Agi idup, agi ngelaban!
Sim Kwang Yang
From the fringe of our national consciousness, a news report on malaysiakini informs us that the natives of Sarawak are getting together in Miri on Labour Day, to discuss the 120 or so court cases they have brought against the government of Sarawak, in defense of their customary rights land.
There have been sporadic reports in the past on the same issue, without attracting much attention from the general readership. This current report will probably suffer the same fate of neglect.
To the ruling parties and their coteries of satellite media organizations, the matter of land rights for the natives of Sarawak and Sabah is bad news for their vision of good governance.
To them, the long-standing protests of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak against encroachment of their customary land by “development projects” is an unpleasant thorn-in-the-side of their official grand vision of macro-economic development. The vocal cord of this large chunk of our Malaysian population has been severed and silenced in our national narrative.
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The opposition parties are hardly any better. After all, they are part of the national consciousness that imagines Sabah and Sarawak as some periphery territories out there, with inscrutable people involved in their distant exotic intractable problems that have hardly any impact on the national scene. The poor natives there are too far and too deep in the tropical rain forest to be a substantial constituency for anybody operating in this essentially urban and highly modernised discourse.
There are those who really care about social agitation in the frustrating business of engendering a civil society in Malaysia. Thank God malaysiakini is one such group of very important people who will still enable the meek voice of the dispossessed marginalised natives to reach an audience. It is not their fault that their audience remains cold.
Therefore, the poor natives out there in the far-flung shadow of our national life will continue to fend for themselves, as they have done helplessly for many past decades, at the expense of much suffering and humiliation. They may have been better educated, and their amenities of life much improved after Merdeka, but the real fruits of independence have continued to elude them.
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It is hard to enter their world, without bringing our own ethnocentrism, or our prejudices of modernity into play in judgment of their claim for justice. Theirs is a legion of very diversified cultural universes that do not fit into our own world view, and that makes it difficult for urban folk to respond to their plaintive cry for help.
Indigenous land rights
Their collective problem, like that of all indigenous people living in modernising economies all over the world, is the matter of indigenous land rights.
The idea of customary land rights must be both alien and heretical to those who have been brought up to believe in the capitalist concept of land and land ownership as gospel truth. Land is the most precious private capital, to be exploited commercially, or traded like any asset at great profit. Essentially, the ownership of all land in the realm lies in the hand of the state; sovereignty of the state is premised upon the monopoly of legitimacy of the state to appropriate all her territorial possessions.
To those truly indigenous people in Sarawak and Sabah however, the right to land is a completely different matter. One can claim land only through personal usage, chiefly through the clearing of primary forests for the purpose of subsistence farming.
Through the use of their land, supplemented by hunting, fishing and collecting jungle produce from the forests around them, they have thrived for centuries before the idea of the modern state of Malaysia was thrust upon a Malay prince on the other side of the South China Sea in 1961.
We do not need guess work to predict who will emerge as victor in this clash of civilisations, between modern statehood against age old customary laws of the indigenous communities over the issue of land.
First, the loggers appear on the horizon, armed with chainsaws and a permit from the state authorities to extract timber on large tracts of land in the vicinity of, and often directly infringing upon the customary land of the local native communities, who do depend on their land for their very survival.
Loggers represent the facelessness of modern market forces: the hunger of the world’s burgeoning economies for tropical hardwood must be satisfied. The immense instant wealth generated by the logging industry also fuels and perpetuates corruption among politicians at the state level. Political power and timber wealth are almost synonymous in Sarawak.
Timber exhausted
Who would pay heed to the great injustice suffered by the very people who live in the timber concession areas indeed? Water catchment areas are heavily polluted, depriving the villagers of their drinking water. The forests – or whatever is left afterwards – will no longer house the wild game for their table. The rivers will be so loaded with the eroded soil that fish disappear altogether. Meanwhile, farm land gets destroyed by the heavy erosion that results from denuding a whole mountainside.
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I am given to understand that intensive logging for the past two or three decades have already exhausted most of the most valuable timber resources in Sabah and Sarawak.
Today, the once plentiful rock hard belian and ramin trees have now become rare. Talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs! Still, there are the large tracts of empty land in these sparsely populated states on the northern shores of Borneo. Some of this land is very fertile.
Therefore, it is a matter of time, when local native communities are confronted with government development agencies and politically connected plantation companies at their door-steps, claiming their right to plant a variety of crops on tens or hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, with the blessings and all the legal instruments from the state government to do so. Soon enough and to their horror, the local communities discover that they have become squatters on what they consider to be their own customary land.
In the early stages, there are those inevitable skirmishes between the contending parties. Some of these conflicts have turned out to be violent and deadly. All these protracted dramatic conflicts go on all the time in the rural heartland, a world away from the mainstream media that is more interested in ingratiating the grand narrative of nation-building rather than reflecting the soul of the entire Malaysian people.
The story of this head-on collision between the dispossessed rural native communities and the powerful interest groups in the jungle of Sarawak has been deeply hidden behind a veil of batik curtain.
Fortunately for the long-suffering Sarawak natives, a very few NGOs and concerned individuals have always worked with them on the ground, and laboured for their cause in the course of the past two decades. This small handful of home grown Sarawak activists have made a difference in the lives of many local communities, suffering often from, among many other things, the close attention of the usual state security apparatus.
Legal issues are complex
For quite a few years now, they have been bringing a deluge of cases to the court. It is a protracted complicated Herculean task. The odds are stacked against the aggrieved native land owners.
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They are making legal history of course. These cases are not the usual land disputes that can be settled by referring to existing land codes and common law precedents. I seriously doubt if there are many applicable precedents when claims for native customary land rights can have priority over the state’s monopoly over her territorial resources.
The legal issues are extremely complex. This sort of cases will also test the wisdom of the judges to no end. Judges in the Court of Borneo have to live and work in the political reality of the state in Sarawak of course. It must be difficult for them to sit in judgment, knowing that a decision in favour of the natives is tantamount to a direct affront to the political will, not of the rakyat of Sarawak necessarily, but of the powerful interest groups sitting at the top of the political food chain in this resource-rich state.
I know of one judge who has inadvertently displayed tremendous personal integrity and professional courage when he ruled in favour of the local community against a paper pulp company that has a great deal of political connection. I especially admire his jurisprudential wisdom when, in judgment, he also made reference to similar cases in other parts of the world.
We have long known the suffering and the struggle of the North American Indians and the Australian Aborigines. To make that connection between their cases with that of the Sarawak natives will require a sense of ultimate concern for the universal common humanity of mankind.
These then, will be at the back of their mind, when the participants gather for that remarkable pow-wow in Miri in Labour Day. I salute you, gentlemen and gentlewomen of good will, who will continue to fight within the ambit of the Law, rather than resorting to arrows and spears, or whatever comes handy in destructiveness.
Agi idup, agi ngelaban! (In Iban, it means “While you still live, you fight on”.)
