翁米古（右图）表示，自两百年前，他与其他的加央族（Kayan）就居住在这个拥有1万9千的平方公里的土地上，这块土地相等于彭亨州的范围。
巴贡计划重置十年生活苦
砂原民斥政府未兑现诺言
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【独立新闻在线实习记者罗彩妹撰述/苏灵采摄影】我国政府以推动经济发展为由，在砂劳越州内建立多座大型水坝工程，这使当地许多原住民社失去原住民习俗地、生活方式也遭受影响。巴贡水坝兴建超过十年，近万名被迫搬迁至双溪阿沙重置区的原住民生计难以为继。更甚的是，政府食言，未兑现多年前的诺言。
来自巴贡，反对逼迁的原住民翁米古（Wing Miku）抨击政府以各种承诺，包括在教育、医疗设备及重置区基本设施方面，以逼使原住民们答应搬离巴贡。但是十多年下来，并未兑现承诺。
翁米古（右图）表示，自两百年前，他与其他的加央族（Kayan）就居住在这个拥有1万9千的平方公里的土地上，这块土地相等于彭亨州的范围。
他叙说当年执政党国阵作出的承偌但未曾兑现的行为。1993年，当时的首相马哈迪拟定在该区兴建水坝，当时大多数的村民们都不愿搬离从祖宗时代就居住的地方，可是政府不愿罢休，成立一个“巴贡发展委员会”（Bakun development Committee），使用一些有实权的政治家影响并促使村民离开搬迁。
1999年，当时的副首相安华依布拉欣与当地居民展开多次对话，得出的结论竟是原住民同意搬迁。当时政府也承诺提供现代、先进及拥有完善设备的重置区于原住民。 翁米古指出：“令我们感到无法相信的是，所谓的现代、先进的重置区尽是道路还未完成建立、附近连一间商店也没有的重置区，而村民则只好依靠坐落在伐木营地的几间杂货店购买日常用品。” 他说，所谓的设备完善的设施，就连邮政局、电话服务业没有，水电供应有，但并非之前所承偌的免费供应，而是需他们付费。 他补充道，政府曾承诺在重置地区建立两所学校及两间诊疗所，可是诊疗所并没有医生，只有护士而已，而已经居住了12年的重置区，现在才刚在建立中学学校的过程中。 他陆续点出政府未兑现的承偌，他指出：“之前政府所承诺给予每一户原住民家庭一块没有地契的30英亩土地，可是仅得到三英亩土地。” 承诺是空口说白话 翁米古也形容政府所承诺的只是在空口说白话而已，当时承偌原住民在巴贡栽种的每一棵树赔偿金也货不对办。
他指出：“政府秘书处信函阐明，每一颗榴梿树，可以得到马币82元的赔偿，可可树马币52元，我父亲所拥有的一块地，栽种的树算起来可以得到马币30万至40万的赔偿金，可是得到的是赔偿金仅有那马币二万四千元而已。” 他说，村民因不满赔偿金向州政府理论，州政府就说，如果不满赔偿数额就带上法庭，由法庭决定。 他也指出，大多数村民也因必须承担各种生活费用，最终不得不撤回法庭上诉案件，接受二万四千元的赔偿金额。 他形容，种种发生的事情，让他们领悟，除非有白纸黑字证明政府所作出的承偌，否则说的话都不能相信。 翁米古在演讲结尾时表示，国阵不但操纵着砂劳越整整几十年，更严重的是，因为为了配合政府所谓的发展地区，而牺牲整整一万名的原住民。 他表示：“我们必须放弃一个面积广阔如彭亨州的地区，被国阵欺骗、陷害搬迁至现在的地方。” 也是部落客的翁米古昨晚八时在隆雪隆雪华堂讲堂的一个“寻找遗失的公民——砂州原住民的生存权与公民权”的讲座会上现身说法，阐述他与其余大约一万名的原住民如何在政治当权者的游说及逼迁的经历。 该讲座会是由隆雪华堂社经委员会、犀鸟力量行动小组（Kenyalang Power Initiative）及华总的马来西亚20年行动方略主办。当晚主讲人包括Wing Miku、电机工程师黄天保及《独立新闻在线》助理编辑曾薛霏，主持人为周泽南。 河水受伐木活动污染
另外一位主讲人，曾薛霏（右图）也与出席者分享她在走访巴贡及双溪阿沙重置区的经验。她透过幻灯片阐述该地区的环境、村民日常活动的照片，解释这些原住民在重置区中面对的种种生活状况、食物等问题。 她以照片显示距离巴贡水坝附近的两条河流，分别是巴鲁依河（Sungai Balui）及可央河（Sungai Koyan），该流的看起来严重受污染，水的颜色犹如在麻麻档买的拉茶。 她手上拿了一包拉茶说道：“如果你比较河流的颜色与这包拉茶，河流的颜色跟我手中拉茶的颜色没分别。” 她补充：“由于附近的伐木活动导致河流严重污染，以前原住民可以从河流的到干净的水源，可是现在只可依赖政府的水源供应，必须缴付费用之余，又得不到有品质的水源。” 原住民活在紧急状态中？ 她也以紧急状态时期，住在森林边缘的华人被迫圈入华人新村的经验与原住民搬到重置区的经验相比较，并点出他们都是被迫搬迁到新的环境。 她忆述道，她的婆婆曾告诉她以前在森林边缘生活的情况，他们可以耕种，并且养猪和养鸡。搬到新村后，确实有地有房子，但是行动受到限制。
