Why does Taib fear our little voice of truth? – Claire

From: Clare Rewcastle, via email

Winifred Poh conceded some important truths in her article supporting Sarawak’s Taib Mahmud and his successor Adenan Satem last week(FMT Dec 18: Foreign opposition to Sarawak: What gives? )

In her own words, “in Sarawak, decisions are being made which are irreversible, at least for a generation. Valleys are being stripped and filled with water, populations moved, factory cities built, and a whole generation of Sarawakians are being sold an industrial future that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. And all the time we see huge areas of forest cut for palm oil, and yet more palm oil.”

So, is all this being driven by genuine policy or corruption, was the question she put, before launching into an angry tirade against what she described as ‘amazingly well funded foreigners’ who have criticised these moves and the motives behind them.

Winifred’s position appears to be that ‘foreigners’ have no right to voice an opinion about what is going on in Sarawak, whereas she does. One of Taib’s own favourite arguments is that there is nothing wrong with Sarawak’s democratic institutions, so outsiders should shut up and let the local people decide for themselves.

Sadly, this is not so: Sarawak’s democratic institutions have degenerated into a blatant sham.

Take the State Assembly: salaries were tripled after the last general election; Sarawak’s YBs now earn roughly the same as a UK member of parliament, in a country where the cost of living is a mere fraction by comparison. Yet, Sarawak’s representatives are only permitted to sit on just 16 days a year (the UK parliament sat for 162 days last year; some years have seen as many as 240 days). How much legislative scrutiny of Taib’s decisions does this allow for? Pretty much zero, of course.

Sham of Sarawak democracy

In the UK, the Prime Minister has to face weekly grillings from MPs about any issue they care to raise; by contrast Taib Mahmud did not deign to answer unwanted opposition questions over 34 years.

The fact that the entire state is being chewed to bits and parceled out through a handful of corporations is virtually never raised in the Sarawak parliament, which so rarely sits. Sarawak is no democracy, Winifred Poh, and its state parliament is a tragic travesty of the Westminster model.

Both Taib and Adenan Satem have further secured their undemocratic grasp on the levers of power by occupying all the key offices of state and controlling personally over 80% of the public budget. This means virtually the entire civil service views the Chief Minister as their ultimate boss.

Over the years BN have not failed to abuse this power in the most disgraceful fashion, sacking or moving teachers, administrators or anyone else who ‘stepped out of line’. Time and again Sarawakians have told me that they feel they cannot speak out or oppose anything Taib does, because they fear for their livelihood or for the livelihood of a family member who works for the state.

Should Winifred care to set about criticising the UK, for example, no one would take notice; the UK is already full of its own far better qualified home grown critics. But no one would denounce her ‘foreign’ interference.

Throttled voices of the people

In Sarawak there is no such criticism because there is no free media, the cornerstone of a genuine democracy. This is why Taib hates his ‘foreign critics’. He has managed to get away with his outrageous and exploitative management of the state, through his total control of all media outlets and through restrictions on the rights of people.

Sarawak is less a democracy than a totalitarian state, where people can’t even organise a stamp collectors’ association without government permission.

The one media exception has been Radio Free Sarawak (to which this author states a connection), which has been relentlessly jammed and condemned for ‘poisoning the minds of simple people’.

Winifred’s suggestion that matters like SCORE have been openly and democratically debated, supported and decided upon by Sarawak’s citizens, is mere fantasy.

SCORE was the so-called ‘brainchild’ of Taib Mahmud and as such has gone unquestioned, despite the planetary consequences of destroying this once pristine rainforest region with 12 mega-dams across all of Sarawak’s river systems and the tragic displacement of tens of thousands of people.

Winifred should study the research, consultation and debate that goes into the construction of any major project of this nature in a genuine democracy. By contrast, Taib has ignored all due process over SCORE, before independent consultations have delivered any kind of a verdict on the likely public benefits or environmental impacts of the projects.

This simply is not democratic.

Add to that the draconian powers available to the state to clobber people who oppose Taib’s will. Sarawak is a place where gangsters enforce timber concessions against local people and police turn a blind eye to the situation and instead arrest people who annoy the company bosses instead, where pesky journalists can be sacked by politicians, who control their newspapers.

