Why Robber Barons Love Building Dams... (repost)

The accursed Bakun Dam (brainchild of Mahathir and Daim) is doomed to fail.

Imagine we’re gathered in some holy place. An architectural wonder. Like St Paul’s Cathedral in Rome or the St Sophia Mosque in Instanbul. Or perhaps the Gateway of the Sun in Peru or the Giza Pyramid Complex in Egypt. And we’re here to knock this whole place down and build a megamall right here because it would make better economic sense.

Let's have Wal-Mart and McDonald's at this popular tourist location.

Imagine the tremendous outcry against such an outrage. We’re talking about demolishing a cultural and spiritual artifact – a monument to a whole religious tradition. We’re talking about trading in our prophets for profits. Absolutely unthinkable, right?

Now: imagine you’re living in a small house you built yourself, beside a clear stream in a beautiful, forested river valley. Your ancestors have lived here for a hundred generations. According to your folklore, the landscape is the living flesh of divine progenitors whose essence condensed to form familiar features - like the mountains, the rivers, the rocks and the trees - and who are integral aspects of a Great Spirit inhabiting all forms, a unity in astonishing diversity. To you, the fact that the land is sacred – endowed with meaning, significance, and intrinsic spiritual value – is so obvious, no one needs to put it into words.

Imagine we’re here to log this magnificent forest, blow up the hills, dig up the rocks, turn a green sanctuary into a giant construction site, seriously pollute the water basin, cause massive erosion in a water catchment area, and dam up one of the few remaining free-flowing rivers in the country. Why? Because economic growth demands greater water consumption - and water supply is a growth industry. And because we have been grossly insensitive in the way we use and manage our water resources.

Sungai Luit by Doreen Ong

A CLASH OF PERSPECTIVES

We are born into cultural perspectives that become imperceptible to us - until we find ourselves outside of them. Like fish that never wonder what water is, we grow up with assumptions about reality we rarely question. For instance, we rarely question the need for governments... or armies... or landlords... or caste systems (whether hereditary or monetary).

When we hear the word “development” we assume we know what it means. We experience the flow of time as linear, just as the world looks flat to a lowlander. When conversing with people from a different cultural and linguistic background, we assume they aren’t as clever as ourselves – because they’re not very fluent in our language.

When urbanites encounter country folk, they unconsciously assume an air of superiority. Surely our sophisticated way of life is far better than theirs! Surely they’re better off becoming more like us (no way they could ever become just like us, of course, since we have too far a headstart on them!)

Civilization creates art, it’s true, but art creates artifice and artificiality. Industrial man sees the wilderness as a vast resource that can be converted into private wealth. Recklessly, ruthlessly, we go about building our national aspirations by tearing down our natural heritage.

Morally, this is no different than a cannibal eyeing an infant as a delicious and convenient source of protein. The wilderness, like a baby, has only beauty and innocence as its defences. When Darwinian notions of “survival of the fittest” form the basis of modern society, the total extermination of entire species becomes justified in terms of Them or Us.

CONVERT OR DESTROY THE SAVAGES!

Unfortunately, some of us don’t truly appreciate anything until it’s gone forever. Hardwoods can be converted into hard cash. Ignorant savages can be converted into consumers, taxpayers, mindless believers, obedient slaves of the System.

Filthy heathens have no souls and feel no pain - unlike us civilized God-fearing folks.

Some of us have tried to warn the others about the folly of such shortsighted behavior – and the dangerous consequences lurking ahead. For the most part we have been ignored.

The Earth fights back by getting feverish. When her flesh is torn apart by man’s rapacious machines, she shudders and quakes and sweats profusely, releasing a deluge of mysterious plagues upon us.

The Earth coughs and we realize we're living on the back of a gigantic whale.

At the fountain of knowledge, we drank too thirstily, only to become drunk with a false sense of power. We thought we could manipulate the masses with fear and greed. But the fear and greed enslaved us instead. Now we find ourselves powerless to alter our destructive course. We’re on the fast track and can’t stop the mindless runaway train of economic growth. Our materialistic definition of growth has limited us to the physical world, and excluded us from the limitless realm of the metaphysical. This growth has now taken on the form of a cancer that is about to kill us all – unless we redirect our attention to growth in mental and spiritual terms.

Cash crops bring fast bucks - and fast bucks is what drives "progress."

For a start, we can apologize for the hideous damage we have inflicted on the wilderness and indigenous ways of life. Then we could focus our efforts on helping the wounds heal. Only in a quest for renewed wholeness can we find our collective way home. And only through the heart can we know the universal love that redeems tragedy and transforms it into a higher truth.

Damnation is the fate of those who would turn the Earth into a living hell where everything is measured in terms of buy and sell. Our salvation can only come from regaining our lost innocence and restoring the beauty of our wildernesses.


We don’t really have a choice: win-win or lose-lose are the only options left.

[Written in June 2001 in response to the Selangor Dam project; but still topical in view of all the destructive dams currently under construction, or under consideration. First posted 3 November 2009, reposted 30 June 2014 & 30 May 2019]

Bruno Manser did not die in vain...

Bruno Manser, before he mysteriously vanished in Sarawak, believed to be murdered...

PRESS STATEMENT FROM THE BRUNO MANSER FUND

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear friends,

The Bruno Manser Fund's "Stop Corruption Dams" campaign has achieved a major victory today as mining giant Rio Tinto PLC has announced it will scrap plans for a US$2 billion aluminium smelter project in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. According to Dow Jones Newswires, Rio Tinto decided to scrap the controversial smelter plans as negotiations with the Taib family-controlled Cahya Mata Sarawak and the Taib-controlled Sarawak Energy Bhd failed to bear results. Jacynthe Cote, chief executive of Rio Tinto Alcan's aluminium division said "agreement on a long term competitive power supply contract couldn't be reached" with the Taib family businesses.

Rio Tinto's announcement is a major blow for the Sarawak state government under Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud who consistently used the aluminium smelter to promote the recently completed 2'400 MW Bakun dam, Asia's largest dam outside China. As a result, the Bakun dam will cause a massive power glut in Sarawak whose costs will have to be born by Sarawak consumers, tax payers and Malaysia's pension fund EPF who funded the mega-project with massive loans. Plans to export Bakun's excess power to West Malaysia had to be scrapped for economic reasons.

The accursed Bakun Dam has been plagued with problems since its early inception.

The Bruno Manser Fund welcomes Rio Tinto's decision to abandon its Sarawak smelter plans as a major victory for the international campaign to preserve the natural environment and the livelihoods of Sarawak's indigenous peoples.

Rio Tinto's decision proves that the Taib government's irresponsible economic policies have completely failed. There is no need to build another twelve dams in the state as envisaged by the Taib government. All these corruption-driven dam plans that would only benefit the Taib family's construction companies must come tho a halt now.

Taib Mahmud: insatiable greed personified

This is the kind of development that you have to expect from a kleptocratic potentate who believes in witchcraft instead of sound economic analysis and blatantly abuses his public office in order to rob his people.

The Bruno Manser Fund is calling on the Sarawak government to immediately halt the ongoing construction works for the Murum dam and to shelve all further dam plans in Sarawak. We are also calling on the Malaysian federal government to explain how the Bakun dam should ever become profitable and how the EPF (Employees Provident Fund) loans to Bakun will be secured.

Your BMF team

The Times on the "Rape of Borneo"

"GREEN" DAMS HASTEN RAPE OF BORNEO FORESTS

Tribal peoples are fighting huge hydro-electric projects that are carving up the island's rainforest

The Sunday Times
March 15, 2009
Michael Sheridan, Kuching, Sarawak

THE ISLAND of Borneo, a fragile treasure house of rainforests, rare animals and plants, is under threat from plans for Chinese engineers to build 12 dams that will cut through virgin land and displace thousands of native Dayak people.

The government of the Malaysian state of Sarawak says the dams are the first stage of a “corridor of renewable energy” that will create 1.5m jobs through industries powered by safe, clean hydro-electricity.

Campaigners are furious but appear powerless in the face of a project they fear will compound the devastation wreaked on Borneo’s peoples and land by previous dam projects and the felling of its forests.


They point to the ruin caused by the levelling of millions of acres of trees for oil palm plantations to meet the world’s demand for biofuels.

The dams would slice across a vast sweep of Sarawak, a place where wisps of cloud cling to remote, tree-clad peaks, huge butterflies flit through the foliage and orang-utans, sun bears and leopards roam.

There is more than an ecological argument over the scheme. The initial contract has gone to the Chinese state-owned company that built the controversial Three Gorges dam – a project described by Dai Qing, the campaigning Chinese journalist, as “a black hole of corruption.”

Teams from the China Three Gorges Project Corporation are at work on the first of the 12 new dams at Murum, deep in the interior, from where Sarawak’s great rivers uncoil towards the South China Sea.

Tribal peoples are dazed and frightened, telling a visiting researcher last week that they had been ordered off their ancestral lands. Signs in Chinese were posted all over the project site.


No financial details or contracts have been publicly disclosed. Analysts in China say the work is likely to have been financed in part by a loan from a state institution.

Critics argue that Sarawak does not need more electricity. It produces a 20% surplus and there is as yet no cable to deliver power to peninsular Malaysia – which itself generates more energy than it needs.

Company records filed with the Malaysia stock exchange show that a big beneficiary of the policy is a firm whose shareholders and directors include the wife and family of Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak’s chief minister.

Taib, 72, who drives around in a vanilla Rolls-Royce, is one of the richest and most powerful men in Malaysian politics. He also serves as Sarawak’s finance minister and planning minister.

The family-owned firm, Cahya Mata Sarawak, has interests in cement, construction, quarrying and road building. It has signed a memorandum of understanding with Rio Tinto, the London-listed mining group, to build a “world class” aluminium smelter that will get its electricity from a dam at Bakun.

The Bakun dam, a separate project due to be completed by 2011, has already displaced an estimated 10,000 indigenous people, leading to bitter legal battles and a chorus of dismay from economists about cost overruns.

Malaysia’s reinvigorated opposition is now campaigning against what it calls “crony capitalism”, helping hitherto powerless tribal peoples to challenge in the courts land grabs and cheating.

For all that, it may be too late to save the natural bounty of Borneo itself. Orphaned orang-utans, piteously holding the outstretched hands of their human saviours, are the most conspicuous symbols of its fragility.

Divided between Malaysia and Indonesia, with Brunei occupying a tiny enclave in the north, Borneo’s riches have ensured its plunder.

One reason is the voracious world demand for timber. The other is the fashion for biofuels made from palm oil. Almost half of Borneo’s rainforests have been cut down. Two million acres have vanished every year as trees are felled, the wood sold and the land turned over to oil palms.

The greatest plunderer of all was Indonesia’s late dictator, Suharto, who doled out timber concessions to generals and cronies during his 32 years in power.

Now the central government in Jakarta is winning praise for a determined crackdown that has slowed the rate of illegal logging.

However, much of Indonesian Borneo is already laid waste. Enormous fires cast a perpetual pall of toxic haze, making Indonesia the world’s third largest greenhouse gas polluter after China and the United States.


“Green gold”, or palm oil, poses an even more insidious threat because it promises prosperity and development to the numerous poor of Borneo – along with immense rewards for the elites.

The vegetable oil comes from crushed palm husks. Long used for cooking, cosmetics and soap, it has now become a principal source of biodiesel fuel.

Malaysia and Indonesia produce about 85% of the world’s supply of palm oil – most of it on Borneo.

The price of this apparently environment-friendly fuel is high. Its damage far outweighs its benefits, according to a recent international study published in the journal Conservation Biology.

One of the research team, Emily Fitzherbert of the Zoological Society of London, concluded that oil palm as a biofuel was “not a green option.”


John Anthony Paul, a Dayak notable in Sarawak, explained it another way: “There’s a stench from the palm oil mill close to my longhouse. There’s a huge quantity of slurry and sludge. Our water is deteriorating. Many fish disappear and there are more floods. Pesticides leach into our soil. The insects start to change, so the pollination changes and so does the quality of our fruits and crops. It’s unsustainable.”

Resistance is growing. Last week two Dayaks walked for four hours, carrying their sharp-edged parangs, or blades, to meet me near a cluster of huts housing Chinese dam workers.

The scene was Bengoh, a place so wild, flower-strewn and lovely that it would have made a tourist poster were it not for the grumble of construction noise and the gouged earth.

The Dayaks are being forced out of their villages because engineers from SinoHydro, a second Chinese contractor, are building yet another dam to improve the water supply to Kuching, capital of Sarawak.

“We are 28 families, in our village since our ancestors,” said Simo Anakbekam, 48. “The government says we must leave. We want them to recognise our rights to our land.”

The state government says it has offered adequate compensation plus resettlement to new homes with better jobs, health and education.


However, most people in Simo’s village just want to move higher up their familiar mountainside and cannot understand why they must depart for the hot, marshy lowlands.

It turned out to be an example of legal coercion with the familiar echo of “crony capitalism.” Armed with eviction orders, the dam builders told the Dayaks their presence might contaminate the new water supply.

However, lawyers for the villagers found draft plans for the Bengoh dam – drawn up, the documents state, with input from Halcrow, the British consultancy firm – which reveal that unnamed investors plan to build two resorts on the site.

The Dayaks are now fighting for better compensation and the right to stay in the area.


All over Sarawak, tribal people have lost their ancestral lands to similar gambits. “They don’t know that this thing is coming until they hear the sound of the bulldozers,” said See Chee How, a lawyer and civil rights activist.

It is worse deep in the northeast interior, where logging, palm oil and dams threaten the existence of the Penan, a nomadic tribe. Last week a British researcher for Survival International, the campaign group, found people running short of food.

“They hunt but go for weeks at a time without finding a single animal. Fish are also scarce, because the logging silts up the rivers. Sago is becoming more and more difficult to find,” said the researcher, who asked not to be named.

“One old man told me that the changes could be seen in the bodies of the young people, who were thinner and weaker than the people of his generation. The Penan asked me again and again to get news of their plight to the outside world.”

The ravishing of Borneo – its peoples, animals and the land itself – has roots in the past. But there may be a remedy, too.

Sarawak led a romantic, isolated existence under the “white rajahs” of the Brooke dynasty, whose adventurous founder, James Brooke, established himself in 1848 as an absolute ruler. His heirs held power until 1946.

The Brookes disdained the British empire’s commerce and industry, seeking to preserve a noble Dayak culture in all its splendour.

They established native customary rights by which district officers recorded land tenure as a way to stop headhunting wars among the Dayaks. The rajahs also granted leases and published an official gazette.

Malaysian courts have upheld cases based on such documents and now a hunt is on for letters folded away in longhouses and yellowing copies in archives in Britain. For many in faraway Sarawak, it may be their only hope of justice.

[Several images courtesy of Bruno Manser Fonds]