Malaysia:
The logging trail leading to tree monocultures in Sarawak
In 1989, WRM and Sahabat Alam Malaysia
(Friends of the Earth) produced the publication “The Battle for
Sarawak’s Forests”, which documented not only the destruction
of forests and forest peoples’ livelihoods in Sarawak, but also
the local resistance process, which included major road blockades
established as from 1987 by local communities for stopping the
entry of logging trucks into their territories.
The aim of that publication was to serve
as a tool for the worldwide campaign that had been launched two
years before by a large number of Northern and Southern organizations
against the social and environmental destruction resulting from
industrial logging in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.
The campaign made the issue well known
at the international level and put the Malaysian logging industry
and government in a difficult position. For instance, in July
1988, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on
member states to suspend imports of timber from Sarawak and in
October-November a number of delegations visited Malaysian embassies
in different countries to urge that logging activities not disturb
the Sarawak natives’ livelihood.
Internally, local police repression
and judicial persecution followed, coupled with a smear campaign
that termed as traitors all Malaysians that participated in the
protection of Sarawak’s peoples and forests.
In Sarawak, the main losers
from forest destruction are the Penan, a nomadic people
entirely dependent –physically, socially and culturally- on the
disappeared tropical forests. However hard their current situation
may be, it must at least serve to learn lessons for the future
and in this respect the Sarawak struggle illustrates several important
points:
- First and foremost, it shows that
local peoples and their supporters were right in opposing industrial
logging. From a Human Rights’ perspective, logging violated the
basic rights of local peoples –territorial, physical, social,
cultural- and even their right to life. Environmentally, logging
resulted in the destruction of a forest ecosystem that hosted
an enormously rich biodiversity in terms of animals and plants.
Economically, logging enriched a few while pushing the majority
into poverty.
- Secondly, and equally important, it
is today clear that the logging industry, the Sarawak state government
and the Malaysian federal government lied to the people of Sarawak.
Industry and government promised development and jobs. None of
this happened. The forest all but disappeared while people became
poorer. The only visible “development” were the roads built for
the purpose of extracting wood. In response to the international
campaign, industry and government promised to carry out “sustainable
logging”, which in fact resulted in the same type of destructive
logging as before, now under a different name.
A recent video produced by Hilary Chiew
and Chi too (“Penusah Tapa: the forgotten struggle”), documents
“the untold Penan story” through the testimonies of local people,
many of whom participated in the long struggle to protect the
forest.
Those testimonies not only provide evidence
on the disastrous social and environmental consequences of industrial
logging, but also on the current process of substitution of logged
over forests with monocultures of oil palms (aimed at producing
palm oil) and acacias (for the production of pulp for paper).
This means the final death of the forest. As one man interviewed
in the video says: “We think that the loggers are bad. But if
they only take the logs, the forests will still regenerate. But
when oil palm and tree plantations come, that will cause the trees
to be gone forever ...”
The video is available at
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4gqci_penusah-tana_politics