That is why so many people of conscience have felt motivated to raise their own voices in protest from safer regions of the world.

That is why there is a role for concerned outsiders to speak out, supporting local people who can’t, and warning the wider world that while Sarawak may pretend to be a democracy, it definitely is not.

Why does this upset Taib and Winifred so deeply?

Attack on Sarawak Report

Not long ago Taib used the state assembly itself (on one of those few days it was open) to lambast Sarawak Report and some other NGOs for being the greatest existing threat to the stability of the state. He even accused us of hatching a ‘neo-colonialist plot’ to steal Sarawak’s oil resources. Rare legislative time was expended on this extended invective against us.

Winifred Poh accuses my blog of making ‘manic’ and ‘extreme claims’ for suggesting the Chief Minister is corrupt, but is it not he who is the more prone to exaggeration given such talk – or are we really that destabilizing for Taib Mahmud?

It is particularly revealing how Winifred and by extension Taib, obsess about how much money they imagine is funding his critics. In her article Winifred repeatedly called Sarawak Report “amazingly well funded” and referred to the “Rewcastle Brown publishing empire”, which sadly is all nonsense.

This letter cost no more than the time it has taken to write. The research that supports our articles, likewise, involves little more than time and brainpower. Why are we presented as some kind of powerful empire of moneyed rivals? It is because of the power of the truth – the small voice that demolishes mountains of expensive propaganda.

This is why we are indeed regarded as extremely dangerous by Sarawak’s CM turned Governor.

Taib has used his powers to suppress the truth within the boundaries of his state, but, thanks to the Internet, the truth creeps in from the free world outside.

Winifred’s tactic is to put it about that Sarawak Report and the other NGOs who are questioning Taib’s self-interested and extraordinarily self-enriching policies, ‘cannot be trusted’. How are people to know if what we are saying is true, questions Winifred.

The fact is that most of our sources are not secret at all. We merely present what is overwhelmingly a matter of public record and what in a free democracy would have been raised in any critical newspaper.

This is why the people who bother to read this blog believe it and why Taib is so upset about the impact.

It costs only RM15 to open a company record online; public contracts, stock market (Bursa Malaysia) and public company information are free. Land and Survey documents, timber and plantations concessions are concealed as much as possible, but with a bit of digging they can be accessed.

Anyone who knows their way around the internet can access or check the information presented by Sarawak Report. It is also why other blogs and journalists feel safe in reporting what we have revealed.

We have listed contracts handed to Taib’s family companies without tender, his family’s huge shareholdings in Sarawak companies, concessions and monopolies gone to his family and cronies, and family control of industry and utilities.

Why not disprove our claims?

If Sarawak Report was wrong and inaccurate, as Winifred suggests, there would be a very simple and easy way to destroy our credibility and reputation: Taib could merely point out our inaccuracies in all the media outlets available to BN.

It would be incredibly easy to disprove our claims: in the main, they have not, because in the main it is true.

Taib has taken excessive powers over the state and abused them: until ‘foreigners’ started poking their noses in and speaking out about it he was able to get away with preventing any mention of the fact.

Taib is acknowledged to be extraordinary wealthy, even though he has no business to be so. Just last month his lawyers threatened the publishers of the book Money Logging, which details the corruption. He is a very wealthy man who could demand huge damages.

Yet, year in and year out, he has failed to carry out this and similar threats. He knows that an independent jury in the UK, US or Europe would look at the evidence and dismiss his claims.

Winifred should conduct a simple exercise, instead of huffing and puffing about, she should take one of our articles and disprove the findings. Then she could evaluate the motives of Taib Mahmud and decide on her original question about whether it is all driven by corruption or policies.

There is one final issue that I take with Winifred Poh, who arrived on the pages of Free Malaysia Today without a trace of any prior existence on the internet.

She claims to have lived 50 years in Sarawak, implying she was not born there, yet she reckons she is no ‘foreigner’. I was born and spent my early years there, so I think I have a legitimate right to an opinion as well, as does anybody else.

Clare Rewcastle is the founder and editor of Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak