plantations. All this while, the native communities had no say whatsoever on the use of their native lands by the Sarawak government and had only received ridiculous compensation payments by some logging companies who made millions of the dollars from logging the tropical hardwoods in the region.

After having lodged the case, representatives of the native communities displayed a banner in front of the Miri High Court building which read “Indigenous people taking action for change to save the last remaining Sarwak rainforest”. Currently, close to 200 native communities from Sarawak have challenged the state government over its land rights policies. The native land issue is also a heated subject during the runup to the next state election which is to be held before July 2011.

Please contact us for more information:

Bruno Manser Fund, Socinstrasse 37, 4051 Basel, Switzerland, Tel. +41 61 261 94 74
www.bmf.ch, www.stop-timber-corruption.org

TAIB MAHMUD, TIME'S UP FOR YOU!

PENAN TRIBE ESCALATES ANTI-LOGGING CAMPAIGN

Malaysiakini | 23 Aug 2009 | 11:13am

Hundreds of Penan tribespeople armed with spears and blowpipes have set up new blockades deep in the Borneo jungles, escalating their campaign against logging and palm oil plantations.

Three new barricades, guarded by Penan men and women who challenged approaching timber trucks, have been established in recent days. There are now seven in the interior of Sarawak.

"They are staging this protest now because most of their land is already gone, destroyed by logging and grabbed by the plantation companies," said Jok Jau Evong from Friends of the Earth in Sarawak.

"This is the last chance for them to protect their territory. If they don't succeed, there will be no life for them, no chance for them to survive."

Penan chiefs said that after enduring decades of logging which has decimated the jungles they rely on for food and shelter, they now face the new threat of clear-felling to make way for crops of palm oil and planted timber.

"Since these companies came in, life has been very hard for us. Before it was easy to find animals in the forest and hunt them with blowpipes," said Alah Beling, headman of Long Belok where one of the barricades has been built.

"The forest was once our supermarket, but now it's hard to find food, the wild boar have gone," he said in his settlement, a scenic cluster of wooden dwellings home to 298 people and reachable only by a long suspension bridge.

Alah Beling said he fears that plans to establish plantations for palm oil - which is used in food and for biofuel - on their ancestral territory, will threaten their lifestyle and further pollute the village river with pesticide run-off.

"Once our river was so clear you could see fish swimming six feet deep," he said as he gestured at the waterway, which like most others in the region has been turned reddish-brown by the soil that cascades from eroded hillsides.

Indigenous rights group Survival International said the blockades are the most extensive since the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Penan's campaign to protect their forests shot to world attention.

"It's amazing they're still struggling on after all these years, more than 20 years after they began to try to fight off these powerful companies," said Miriam Ross from the London-based group.

Official figures say there are more than 16,000 Penan in Sarawak, including about 300 who still roam the jungle and are among the last truly nomadic people on Earth.
The blockades, which Friends of the Earth said involve 13 Penan communities home to up to 3,000 people, are aimed at several timber and plantation companies including Samling, KTS, Shin Yang and Rimbunan Hijau.

After clearing much of the valuable timber from Sarawak, some of these companies are now converting their logging concessions into palm oil and acacia plantations.

"They told us earlier this month they were coming to plant palm oil, and I said if you do we will blockade," said Alah Beling.

"They told us we don't have any rights to the land, that they have the licence to plant here. I felt very angry - how can they say we have no right to this land where our ancestors have lived for generations?"

Even on land that has been logged in the past, Penan can still forage for sago which is their staple food, medicinal plants, and rattan and precious aromatic woods which are sold to buy essential goods.

"Oil palm is worse because nothing is left. If they take all our land, we will not be able to survive," the Long Belok headman said.

Masing dismisses Penan as good storytellers


Sarawak's Rural Development Minister James Masing (right) admitted some logging companies had behaved badly and "caused extensive damage" but said the Penan were "good storytellers" and their claims should be treated with caution.

"The Penan are the darlings of the West, they can't do any wrong in the eyes of the West," he said.

Masing said disputes were often aimed at wringing more compensation from companies, or stemmed from conflicts between Penan and other indigenous tribes including the Kenyah and Kayan about overlapping territorial claims.

He said the current surge in plantation activity was triggered by Sarawak's goal to double its palm oil coverage to one million hectares - an area 14 times bigger than Singapore.
"The time we have been given to do this is running short. 2010 is next year so we want to make that target and that is why there may be a push to do it now, to fulfil our goal established 10 years ago," he said.

"In some areas the logging has not been done in accordance with the rules and some of the loggers have caused extensive damage. That does happen and I do sympathise with the Penan along those lines," he said.

"But the forest has become a source of income for the state government so we have to exploit it".

Whole valleys stripped of vegetation


Driving through the unsealed roads that reach deep into the Borneo interior, evidence of the new activity is clear with whole valleys stripped of vegetation and crude terraces carved into the hills ready for seedlings.

Most of the companies declined to comment on the allegations made by the Penan, but Samling said it "regrets to learn about the blockades".

"We have long worked with communities in areas we operate to ensure they lead better lives," it said in a statement.

Its website says its acacia timber plantations in Sarawak will "enhance the health of the forests" and that it uses "only the most sensitive ways to clear the land".

The Penan allegations could discredit Malaysia's claims that it produces sustainable palm oil, particularly in Europe and the US where activists blame the industry for deforestation and driving orangutans towards extinction.

Indigenous campaigners say that past blockades have seen violence and arrests against tribespeople, but village chiefs - some of whom were detained during the 1980s blockades - said they did not fear retribution.

"We're not afraid. They're the ones destroying my property. Last time we didn't know the law and now to protect ourselves, but now we know our rights," said Ngau Luin, the chief of Long Nen where another barricade was set up.

An AFP team reporting at the blockades was photographed by angry timber company officials, and later intercepted at a roadblock by police armed with machineguns and taken away for questioning.

The plight of the Penan was made famous in the 1980s by environmental activist Bruno Manser, who waged a crusade to protect their way of life and fend off the loggers. He vanished in 2000 - many suspect foul play. - AFP

TRIBUTE TO AN ECOWARRIOR

Calls for Total Ban of Forest Burnings in Bakun Dam Reservoir

Miri, Sarawak, MALAYSIA: – The Sarawak Conservation Action Network (SCANE) is shocked to learn that forests have been burning within the catchments and reservoir area of the Bakun Hydroelectric Power Dam project without any action being taken against the culprit by the Government Authorities.

SCANE has been informed that the forest burnings were purportedly done as directed by the Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd to wipe-out the forest that would be impounded by the dam. The Bakun Hydroelectric Power Dam project is owned and developed by Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd, a fully-owned unit of the Minister of Finance Inc, Malaysia (MOF Inc).

SCANE found out that Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd has started with the work to clear the forest within the entire Bakun dam reservoir. The contracts for clear-cutting of forest have been commissioned to some contractors since beginning of the year. The forest area which will be cleared for the dam is 80,000 ha that is roughly the size of Singapore Island.

Recently the Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd managing director Zulkifle Osman announced that the impoundment of water catchments would start in October, which by then the whole dam reservoir will be flooded. By July 2010, testing for electricity transmission from Bakun dam will start. The Bakun reservoir catchment comprises some 20 sub-catchments with the main river draining the catchment is the Balui, which in turn is fed by the Murum, Bahau and Linau Rivers.

SCANE was told that one of the conditions as stipulated in the contract is that the contractors and/or its sub-contractors, agents and/or workers are required to do burnings on the cleared and felled forest, without which they would not be fully paid for the work done and/or their contract would be terminated. Over the past few months, large tracts of forest have already been cleared and felled within the Bakun dam reservoir area.

SCANE is wondering as how the Sarawak Natural Resources and Environment Board (NREB), the law enforcer of the Natural Resources and Environment Ordinance (NREO) fails to closely monitor the actions of Sarawak Hidro when its development activities are detrimental to the environment. It is scandalous that the Sarawak Hidro does not strictly follow the Environmental Management Plan (EMP), if any, as such stated in the Bakun Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Report.

With the current long spell dry weather, the Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd’s contractors and/or its sub-contractors, agents and/or workers have been doing a series of forest burnings. SCANE has received reports that there were open burnings carried out in the area. Fires were reported at different locations and sites in the area. In certain sites, where the fires were not being able to completely razed the felled trees, logs and debris, their workers are asked to gathered all the logs and reduce to ashes. SCANE was told that those workers who set the fires were not aware at all whether any permits for open burning had been issued by NREB as they merely followed the directive of Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd.

The unscrupulous activity of clearing and open burning of forests by Sarawak Hidro within the Bakun dam reservoir area is clearly violating to the Natural Resources and Environment Ordinance (NREO). It is such outrageous that Sarawak Hidro actions to wipe out the forest within the reservoir area without having any sense of responsibility and sensitivity toward the environment, though knowingly that its activity would cause immeasurable impacts to environment. Due to the large scale nature of such activity, burning should be ban totally before it could become an environmental crisis within Bakun dam reservoir area and beyond. Hence, it is within the jurisdiction of the NREB to take appropriate measures to ensure such activities from reoccurrence.

SCANE is extremely concerns with the environmental implications of development activities surrounding the Bakun Hydroelectric power dam project that causes drastic land-use change and deforestation of sensitive ecosystems.

SCANE warns that removing vast tract of forest, open burning and forest fires in the dam reservoir not only puts flora and fauna at risk by reducing their habitat, but also contributes to long-term environmental problems such as climate change.

SCANE strongly urges the State Government of Sarawak to put a total ban on any forest clearance and burnings in Bakun dam reservoir area until appropriate measures and management plan are in place. With immediate action, the NREB, with the conferred power and jurisdictions should take stringent action against the developer of Bakun dam project for indiscriminate burnings of forest in the reservoir area.

Thank you.

