Enlightening the Dayaks

Has Taib Mahmud's attempt to divide the Dayaks backfired?

COMMENT

Clare Rewcastle Brown

Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud officially denied the existence of the ‘Dayak’ in 2004 when he ruled that the term had no meaning whatsoever.

Such a ruling has, of course, turned out to be counter-productive.

Nothing could have been more designed to give the Dayaks a stronger sense of a shared identity than to tell them they are no longer allowed to exist!

Many Dayaks I have since spoken to – Bidayuhs, Ibans and Penans – have insisted they believe this abolition of the long-established concept of the Dayak people was a deliberate attempt to keep their communities divided, so that they can be controlled by a minority elite.

The result has been a growing determination to stop the infighting and to develop a common ground.

So it was that last week I attended a very interesting gathering of Dayaks in Western Kalimantan. It was a meeting of the Borneo Dayak Forum, active since 2006.

The group consisted of leading lights from Sarawak, Sabah and Kalimantan, who are working across borders to develop a unified movement to gain a better cultural recognition of their people and also a fairer deal for these communities.

It is a standing disgrace that this relatively small population of people, who live in one of the world’s richest territories, have been allowed to descend into the lowest poverty, while the wealth of their island has been sucked dry by Malaysia and Indonesia.

First the timber and then oil, coal, minerals such as bauxite have been extracted to make both countries those rich.

Scant respect for heritage

Now the land is being transformed into the world’s most massive oil palm plantation and not once has anyone consulted the people who live there.

Nothing has been delivered to them in return for the billions extracted from their natural wealth.

No money, no jobs, no education to speak of and scant respect for their traditional customs and methods for sustaining life.

The people who care most about the preservation of the jungle in Borneo are the people from Borneo, the Dayaks.

Yet, while one of the world’s most valuable resources is being wantonly destroyed for cheap timber, their voice has been ignored.

This treatment can only be categorised as the worst form of modern colonialism.

Malaysia and Indonesia were handed these territories 50 odd years ago in trust. Regretfully, this has been a story of nothing but take, take, take ever since.

Time for policy change

By comparison the haughty White Rajahs of earlier years are now talked of by the people as a relative blessing!

So, surely the Dayaks deserve a change of policy in these more enlightened times?

Recognition that they exist would be nice for a start, along with a fairer share from the so-called ‘development’ of their lands.

The different regions have different problems of course. In Kalimantan things have looked up politically since the return of democracy to Indonesia.

For the first time since the 1960s there is once more an indigenous Dayak leader, Dr Cornelis, elected into the Governor’s Palace in Pontianak by his people.

One of two Dayak governors, he has worked to curtail some of the exploitation and has apparently ended the gangster logging, which saw the illegal export of so much of Kalimantan’s wood across the border into Sarawak.

However, the problems are enormous.

According to the members of the Dayak Forum, who have drawn up an agenda to try and address some of their people’s most pressing issues, it is primarily the lack of education that has left their people disempowered.

Even the most basic jobs in the new economy are deemed to require levels of education that have not been made available to Dayaks.

So instead these posts are handed to incomers, who have been transported into the region under Indonesian’s transmigration programmes.

Thus, the resources of the Dayak territories have been taken from them and in return it is the new arrivals who get the jobs.

Locals complain that many of the trans-migrants whom the government are placing in their midst also come from troubled communities and have imported bad ways. Theft and fighting have broken out.

So, it would seem that Indonesia has taken Borneo’s wealth and in return handed back its own problems of over-population and also crime.

Unfair policies

And, of course, there are the religious issues.

The local Christians wonder why the central government builds mosques but does not similarly subsidise churches?

They also wonder why trans-migrants have received assistance in housing and settlement costs, when they the locals, whose lands have provided so much of Indonesia’s wealth, get nothing?

So, when the Dayaks complain that they have been the victims of inequality and discrimination they appear to have a point worth investigating.

Meanwhile, over the border in Malaysia there is no such political easing.

Poor Sabah has been turned into one vast palm oil plantation, where the indigenous people are now almost outnumbered by the immigrant plantation workers.

Once again, their land has been taken, but there have been few jobs or opportunities in return.

Worse, while many indigenous people still languish without ID cards or voter registration, the immigrants have been slipped the vote by the back door and have reportedly been told they can stay as long as they vote BN!

So, just as in Indonesia, ‘development’ for the Dayaks of Malaysia has threatened them with marginalisation in their own country.

It is not hard to understand why genocide is a word that is frequently brought up in this context.

Democracy on the back foot

Meanwhile, in Sarawak the legacy of Native Customary Rights Land recognition by the British pre-independence has given a valuable legal tool to native communities struggling to protect their areas from logging, mining and oil palm – or at least to get a fair share of the profits.

The progress of over 300 cases through the courts has done more than anything to expose the high-handed and greedy methods employed by Taib and his cronies to snatch the country’s wealth for themselves.

However, with democracy on the back foot, the politicians are of course fighting back, sacking the judges and bringing further corruption to an already sham system of governance.

Of Sabah and Sarawak’s oil, only 5% of the royalties are channelled to the local governments.

Likewise, of RM109 billion of state spending last year, only RM9 billion went to the two East Malaysian states, which provided a huge proportion of that revenue.

As in Indonesia, none of the wealth and few of the jobs, educational opportunities or benefits of any kind have been offered to the Dayak people in return for the bounty of their lands.

The lost tourism opportunities over the years have been equally staggering.

Malaysia loves to boast its jungle environment to eager potential visitors, featured in advertisement after advertisement.

But the reality that awaits visitors to Sarawak is an artificial ‘Cultural Village’, an Orang Utan ‘sanctuary’ and millions of hectares of palm plantations.

The remaining interior jungle areas that the more adventurous might try to get to are themselves under threat from Taib’s greedy timber cronies.

Dayak’s fight

It is only the Dayak people who are fighting to preserve what is left of their jungle and their way of life.

So since, these are the very things that are most attractive to the tourists, why are these communities not assisted in keeping and sustainably developing some of these attractions

At the Borneo Dayak Forum last week, the gathering reflected on such matters.

Many expressed the well-founded fear that unless responsible action is taken, the fate of the Dayak people of Borneo will be no different to that of the North American Indians and the Australian Aboriginees.

One member recalled how a BN leader had once told him not to ‘incite’ the natives.

“Don’t tell them what they don’t need to know”, the senior politician had urged.

What he meant, explained the chastised campaigner, was don’t tell the Dayaks that they have been cheated; don’t tell them how much their land, their oil, their timber is worth and don’t educate them, in case they find out.

It is clear that many Dayaks have finally found out anyway. They are evaluating their problems at last and drawing up their agenda for change.

With the Borneo Dayak Forum they have also started to find a voice. The world should start listening.

Clare Rewcastle Brown is the founder/editor of Sarawak Report and a FMT columnist.