As the GPS government seeks to make a show of its eco-credentials (with an eye to making billions out of carbon trading) it comes as no surprise that, once again, it is native communities who are taking the brunt of the pain and hardship.

Meanwhile, as the recent spate of brand new land conflicts has made clear, licences are still being secretively handed out to major logging concerns in native forest areas, even while the GPs leadership boasts about extending the ‘totally protected’ forest cover in the state.

Similajau Agricultural Heritage village

A shocking case is presently unfolding in Similajau, Bintulu, which perfectly illustrates these double standards, combined with Sarawak’s total lack of transparency or consultation over land issues.

Over the past 48 hours, according to the native rights group Sadia, a cohort of Sarawak Forestry Corporation (SFC) officials accompanied by armed officers have marched into the Sungai Patin Agricultural Heritage village community of some 118 families and started evicting them from their homes, leaving these families to take refuge, along with their children and nursing babies, by the roadside.

Three members of the community, including an agricultural worker named Jalani and his wife were arrested and held for several hours, accused of encroaching on the national park area of ​​Bintulu, until protesting crowds outside occasioned their release.

One of the prisoners says he was further outlandishly accused by an SFC officer called Azlan of having received support amounting to tens of thousands of ringgit from an ‘NGO in London’ (which would not have been a crime even were it true)!

According to Panting ak Baling, the Headman of the village, the trouble began on Friday. He told Sadia:

While the residents were collecting agricultural produce in their gardens three were arrested by SFC authorities. They were detained for several hours at the SFC HQ in Similajau. Realising that all the villagers were gathered along the road leading to the SFC HQ, the three were released at around 1am the following Saturday morning. The problem faced by the residents is that they are now driven out and are not allowed to collect their agricultural produce.

What was the explanation for this cruel action?  It emerges that in April (without consultation, compensation or any warning whatsoever) the GPS state government had decided to extend the Similajau National Park by turfing these people off their farmland.

A notice was simply placed at the entrance to the Heritage Village to advise the inhabitants they must leave.

Naturally, the people stayed and were trying to harvest their hard-earned crops over the weekend when the government backed hit squad arrived.

It is quite hard to fathom how, in this day and age in a country like Malaysia, such an arbitrary and outrageous abuse of state power could be implemented against citizens in such a way.  However, the answer appears to be that this area of native crop growing had been identified as part of GPS’s vaunted ‘eco-plan’ to extend its national parks and create 800,000 extra hectares of ‘totally protected forest’.

This, bearing in mind that Sarawak Report has learnt over the past few days alone of no less than five separate incursions by major logging companies into native customary rights areas to cut down existing forested areas which those communities have been trying to protect.

Those incursions have all been apparently newly licenced by the state government and the police have done nothing so far to support the villagers who have been trying to stop the destruction.

Compare these valuable forest areas, which loggers have gained licences to destroy without any of the consultation and transparency required under the certification rules that Sarawak’s allegedly eco-conscious state government is bound by, to the Agricultural Heritage Village –  a zone that has already been logged and planted and which sustains it native farmers.

The project consists of 605 hectares of very little remaining environmental value which will be hugely challenging to restore to natural biodiversity.  Nonetheless, the SFC seems set to include this region into its touted “totally protected forest” map as if it represented genuine National Parkland of the same quality of the areas that crony loggers are presently being licenced to destroy in Baram and elsewhere.

Gift From Adenan To The Dispossessed Native People

The history of the Heritage Village renders the actions by the SFC doubly outrageous, says Nicholas Mujah of the native rights group Sadia, who has sought to raise the alarm.

A community of 118 families, comprising mixed ethnicities, including  Iban, Malay, Bidayuh, Ulu people and Chinese, had applied in 2014 to then Chief Minister Adenan Satem for land to live off. Several had been displaced by the expansion of Bintulu and the Similajau ‘industrial park’ set up by the Taib administration,

They had been farming the area since 2004, according to a complaint now sent by Sadia to the Malaysian human rights commission Suharkam. The complaint goes on to say that Adenan himself visited the village and gave permission for the villagers to cultivate agriculture and ordered the Land and Survey department to measure and issue a map of the agricultural lot for the residents involved.

Those documents are available and have been obtained by Sadia. The community say they even received official support to establish their project through Department of Agriculture subsidies to set up caged fish ponds, establish abrica coffee, pepper and palm oil plantations, which they were formally licensed to sell from.

However, Adenan passed on and the new administration has now unilaterally cancelled the grant of the agricultural lot and instead approved the expansion of the Similajau National Park to include the entire area which had been granted to the Sungai Patin Agricultural Heritage village.

There was no consultation, warning nor even compensation complains village chief Panting ak Baling despite the years of toil:

“Even if the National Park is expanded. Our crops and gardens should be compensated. We should be given time and should still be given the opportunity to harvest our agricultural produce because that is the source of our income – pepper, coffee, pineapples, have not been harvested, thus our source of life has been forced to be cut off, directly affecting our lives and our children. All of our families are now sheltering on the side of the road and in the available space to provide shade to the parents and children so that they are not eaten by the rain and extreme weather.
The affected families also have no sympathy from any government agencies or interested parties, we had to bathe in Sungai Sungai.” [Complaint to Suhakam]

And what of these people’s local ‘representative’ YB, who in any normal democratic country would be racing to champion these once hard-working and productive constituents whose children can no longer go to school and no longer have no roof over their head?

The headman says he is utterly distraught by the lack of support on the part of this GPS leader , but for any observer of how native people are treated in Sarawak it comes as no surprise:

“We have all the evidence of dialogue and photos and documents with Adenan and all the departments involved during the agricultural lot approval process for us. The SFC challenged us to take the case to court. But we are aware that we will lose in court. Because they control all the information and we have no money to take our case to court. We appeal to YB Datuk Majang Renggie – Samalaju area assemblyman. YB did not want to interfere and even asked us not to fight the SFC. In these few days we have not entered the forbidden area. The situation is very tense now.”

Only the native rights NGOs, platforms like Radio Free Sarawak and the people themselves have sympathy to spare, it seems, over this story that has received no coverage so far in the pliant local press.

Millions of hectares have been handed over for logging and plantations in Sarawak to companies owned by the ‘Big Six’ timber tycoons and linked to their political cronies in the GPS government.

Yet, when it comes to making a show about restoring Sarawak’s devastated forests in order that the same billionaire companies and their political allies can line up to beg for carbon credits it is, of course, once again the areas set aside for native peoples that are being targetted to expand this National Park.

It is not companies who have made billions out of the forests and plantations (and who yet bafflingly have failed to turn sufficient profits to pay much tax) who are being squeezed to extend the forest base. Quite the opposite.  It is the poorest of the poor who first lost their hunting territories to logging and are now losing their agricultural plots to ‘reforestation’.

The voting public of Sarawak deserve and have a legal right to Transparency, Open Government, Consultation, Legal Support and, if need be, fair and proper Compensation in such matters.

This is fact and not opinion. Such abuses have to stop and should be condemned worldwide.