|
|
Extracted from Malaysiakini
A crime against Tania's humanity
Keruah Usit
| Apr 29,
Tania was in Form Four when she first visited a timber camp. She
was a lively girl of 15, well-liked among her schoolmates. Like all her
friends, Tania enjoyed swimming, playing netball and making fun of boys in her
small rural school in
At the end of one school term, four years ago, when all the
children were returning to their far-flung villages, Tania was picked up by a
4x4 truck.
A large timber company, which was operating a concession in her village's area,
owned the truck. The driver should have sent Tania back home, three hours'
drive by logging track. Instead, the driver took her to one of the timber camps
about an hour's drive of her school.
Almost all of Tania's schoolmates were boarders at their remote secondary
school. The students' villages were spread out far and wide - a day's walk, or
even further, from the school. To get home for a term break, or go back to
school, they climbed into three-tonne monster logging trucks, or they squeezed
like blue-and-white livestock, into the open back of a 4x4 logging vehicle.
The Company’s broken promises
Most of these vehicles belong to a timber giant, called ‘The Company’ by local
villagers. The Company extracts enormous profits from the forests belonging to
Tania's village and other communities in the area. Many resisted the invasion
of their native customary rights (
The Company had promised transport for students on its fleet of
trucks, free of charge, every time the children needed to get home or return to
classes. The Company told Tania's village that its bulldozers would help to
shore up dams for the village's piped water supply. The Company said that
schools and clinics follow after the logging tracks were built, and that logging
would bring development to these remote communities.
The Company employed ‘community liaison officers’ to preach the good news to
the villagers. These public relations people presented jerseys to village
football teams, and handed out cash at Gawai and
Christmas.
But after logging took off, the Company talked less to the
villagers. Wild game and fish, usually abundant, became scarce. The villagers'
water supply turned brown, because of logging around the water catchments on
the hills. The water coming through the pipes "looked like
The local people complained to the district office, but their appeals for help
were ignored. Later, the Company went back on its promise to use its bulldozers
to deepen the dam for the water catchment supplying
Tania's village.
Young men from Tania's village felled a tree to set up a blockade across the
company's logging access road, to try to make the company keep its promises.
The Company lost tens of thousands of ringgit a day.
The Company brought in hired thugs, or samseng,
from the towns, to force the villagers to take down the blockade. The young men
from Tania's village fired a couple of blowpipe darts, without any poison in
the tips, into the door of the thugs' guardhouse at one timber camp, and most
of the thugs fled back to the towns.
Then the police came to Tania's village. The young men tried to reason with the
police, but were met with intimidation and threats. The blockade was dismantled
by force. The Company continued to build logging tracks and drag trees through
the forest to the ports on the coast, and beyond, to
A daughter's disappearance
Against this backdrop, Tania might have been expected
not to want to visit a timber camp. But she was driven to a timber camp all the
same by the logging Company driver. Camp workers told Tania's father later that
Tania had gone there voluntarily, to "watch TV and drink beer".
At first, Tania's father waited for her to return from school as he saw the
other schoolchildren coming home to their parents. After Tania failed to turn
up, her father went to her school to look for her, hitching rides along the
way.
Tania's father arrived at her school, and found out that Tania had
left school with an unknown man, in a truck belonging to the Company. Tania's
father asked for help from the headmaster, but the headmaster said Tania had
already left the school, and was no longer his responsibility.
Tania's distraught father hitched a ride from one timber camp to the next,
searching for his daughter, making his way along the many miles of long, dusty
logging track. At each camp, he was told Tania had not been there, or had just
left.
After three weeks of desperate searching, Tania's father found her in one of
the timber camps, and took her home. Tania was as relieved to see her father,
as he was to see her. But she talked little about her ordeal. And she did not
want to go back to school.
Tania's father later brought Tania to the nearest police outpost,
in a small township, six hours from home, to make a report of rape. The police
accepted the report but shrugged their shoulders. The police could not, they
said, investigate a crime so far away. The police did not mention the distance
they had travelled to demolish the logging blockade at Tania's home village.
Tania's father was a poor farmer, and did not know where to turn. He travelled
even further downriver, to the divisional police station. He spent a crippling
amount of money to get there. His report was accepted, but again, his appeal
for justice was not answered. He was told to go home.
Several months after returning home, Tania recovered her animated spirit. But
the 15-year-old never behaved again like a schoolgirl. She had learnt some of
the mannerisms of a grown-up. She looked, in some ways, like a grown-up,
although she was only a girl. She still played netball with her friends, but
she was no longer one of them.
Tania is now in her late teens, working in a bar in a town, many hours from her
home village. She gave up school soon after she was taken to the timber camp.
Sexual abuse by loggers
Other rural girls and women, throughout
Two different logging companies
denied their workers were involved in sexual abuse of girls
in their areas of operation. Their public relations staff claimed that, on the
contrary, the companies worked hand in hand with local communities, to bring
development to these rural areas.
Other people from rural communities tell of bitter experiences too. One young
man, Musa, described the effects of the intrusion of
a logging company on his home village. The logging company was the same giant
operating in the area of Tania's village.
Musa was staying with relatives in a longhouse, a
day's walk from his own home village. He was explaining why he had left home,
and recounting his life story, sitting on the bare wooden floorboards, in the
small arc of light of a kerosene lamp, while he smoked cigarette after
cigarette.
Musa said most of the
young people in his home village, both men and women, had left home, just as he
had, since a logging camp had begun operations there two decades ago.
"The logging camp workers come into our village at night," he said
quietly. They are usually drunk on ‘langkau’, and
they're looking for a fight. They harass our women. The girls and women hide
from them.
“The timber camp workers try to take the women away. That's why I left. I
couldn't stand it any longer. If I'd stayed in my home village, I'd have wanted
to fight. And then I might not have survived."
Some communities are still able to look after their young. One exemplary rural
secondary school in Limbang division in
The school's headmaster and teachers have taken their own
initiative to source funding for these travel arrangements. The teachers
themselves oversee their students being picked up and dropped off. The rural
communities in that part of Limbang are delighted.
We all have a role to play in keeping our children safe. We all share a
responsibility for our children's well-being, and for justice, everywhere in
Crimes against humanity in rural communities are crimes against our collective
humanity. Will the rest of us stand up against these injustices?
Tania and Musa are not their real names.
KERUAH