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Unga Paran and Mutang Urud are two tribal people from Sarawak. One is
a Penan, the other a Kelabit, both people of the forest. Last week they
were in Tokyo, a place as far removed from a tropical forest as they could
get. But Japan is the final destination of many of the trees cut from their
homeland – and was the final stop on a world tour to draw attention to the
destruction of their forest homes.

In Australia, the US, Canada, Britain, Scandinavia and other European
countries, they put their case eloquently and convincingly. Their message
was simple. ‘Don’t build you home with ours.’

The message was especially important in Japan, where their visit coincided
with the annual meeting of the International Tropical Timber Organisation
in Yokohama. ITTO is a trade organisation representing both nations that
produce timber and those that consume it. Although ITTO has set itself the
task of developing tropical forests ‘in a sustainable manner’, Unga Paran
and Mutang Urud fear that in a country which throws away 2 billion chopsticks
each year and where most of the imported tropical timber is burnt in power
stations after a short life holding up concrete on construction sites, the
logic of their arguments will have fallen mostly on deaf ears.

Another fear, which they seem almost to dismiss, is that they are likely
to be arrested as soon as they set foot in Sarawak again. Their crime is
to have dared to tell the outside world what is happening in their forests.

In May, Fred Pearce wrote a strongly worded article on the disastrous
logging of rainforest in Sarawak (see ‘Hit and run in Sarawak’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,
12 May 1990). He described how timber companies were working in some areas
24 hours a day with the help of floodlights; how the local inhabitants were
attempting to protest by forming human barricades across the logging roads,
and how campaigners were looking forward to the publication of a report
on the state of Sarawak’s forests commissioned by the ITTO. The forest people
hoped that its findings would generate universal outrage at such wanton
destruction.

The ITTO’s mission concluded that logging in Sarawak is not sustainable
and that it is destroying the environment. The primary forests will be logged
out within 11 years, it said. Other, grimmer, estimates put the figure as
low as seven years. The ITTO team recommended that no logging concessions
should be allocated in about half a million hectares of forest until the
legal position of the native peoples’ rights is sorted out. Despite repeated
appeals by many environmental groups and human rights organisations, such
as Survival International, the mission did not investigate the impact of
logging on the local peoples’ livelihood, questioning whether this subject
was any of their business.

Although the report presented damning evidence against logging, it failed
to create the sense of urgency needed to bring about change. The logging
continues unabated and the local people continue to protest.

Sarawak contains the richest rainforest in the world with an untold
biodiversity of still undiscovered species. Scientific research had accelerated
in recent years but nothing like fast enough to keep pace with the logging.
No one knows how many species become extinct each day. We are only just
beginning to guess how many species there are.

In 1977, I led a Royal Geographical Society expedition to the newly
created National Park of Mulu in the highlands of Sarawak. For 15 months
we lived there while 140 scientists came and went, making the first in-depth
multidisciplinary study of a rainforest. The study sparked off the growth
of public interest in the subject, and the loss of tropical rainforest is
now a matter of universal concern.

There are many causes of deforestation, and cures are difficult to bring
about. But the rate of destruction has doubled in the past decade, and commerical
logging accounts for a substantial part of this. With well over half the
world’s hardwood logs coming out of Sarawak, there is every reason why the
spotlight of concern should be focused there.

Two-thirds of Sarawak’s timber goes to Japan. But the state also accounts
for most of the sawn tropical timber going to Britain. Imports from Sarawak
this year overtook those from the Philippines, where stocks are running
out. While the financial benefit to the state makes impressive reading –
2.5 billion Pounds a year in export earnings – the sad and undisputed fact
is that virtually every state politician in the ruling parties is financially
involved in the industry, which is itself run in an utterly corrupt and
unsustainable way. Concessions are always sold or given as favours, most
of the timber leaves the country as whole logs, denying the local people
of employment, and the environment is permanently degraded in the process.

Corruption is at the heart of the problem in Sarawak and it is difficult
to combat the internal corruption of one state internationally. Countries
are understandably sensitive to criticism from outside and do their utmost
to dismiss it as being either politically inspired or an economic plot financed
by commercial competitors. Anyone who has followed the extraordinary rise
in international shock at the rape of the world’s rainforests must see how
absured these suggestions are. Nonetheless, the best hope is for change
to come from within.

