Extracted from Malaysiakini

 

In defence of the emerald forests

Keruah Usit | Jun 10, 09 11:08am

 

Tirong Lawing, 61, a respected village chief from the remote community of Long Kerong, appeared vexed. He was talking about Malaysian timber certification.

 

Tirong spoke slowly and softly - verbal pyrotechnics are not exactly his style. For a forest-dweller, raising one’s voice is necessary only in an emergency.

Tirong’s frustration could be drawn only from his expression: a few wry smiles and the occasional frown.

Tirong was describing a visit from the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC) in early 2006. The MTCC delegation had clearly offended their shy, courteous Penan hosts.
 
The clash between forest dwellers and the MTCC is a case study in the pervasive doctrine of ‘might is right’ in
Malaysia.

 

The MTCC, a supposedly independent timber accreditation body, had certified that logging in the Selaan-Linau area surrounding Tirong’s (right) village as “legal”.

The council argued that a logging licence had been granted to the fabulously wealthy logging giant Samling by Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud over a decade ago.

Armed with MTCC certification, Samling was able to circumvent a ban and market timber from the Selaan-Linau area to credulous European buyers.

Seal of approval for logging giant

The MTCC provides accreditation for a vast area under Samling’s concession called the Selaan-Linau Forestry Management Unit (FMU). The Selaan-Linau FMU (also known, more succinctly, as ‘home’ to the people living in the forests) covers 55,949 hectares, almost a fifth of Penang.

 

The FMU envelops the communal land of 70 families in Long Kerong as well as the land of around 5,000 other Orang Ulu people in remote Baram, located in northeast Sarawak.

MTCC’s assertion that timber is “legal” ignores the fact that local communities have been protesting for 20 years since Samling moved in. The communities have asserted their native customary rights (
NCR) over the land. It is clear that Samling’s claim to the land, based on Abdul Taib’s timber concession, is still fiercely disputed.

Communities living in and around the Selaan-Linau FMU have brought a legal suit against Samling and the
Sarawak government to defend their NCR rights.

 

Four leaders - Kelesau Naan (left), Jawa Nyipa, Bilong Oyoi and Pelutan Tiun - brought the suit to overturn Abdul Taib’s concession grant to Samling.

The suit has been left languishing in the courts since 1998. Manoeuvres to bring in neighbouring Kenyah litigants to lay claim on the same land as the four Penan plaintiffs delayed the trial.

The civil court decided that the suit must now be heard in the native customary court first before Samling’s concession can be challenged in the Miri High Court. The native customary court has yet to decide which communities have a stronger claim to the disputed land.

Meanwhile, MTCC, which delineated the FMU in October 2004, has refused to recognise that these NCR claims raised any legal conflict.

In a letter written to MTCC in 2004, 19 native community chiefs from the Selaan-Linau area said: “Many of us have suffered due to the Samling logging operations: our rivers are polluted, our sacred sites damaged and our animals chased away.”

Samling claimed, on the other hand, that it “engages and assists” native communities in its concession area.

Council protects market, not forests

Malaysiakini reported that a leading land rights lawyer, Baru Bian, gave testimony on MTCC’s credibility to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Integrity in 2006 (Timber council ‘protects market, not forests’).

Baru told the committee that the MTCC was more interested in securing a market for local wood products than in promoting social and environmental justice.

 

Baru said indigenous peoples’ groups and environmental activists had pulled out of the MTCC process in 2001, because of the council’s disregard for indigenous people’s land rights.

“We have chosen to withdraw because, as we have maintained from the beginning, we feel that the MTCC initiative, among other things, has been weighed down by skewed business interests, biased government support and lack of transparency in matters where it matters most... MTCC is also noted for not defending the truth,” said
Colin Nicholas of the Centre for Orang Asli Concerns (COAC), in a letter to the MTCC on Nov 10, 2008.

Since the MTCC was set up in 1998, its board of trustees has been dominated by government bureaucrats. There has also been a healthy smattering of timber industry executives.

The rest of the board has been made up mostly of academics, native NGOs which have little to do with forest-dwellers, and a few token, compliant environmentalists, such as the Malaysian Nature Society.

Malaysian taxpayers provided the bulk of MTCC’s 2007 assets of RM86 million.

Tirong Lawing recounted the visit of an MTCC delegation to meet villagers from Long Kerong, Long Sepigen and Long Sait (both an hour’s walk from Long Kerong) in early 2006.

“The MTCC officials went to Long Sait together with Samling staff and Forestry people,” Tirong said.

“One MTCC man was very aggressive,” Tirong reported. “He said the MTCC had come to tell us to accept the company’s logging. He said if we refused, the next time they came, they would not be so friendly. They would come with the police and the Field Force.

“We were unhappy that he threatened us like that,” Tirong explained patiently, “but we told our visitors we were willing to continue to negotiate. We told them we are peace-loving, that we would even negotiate with the police. We have handled the police in the past.”

Pleas to remove the blockade

In Long Benali, further north in the Selaan-Linau FMU, villagers have said that MTCC representatives had tried to persuade the villagers to remove their logging blockade against Samling. The Long Benali blockade was the reason for a six-month suspension of Samling’s MTCC certification for Selaan-Linau, starting in May 2007.

Certification
was reinstated in November 2007 when MTCC assessors decided that Samling’s negotiations had led to “progress made to resolve the dispute”.

 

Clearly, though, the progress trumpeted by MTCC was illusory: the blockade remains standing until today, and the heated issues surrounding Samling’s invasion have not been resolved.

MTCC public relations/marketing executive Sabrina Wu
wrote in a letter to Malaysiakini last week that allegations of MTCC representatives asking Long Benali villagers to remove the blockade were “totally untrue”.

Long Benali villagers had stated unequivocally that MTCC representatives had asked them repeatedly, during visits in 2007, to remove the blockade.

MTCC representatives were taken to the village by Samling, in the company of Forestry Corporation officials. The three parties travelled together, as they did when the “holy trinity” had visited Long Sait in 2006.

A Long Benali leader, Henneson Bujang, described one well-known MTCC consultant’s pleas. “He put his arm around my shoulders and asked me again and again to remove the blockade. He said an MTCC audit was coming up. He told me with a smile that after the audit, we could put the blockade back up.”

Henneson was not amused, and the villagers refused.

S’wak timber exports RM6 bil a year

The controversies surrounding the MTCC are not unique to the logging industry. Many other Malaysian accreditation bodies, purporting to provide certification and licensing, have also been condemned for poor transparency and lack of impartiality by the Malaysian public.

 

The disgust induced by the MTCC is only one sign of the frustration of impoverished forest-dwelling communities in Malaysia.

The crushing weight of government machinery is being applied to wrestle land away from natives in
Sarawak, as well as from natives in Sabah, and Orang Asli in Pahang and other Peninsular states.

The MTCC now claims to certify wood from 4.73 million hectares of forest throughout
Malaysia – 42 percent of the nation’s permanent forested estate area. What is this certification really worth?

The MTCC, the Forestry Corporation (a privatised version of an emasculated Forestry Department), the police, the
Sarawak government, and the federal government seem determined to work together to break the spirit of forest-dwelling communities.

The rewards for taking over
NCR land are tremendous. Sarawak’s timber exports have declined over the years, but still average RM6 billion a year.

Sarawakian tycoons, working hand in hand with government politicians, hope that oil-palm plantations and giant dams will be cash cows in years to come, to replace rapidly dwindling timber stocks.

But the government and its cronies must first overcome the tenacity and perseverance of rural communities in defending their land.


KERUAH USIT is a human rights activist - anak Sarawak, bangsa Malaysia. His ‘The Antidote' column, which appears in Malaysiakini every Wednesday, is an attempt to allow the voices of marginalised people to be heard all over Malaysia. The writer can be contacted at keruah_usit@yahoo.com.