The US State Department report, released April 8, 2011, cites claims by indigenous rights groups that Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s government has leased the Penan tribe’s land “to logging companies and land developers in exchange for political favors and money”.
Taib Mahmud has been in power for 30 years, and won state elections again last week. Thousands of Penan tribe’s people were unable to vote because they have not been issued with identity cards.
The US report describes accounts that “logging companies harassed and sometimes threatened vocal Penan leaders’ and that ‘workers from two logging companies… regularly sexually abused Penan women and girls”. A government minister has confirmed the rapes, but no action has been taken against the perpetrators.
The hunter-gatherer Penan are fighting to keep their last remaining rainforest safe from the logging companies. One Penan woman told Survival International, “Our land and our river have been destroyed by the logging company, by the oil palm plantation. It brings hardship and suffering to our land.”
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, “The State Department report adds weight to growing worldwide condemnation of the Sarawak government’s treatment of the Penan. The Penan’s human rights are being ignored, their forests destroyed, and their survival threatened.”
Background
The Penan tribe lives in the rainforests of the interior of Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo. Traditionally nomadic, most of the 10-12,000 Penan now live in settled communities, but continue to rely on the forest for their existence. Some still live largely nomadically. Unlike the other indigenous peoples of Sarawak, who grow most of their food, the Penan are hunter-gatherers.
The Sarawak state government does not recognize the Penan’s rights to their land. Since the 1970s, it has backed large-scale commercial logging on tribal land across Sarawak.
In 1987, many Penan communities protested against the logging of their land by blockading the roads cut though the forest by the logging companies. More than a hundred Penan were arrested. The Penan have kept up their resistance, and continue to mount blockades against the companies. Some have managed to prevent the companies from entering their land, but others have seen much of their forest devastated.
Where all of the valuable trees have been cut down, the companies have started to remove the forests completely in order to establish oil palm plantations. The Sarawak government also plans to build twelve new hydroelectric dams, flooding many villages belonging to Penan and other indigenous people.
The Penan are battling to stop the destruction of their last remaining forests, and their way of life.
Check the following link for the US State Department Human Rights Report for Malaysia:
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/eap/154391.htm
About Survival International
Survival International is a human rights’ organization formed in 1969 that campaigns for the rights of indigenous people and uncontacted tribes, seeking to help them to determine their own future. Their campaigns generally focus on tribal peoples’ fight to keep their ancestral lands, culture and their own way of living. Survival works for the people who they call “some of the most vulnerable on earth”. A part of their mission is to educate people from misconceptions that help justify violations of human rights against indigenous people, and the risks that they face from the advancement of corporations, governments and also good intentions based on an idea of “development” that is forced upon them. Survival believes that in fact their alternative way of living is not lacking, they represent a model of sustainability in the environment that they are a part of and they possess a rich culture from which we could learn. For more information, visit www.survivalinternational.org.
Source: Survival International Press Release dated April 19, 2011.
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