On the Mulu expedition we worked with people from many of the tribal
groups of the interior, as well as Malay and Chinese scientists from the
coast. Kenyah, Kayan, Berawan and Kelabit people came from their respective
longhouses, and we also met many Penan, some of whom had recently settled
on the riverbanks, while others were still living their traditional nomadic
lives deep in the forest.

The easy familiarity of these people with what our international group
of scientists at first found a hostile environment, made working alongside
them a constant pleasure. More significantly, their knowledge and understanding
of the extraordinary diversity around us was the single thing that impressed
everyone most. Without them we would have achieved far less than we did.
Since we left, we have watched helpless and dismayed as their territory
has been laid waste.

Protest is not looked on tolerantly in Malaysia, where members of environmental
and human rights groups, as well as opposition politicians, are regularly
jailed for expressing opinions the government does not like. This has not
deterred the many indigenous people of Sarawak’s interior from passive and
peaceful campaigning to prevent their forests from being removed, their
land impoverished, their rivers polluted and their livelihood destroyed.

Defending their land in this way was made a criminal offence in 1987.
So far, more than 300 tribal people have been arrested on various pretexts,
taken from the forest to squalid jails on the coast and fined exorbitant
sums by local magistrates. When they refused to pay on the grounds that
there was no case to answer or that they had no money, High Court judges
have consistently upheld their defence and released them. The latest such
case was heard on 9 November when 14 young Kenyah from Long Geng village
on the Belaga River were allowed home three months after being arrested
for the first time. Last week the human blockades were in place again at
Long Geng and a substantial number of police are being moved into the area.

It takes courage to stand up for your rights in Sarawak. But courage
is a commodity which the tribal people of the interior do not lack. Old
men and women have also been arrested and many of the blockades have been
inspired by the nomadic Penan. The Penan stand to lose most as their traditional
hunting grounds are invaded and their fear of being locked up in dark prisons
is even greater than that of people used to living in longhouses.

What reception awaits Unga Paran and Mutang Urud when they return to
Sarawak is uncertain, but Malaysia does not take kindly to having its shortcomings
exposed to the outside world.

In October 1987, a young Kayan environmentalist activist, Harrison Ngau,
was one of the first protestors to be arrested. He was held for two months
– the maximum period allowed without trial. In 1988 I led a mission to Malaysia
organised by the IUCN (the world conservation union), Survival International
and Friends of the Earth, for which Ngau worked in Malaysia. We were invited
to discuss with ministers the dramatic increase in the rate of logging in
Sarawak and why people were being locked up for opposing it. We were prevented
from meeting Ngau, who was under house arrest in Marudi after his release
from jail.

We did meet Ngau’s lawyer, who assured us that international pressure
had helped his case. Later we had a profoundly disturbing meeting with James
Wong, Sarawak’s minister for the environment and tourism. Wong is also boss
of Limbang Trading, one of the state’s largest timber companies, with concessions
to log about 300,000 hectares. His rejection of all scientifict opinion
is legendary and well-documented, but his reply when I asked him whether
he was not concerned that deforestation might affect the climate has become
apocryphal: ‘We get too much rain in Sarawak; it stops me playing golf.’

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Harrison Ngau may have been
under house arrest for much of the past two years, but that has not lowered
his profile in international circles – or at home. His friends have nominated
him for prestigious and valuable prizes. In 1988 he was one of the recipients
of the Right Livelihood Award, the ‘alternative Nobel prize’, and in 1990
he won the Goldman Environmental Prize.

With the money from the prizes, Ngau campaigned for election to the
Malaysian Federal Parliament, standing against Luhat Wan, the Malaysian
deputy Minister of Public Works, the candidate backed by the timber companies.
Two weeks ago he won the election.

One swallow does not make a summer, but the collapse of communism in
eastern Europe began with the election of ex-jailbirds such as Vaclav Havel.
We can only hope that a similar collapse of corruption in the face of people
power may be about to take place in Sarawak.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison is President of Survival International, a worldwide
movement to support tribal peoples. They can be contacted at 310 Edgeware
Road, London W2 1DY. Telephone 071-723 5535.