尽管重置区的原住民并未被篱笆围着，但是如今他们出入都得依赖车，跟被限制居住无甚分别。 之前，他们可使用船通过河流到达另一个地方，而现在居住在重置区的原住民必须依赖马路。 曾薛霏表示：“如果他们无法购买四轮交通工具或付车费，他们只好待留在家中。我们听过一个例子，一个老伯从他搬迁至重置区，他已超过十年未出过家门。难道这就是政府承诺人民，即你可以得到先进的设施却无法享有这些设施吗？” 此外，新长屋的素质也恶劣，如屋顶漏水，长屋的狭窄走廊、狭小的客厅及厨房。 她表示，这并不是原有的长屋设置，长屋必须很宽大，他们需要宽大的走廊进行交流活动，这使原住民必须使用她们的钱装修长屋。这15间重置区的长屋也面临一样的问题及状况。 主持人周泽南较后笑称，若搬到重置区真的如被圈入华人新村一样，那是不是意味着原住民仍活在紧急状态之中？ 伐木办报老板会否助原民上学 另外，曾薛霏也在讲座中着重在于原住民小孩失学问题。根据政府就本南族女性面临性侵害所做的实地考察报告，在乌鲁峇南区，本南小孩失学的情况占了三成，在双溪阿沙重置区，因家人无法承担小孩上学的交通费用而无法求学。如果步行上学，居住的地方距离学校也至少七公里，走路也非常难。
她以一名失学的本南少女海伦（Helen）为例：“今年才13岁的她只读过一年书，现在她已没有去上学，在家帮忙她的妈妈做家务。只有13岁的她，日后会有怎样的前途。，值得大家去思考。” 她也抛出一个疑问，以伐木业赚大钱的常青集团（Rimbunan Hijau）老板张晓卿，拥有的《星洲日报》拥有百万读者。该报备有一个协助中国及柬埔寨孩童上学的爱心助养活动。这个活动成立一个基金向公众收集捐款，所收集的款项就用来协助该国家的孩童上学。 她说：“大家试想想，这个老板既然可以协助外国儿童，难道不能协助原住民孩童及其他面临求学问题的孩童？” 长青集团（Rimbunan Hijau Group）是马来西亚其中一家最大规模的多产业公司。常青集团创立于1975年，它主要的经营业务包括棕榈种植业、媒体、酒店服务及其它领域等。 该集团已成功的在全球各地建立业务。这些国家包括澳大利亚、柬埔寨、加拿大、中国、赤道几内亚、加蓬、香港、印度尼西亚、韩国、马来西亚、缅甸、新西兰、巴布亚新几内亚、俄罗斯、新加坡和美国。
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Friday, September 25, 2009
A Hole The Size Of Singapore In The Middle Of Sarawak
Bakun dam to be much worse than PKFZ scandal
Kua Kia Soong
Sep 22, 09
8:41am
Comments by Sarawak Headhunter in red.
Nearly 50 years after independence for Sarawak, we see a comparison with the 'Highland Clearances' in Scotland during the 18th century when the highlanders were driven off their lands for capitalistic sheep farming.
Highlanders of Sarawak, beware! Not even Idris Jala can save you!
The English did it with brutality and thoroughness through “butcher” Lord Cumberland and even obliterated the 'wild' Celtic mode of life.
Even if not so 'wild', there goes the Sarawak highland native mode of life, just as surely.
What we have seen in Sarawak recently has the same capitalist logic, namely, to drive the indigenous peoples out of their native customary lands so that these lands can be exploited for their commercial value and the indigenous people can be “freed” to become wage labourers.
Freedom to be slaves to the dams and their owners, Taib Mahmud and family and their insatiably greedy "industrialist" cronies.