Raymond Abin

National Coordinator

Note: Sarawak Conservation Action Network (SCANE) is a coalition of leading environmental and indigenous rights organizations in Sarawak whose members include Borneo Resources Institute Malaysia (BRIMAS), Indigenous Peoples Development Centre (IPDC), Network of Customary Land Rights of Sarawak Indigenous Peoples (TAHABAS), Centre for Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Sarawak (CRIPS), Sarawak Indigenous Lawyers Associates (SILA), Serakup Raban Iban Bintulu (SRIBin), Gerempung Anakbiak Sekabai (GAS), Indigenous Peoples Institute Malaysia Sarawak (IPIMAS), Society for Alternative Living (PPU) and Native Longhouse Action Committees through out Sarawak.

WAKE UP & SMELL THE PALM OIL!

WHAT RAINFOREST?

36 minutes
English/Malay/Iban with English Subtitles
Produced by Hilary Chiew and Chi Too

Synopsis:

When oil palm barons began encroaching on their native customary rights (NCR) land with claims of buyovers sanctioned by the government, the families in Kampung Lebur, near Kuching in Sarawak, were devastated.

One man stood his ground. Segan anak Degon was the only one of 101 families who managed to hold off an oil palm plantation from replacing his ancestral patch of forest which included his paddy field and fruit trees planted by his forefathers.

Like his fellow villagers, the forest was the sole source of livelihood for Segan and his wife. But unlike his fellow villagers, Segan fought... and won. And this is his story.

An independent review of What Rainforest?:

It had all the necessary ingredients of a thrilling Hollywood blockbuster:
A stoic hero and his long-suffering wife.
Ruthless land-grabbing corporations.
A plot that wove a tale of David minus his slingshot versus Goliath.
Of conviction of strength in the face of greed, gangsters and cockamamie policies.
And also a credible supporting cast and beautiful long-range and wide angle shots of one of the world’s oldest rainforests.

But What Rainforest? neither thrilled nor entertained.

Of course, the co-producers of this 36-minute documentary – Hilary Chiew and Chi Too – never intended for it to. Instead, they succeeded all too well in making you burn as you watch the outright trampling of the basic rights of the indigenous Iban folk and their ancestral lands.

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION AGAINST THIS WANTON ABUSE OF OUR INDIGENOUS KINFOLK AND THEIR ANCIENT LANDS!

SARAWAK SOUNDS ALARM OVER PENAN RAPE CLAIMS
Oct 7, 08 6:41pm

Authorities in Sarawak have called on police to investigate reports that women and girls from the Penan tribe have been raped by workers from jungle logging camps.

The plight of the Penan people was made famous in the 1990s by environmental activist Bruno Manser, who campaigned to protect their way of life and fend off the loggers, before he vanished in 2000 amid suspicion of foul play.

"Let the police do a full investigation. It is important that we get to the truth of all these things," Sarawak Deputy Chief Minister George Chan said of the rape claims, according to the state news agency Bernama.

"This is criminal but we must have very firm evidence as it could portray a very bad national image," he said.

[Read the rest of the Malaysiakini story here.]

HOW TAIB BULLIES THE RAKYAT
Al Tugauw | Oct 7, 08 5:09pm

According to the The Borneo Post report, "Let's talk, but don't try any rough stuff with me: CM" on Oct 3, Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud allegedly said he is open to discussion on a supposed eviction of some 10,000 villagers from 13 Kedayan-Malay villages in Bekenu, Sarawak.

The question is what discussion? Why only now?

Does anyone think that this man is really open to discussion? Or he just wants the people to come begging to him so that he can placate them with some devious promises not meant to be fulfilled? The report also stated that he said although he had allegedly yet to hear from the affected villagers, he felt that the best way to resolve the matter was to come and see him and not ‘try any rough stuff’ with him.

What rough stuff? In any event why shouldn't the people play rough when this is the way they are treated, like illegal squatters and asked to get off their land and leave their houses just before Hari Raya? He has yet to hear? What rubbish!

In the first place, doesn't he know or are we to believe that he doesn't know? This is the eviction of 10,000 people we are talking about here whose families have been on this land since 1910, and they are squatters?

Some new company comes and they suddenly get more rights to the land than those who have been on it for almost 100 years? And Taib has yet to hear from the affected villagers?

"‘Because once you start playing rough, you cut all communication with me. In the end, you still have to communicate with me because I'm the government… whether or not the claim is good (only) then I can consider,’ he told reporters at the second day of his Hari Raya Aidilfitri open house at Stadium Perpaduan here yesterday." said the report further.

This is how Taib bullies the rakyat. Why was there no communication with the affected villagers except for the notice of eviction? So the villagers who have been living there for the last 100 years now have to prove their claim? Surely they should have been considered even before any such decision was made?

The arrogance of this man seems to know no bounds. Just because he ‘is the government’ does that mean he can do what he likes and treat the people as he likes?

[Read the full story on Malaysiakini.]

VISIT AL TUGAUW'S BLOG - SARAWAK HEADHUNTER!