The indigenous Penan have used the Malaysian premier’s official visit to Switzerland to highlight the continual depletion of their land under logging companies.
Two letters of appeal were passed on to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad by the Basel-based human rights organization, Bruno-Manser-Fund, or BMF. Swiss Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Joseph Deiss delivered the letters.
“Please tell Dr. Mahathir that people are poisoning our rivers and many of us have fallen ill,” said Penan nomad Selai Sega of Limbang River.
The effects of logging the past three decades have had a tremendous impact on the Penans – the last of Malaysian Sarawak and Borneo’s hunter-gatherers. Over this period of time, where logging has steadily depleted the region’s rainforests that is also the world’s oldest – Sarawak accounts for almost half of the world’s tropical logs exports – this encroachment of modern civilization has seen all but a few hundred of nine thousand Penan abandon their nomadic way of life to settle in longhouses and trying to adjust to unfamiliar ways of trade and agriculture.
Since March 1987, the Penan have resorted to erecting barricades on logging roads to protest the activities of the logging companies – an act of aggression that has no precedent in their way of life. At least six blockades alone have been conducted by the Penan since March this year.
According to BMF, the Penan are not against development in general – they just don’t want to give up their rights to self-determination and their traditional lands. Repeated calls for help in the form of letters of appeal and complaint have not seen any results.
“We asked for forest reserves,” said Ajang Kiew, headman of Long Sayan. “We asked them not to disturb the land surrounding our longhouses. We asked for school for the villages, so our children could go to school... We asked for clinics... Instead they gave us the logging companies. ... Now it is oil palm plantations.”
The Burno-Manser-Fund is named after the Swiss shepherd Bruno Manser who, fascinated by the Penan culture he encountered in 1984, lived with a group of them for six years before publishing works about their way of life. He also led non-violent demonstrations and held exhibitions to protest the logging of tropical woods and deforestation, before finally returning to the forests of Sarawak in 2000. He has been reported missing ever since.