Thus, even though the accursed Bakun dam had been suspended in 1997 due to the financial crisis, the government still went ahead to displace 10,000 indigenous peoples to the Sungai Asap resettlement camp in 1998.
Well, there is a reason for this - the contract for the Sungai Asap camp had already been given out to a multinational company. After all, the whole Bakun area, which is the size of the island of Singapore and home to the indigenous peoples, had already been thoroughly logged...
And just how much would timber from a virgin forest area the size of Singapore have fetched? The size of Singapore is about 646 sq kilometres, equivalent to 64,600 hectares or 159,626 acres. Based on a conservative yield of 30 tonnes per acre, that would amount to about 4.8 million tonnes of timber, worth RM2.1 billion at RM450 per tonne, if it was all classified as MLH.
Clear felling could easily yield twice the tonnage, while better species than MLH could be sold for between twice to more than quadruple the price of MLH (depending on species). Easily at least RM5-6 billion worth of timber would have been stolen in this manner, just from Bakun alone.
Any benefit to the state? Only nominal, since the bulk of the timber income would have been siphoned off and deposited into overseas bank accounts, in this case by Taib and Ting Pek Khiing.
See Sarawak Headhunter's post on "Timber - How Do They Cheat?" to get an idea of the scale of the stealing that has been going on and perpetrated by Sarawak logging companies.
Was any real accounting done? Does anyone trust Taib Mahmud?
All this happened while Dr Mahathir was the prime minister. Wasn't he a liability to the BN government then?
What liability? From their point of view of course he was an asset worth billions.
I was part of the fact-finding mission to Sungai Asap in 1999 and even then we could see the destruction of so many unique indigenous communities and their cultures, including the Ukit tribe.
There was only one word to describe what had been done to these indigenous peoples and their centuries-old cultures... wicked!
Evil more like it! That's how Taib likes it!
Banned from my own country
As a result of my concern for the indigenous peoples and the natural resources of Sarawak, I was told at Kuching airport in August 2007 that I could not enter Sarawak. So much for 1Malaysia! So much for national integration! So much for nearly 50 years of independence! I was not even welcome in my own country.
As a threat to a multi-billion RM a year scam, of course you wouldn't be welcome. This is the land of divide and rule, not integration.
What independence? The natives of Sarawak have just traded one colonial master for another, albeit one of their own - Taib Mahmud - who has lorded it over them for more than 28 years. Taib has raided, looted and plundered Sarawak's timber resources, while the other Malayan colonial master BN has done the same to its petroleum resources.
Once Taib is gone, it won't be long before Sarawak starts asking for real independence.
But the contracts for the resettlement scheme and the logging are chicken feed compared to the mega-bucks to be reaped from the mega-dams. Even before the Bakun dam ever got started, Malaysian taxpayers had to compensate dam builder Ekran Bhd and the other “stakeholders” close to RM1 billion in 1997.
How much does it cost to pay our 'mata-mata' (police) to investigate the alleged scandalous rape of our Penan women?
The contracts from building the Bakun dam and the undersea cable run in excess of RM20 billion. Malaysian taxpayers won't know the final cost until they are told the cost overruns when the projects have been completed.
But if the Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) scandal is anything to go by, the leaks and non-accountability all along the line will result in Malaysian taxpayers paying billions for the same kind of daylight robbery.
That is the name of the game and that is what we get for voting in such a government and continuing to keep them in power.
In the early 90s, when the government was trying to assure us that there would be no irresponsible logging in Sarawak, I pointed out in Parliament that if the government could not monitor the Bukit Sungai Putih permanent forest and wildlife reserve just 10 minutes from Kuala Lumpur, how did they expect us to believe they could monitor the forests in Bakun?
Likewise today, if the government cannot monitor a project in Port Klang just half an hour from Kuala Lumpur, how can they assure us that they can monitor a project deep in upriver Sarawak and through 650km of the South China Sea?
How can we be assured that we will get to the bottom of politically-linked scandals when the Sarawak police tell us they don't have the resources to investigate the rape of Penan women and girls?
How can we be assured that the Sarawak state government cares about its indigenous peoples and its natural resources when NGO activists are banned from entering Sarawak to investigate a part of their own country?
Taib Mahmud and his evil regime do not care and neither do the Malayan colonial masters in Putrajaya.
It makes no economic sense
In 1980, the Bakun dam was proposed with a power generating capacity of 2,400MW even though the projected energy needs for the whole of Sarawak was only 200MW for 1990.
The project was thus coupled with the proposal to build the world's longest (650km) undersea cable to transmit electricity to the peninsula. An aluminum smelter at Sarawak's coastal town of Bintulu was also proposed to take up the surplus energy.
