Voices for the Borneo Rainforest
We don’t like the company to destroy the forests any more: they make the water muddy. We become ill. We get TB. We get eye illness. We get malaria. We get killed on the roads.
In October of 1990, realizing that the campaing inside their country to halt the ongoing destruction of their rainforest was failing, two Penan tribesmen, Unga Paren and Mutang Tu’o, and a Kelabit activist, Andy Mutang, slipped out of Sarawak, the Malaysian State on the Island of Borneo, to embark on a last ditch effort to gain world wild support for their cause. It is the first time that any Sarawak native has been able to leave Malaysia to present their plight directly to the world.
The three Dayaks (Borneo natives) joined Thom Henley, a well known British Columbian Environmentalist and co-author of the recently released book PENAN: Voice for the Borneo Rainforest, and Bruno Manser, the Swiss shepherd featured in the award-winning film Blowpipes and Bulldozers who lived with the nomadic Penan for six years until last spring. According to Manser, the human rights of the Sarawak natives continue to be violated with impunity, and the Penan face immediate cultural genocide from the current 24-hour-a-day logging operations which are destroying their rainforest home. Their tour, Voices for the Borneo Rainforesrt, was organized by activists from Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe and Japan.
For the last two decates the Sarawak government has allowed the logging of the primary forest to escalate and now the end is in sight. If logging continues at the current rate, in less than half a decade, one of the world's oldest and most complex ecosystems will be destroyed. The loss of this great rainforest will drive thousands of unique species (found nowhere else on earth) to extinction, and will mean the end of a traditional way of life for many of Sarawak's natives, including the Penan, one of the last tribes of true hunter-gatherers left in the world.
The logger is delighted. He is eating the money from the trees like this. He is delighted to bulldoze a road, cut the trees, big, big trees,-get money! His children, his wife, they are full. They eat with the money they get from trees.
I wanted to talk with the police about land to be saved for us to stay alive. They don’t want to talk. They arrest me
After petitioning their government with no success, the Penan and other native tribes in Sarawak, collectively called Dayaks, resorted to blockading timber roads in an effort to stop the destruction of their forest homeland and to preserve their way of life. In the last few years, over one hundred Penan have been imprisoned for trying to protect their native lands through these non-violent actions. Despite their efforts and worldwide media coverage, they have not been able to gain meaningful government recognition of their land rights, perhaps because most of the logging concessions in Sarawak are held by polticians or their close relatives. The state government appears detemined to crush native resistance and continue the lucrative logging of the remaining oldgrowth forests until they are gone.
One of the major stumbling block to a solution to the conflict over logging is Datuk James Wong, Sarawak's Minister of the Environment and Tourism. He is the holder of one of the largest timber concessions in Sarawak. He belives that "logging is good for the forest", but studies by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Wide Fund For Nature suggest that selective logging damages 50% of the residual stands, removes 46% of natural cover, and seriously damages soils, as over 30% of the ground surface is exposed. There is no evidence that the primary forest, once logged, ever returns to its natural state.
The three native leaders from Sarawak believe that The Voices for the Borneo Rainforest world tour is their last hope, as hundreds of heavy bulldozers encroach further each day into their traditional hunting grounds, frightening away wildlife, destroying food trees, and contaminating rivers through massive erosion and siltation.
They are calling for an immediate moratorium on the logging of their traditional lands, meaningful recognition of their customary land rights by the Sarawak State government, and that a significant area of primary rainforest is set aside as a United Nations Biosphere Reserve to provide permanent protection for both the forest and their way of life.
They are asking you to help them by seeking bans on tropical hardwood imports into your country and by asking your federal government to suspend development and foreign aid to Malaysia until their government respects native rights and stops logging the last remaining areas of primary rainforest--the homelands which natives and wildlife need for survival.
