More Solidarity For Sarawak

By Sarawak Report

This morning, in distant Tasmania, an intrepid group of young protesters defied Taib’s family company Ta Ann.

They boarded a boat laden with wood that Ta Ann had taken from their own primary jungle, climbed right to the top of a crane tower and chained themselves to it.

And they wanted to make their message clear. They were not only fighting to protect their own rare jungle from the short-sighted and greedy plunder of the already fabulously wealthy Taib Mahmud, they were standing in solidarity with the people of Sarawak.

This was the statement by the Huon Valley Environment Centre’s Jenny Webber:

“Today’s protests on Hobart’s waterfront was taken by Huon Valley Environment Centre to highlight Ta Ann’s continual disregard for not only Tasmania’s wild forests but the indigenous people of Sarawak”

Taib’s global reach is making him internationally notorious

The campaign in Tasmania against Ta Ann is a sign of the developing international international awareness of Taib Mahmud. The people of Sarawak were the first to suffer from his greedy pact with the timber tycoons to strip the forests bare. However with most of Sarawak’s own forests now logged out, he and his cronies have spread their tentacles abroad, engaging in plunder across the world’s few remaining areas of virgin jungle. Tasmania is developing a strong movement to prevent that happening.

Ta Ann is run by Taib’s cousin and well-known proxy, Hamid Sepawi, who also owns over a third of the shares in what is billed as a public company. Onlookers were astonished when the multi-million dollar concern managed to get a grant from the Australian government to invest in a wood veneering factory in Tasmania, which it was hoped would breath life into a struggling industry.

Questions are still being asked over why the Australian government would PAY Taib’s company to strip their forest? The Green Party says no satisfactory answer has been provided so far.

However, the promise Ta Ann made when it opened the project was that the factory would rely on plantation forests and not extract wood from Tasmania’s remaining high conservation value forests – its primary jungle. However, environmentalists say that the factory managers are now saying that the quality of the plantation wood is not sufficient for their factory and they are demanding hardwood from the jungle.

According to Jenny Weber:

”The Tasmanian Government and Ta Ann are locking in the logging of native forests to meet a wood supply contract till 2027. High Conservation value forests are being lost to feed Ta Ann’s mill, when they should be in a moratorium now”.

Worse, the environmentalists say Ta Ann are now putting the Tasmanian authorities under pressure to provide them with access to primary jungle hardwood until 2042!