In 1986, the project was abandoned because of the economic recession although the then PM Mahathir announced just before the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that this was “proof of Malaysia's commitment to the environment”.
So what happened to that commitment, Mahathir?
Mahathir a man of commitment? Mahathir has all his life been committed only to grandscale corruption and deception.
In 1993, with the upturn in the Malaysian economy, the government once again announced the revival of the Bakun dam project. To cushion the expected protests, then Energy Minister S Samy Vellu gave Parliament a poetic description of a “series of cascading dams” and not one large dam as had been originally proposed.
Before long, it was announced that the Bakun dam would be a massive 205-metre high concrete face rockfill dam - one of the highest dams of its kind in the world - and it would flood an area the size of Singapore island.
The undersea cable was again part of the project. There was also a plan for an aluminum plant, a pulp and paper plant, the world's biggest steel plant and a high-tension and high-voltage wire industry.
Have feasibility studies been done to see if there will be adequate local, regional and international demand for all these products?
Six years later, after the economy was battered by the Asian Financial Crisis, the government again announced that the project would be resumed albeit on a smaller scale of 500MW capacity.
Before long in 2001, the 2,400MW scale was once again proposed although the submarine cable had been shelved. Today we read reports about the government and companies still contemplating this hare-brained undersea scheme which is now estimated to cost a whopping RM21 billion!
Once it is all under the sea, who's going to know exactly how much it really cost? That's the whole idea. If there are no mass protests, the costs could double or triple without any problem - it will all be justified.
More mega-dams to be built
The recent announcement that the Sarawak government intends to build two more mega-dams in Sarawak apart from the ill-fated Bakun dam is cause for grave concern.
Malaysian taxpayers, Malaysian forests and Malaysian indigenous peoples will again be the main victims of this misconceived plan. We have been told that some 1,000 more indigenous peoples will have to be displaced from their ancestral lands to make way for these two dams.
Apart from the human cost, ultimately it will be the Malaysian consumers who pay for this expensive figment of Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud's wild imagination. Indeed, enough taxpayers' money has been wasted - Sarawak Hidro has already spent some RM1.5 billion on the Bakun dam project.
It is no longer a figment of Taib's wild imagination but is in the process of being implemented right now. Only his defeat in the next State elections will stop it.
Right now, the country is being fed conflicting reports about energy demand.
There is supposed to be a 43 percent oversupply of electricity capacity in peninsular Malaysia. Experienced Bakun dam watchers will tell you such conflicting and mutually contradictory assertions have been used by the dam proponents to justify every flip flop of this misconceived project.
Apart from the economic cost and the wastage, how are investors supposed to plan for the long-term and medium term? What is the long-term plan for Bakun? Can Bakun compete with the rest of the world or for that matter, Indonesia?
All this doesn't matter.
The suggestion for aluminum smelters to take up the bulk of Bakun electricity have been mentioned ever since the conception of the Bakun dam project because they are such a voracious consumer of energy. Even so, has there ever been any proper assessment of the market viability of such a project with the cheaper operating costs in China?
This also does not matter.
Does it matter that the co-owner of one of the smelters is none other than Cahaya Mata Sarawak (CMS) Bhd Group, a conglomerate controlled by Taib's family business interest?
This doesn't matter either.
Sarawak's tin-pot government
Clearly, Bakun energy and Sarawak's tin-pot governance do not give confidence to investors. First it was Alcoa, and then Rio Tinto - both giant mining multinationals - had expressed second thoughts about investing in Sarawak.
"Investing in" or "stealing from"?
Concerned NGOs have all along called for the abandonment of this monstrous Bakun dam project because it is economically ill-conceived, socially disruptive and environmentally disastrous.
The environmental destruction is evident many miles downstream since the whole Bakun area has been logged by those who have already been paid by Sarawak Hidro.
The social atrophy among the 10,000 displaced indigenous peoples at Sungai Asap resettlement scheme remains the wicked testimony of the Mahathir/Taib era. The empty promises and damned lives of the displaced peoples as forewarned by NGOs in 1999 have now been borne out.
The economic viability of the Bakun dam project has been in doubt from the beginning and the announcement to build two more dams merely reflects a cavalier disregard for the indigenous peoples, more desecration of Sarawak's natural resources and a blatant affront to sustainable development.
Does anyone think that they really care?
When will Malaysians ever learn?
When the damage becomes too big to be repaired, mere reform is out of the question and revolution is the only answer.
Dr KUA KIA SOONG is director of Suaram. He was member of parliament for Petaling Jaya from 1990 to 1995.