Indigenous Peoples' Heroes and Martyrs in Asia

Indigenous Peoples' Heroes and Martyrs in Asia

By Komeok and the Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia (The Indigenous Peoples Network of Malaysia) JOAS)

Introduction

 Asia is home to 2/3 of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples. They share a common situation with other indigenous peoples in other parts of the world – they are part of the most marginalized and discriminated. Based on Human Development index (HDI), indigenous peoples are overrepresented among the poor, illiterate, malnourished and stunted.

This is largely due to historical injustices committed to indigenous peoples especially by states, and the continuing viola-tion of their collective rights to their lands, territories and resources, the right to self-determination including on development concerns, and to their cultural diversity and dignity as distinct peoples.

In response to this condition, indigenous peoples across Asia and beyond have been actively resisting on the impositions of states and others especially in grabbing their lands and resources in the name of development.

The militarization of their communities for “national security”, the criminalization of their traditional occupations in the name of “conservation”, the commercialization of their cul-tures and the utter disregard of their wellbeing has given rise to indigenous peoples movements to defend their rights and promote their aspirations for equality, justice, peace and dignity for all.

These movements are shaped and being led by the many indigenous men and women who are courageous, selfless and determined to fight for the rights of indigenous peoples. Many have sacrificed their lives in being at the forefront of the indigenous peoples struggles.

This publication tells the stories of the some of these indigenous men and women. Asia Indigenous People's Pact (AIPP) is humbled by their sacrifices and recognizes their invaluable contributions in advancing the indigenous peoples movement in Asia. This book is a tribute to them as we continue to be inspired by their leadership and martyrdom for the benefit of indigenous peoples. This book is also dedicated to their families, friends, relatives, communities and organizations.

Penan Hero: Headman Kelesau Naan “We say we want to preserve the Forest because we have a good life here. We are the Penan and we are the VOICE for the rainforest of Sarawak, Malaysia.”

History of our Situation as Penan.

 According to headman Kelesau Naan, Penans are peoples originating from the Baram area dating back a few thousand years ago. No other people and no government existed before in the area.

Only the Penans lived there together with the Temedo (or the rhinoceros, abundantly found in the Baram area) and other animals. The Penans are the only true nomadic people in Sarawak and are among the last hunter-gatherers in the world. We make our home under the rainforest canopy, deep within Sarawak’s virgin jungle.

Until today, we continue to roam the rainforest using blow-pipes to hunt wild boar and deer. Previously, the Penans worshipped a supreme God called Bungan. However, an increasing number of Penans have converted to Christianity as they abandoned the nomadic lifestyle in favour of settlement in longhouses.

 Sarawak is known as the land of the White Rajah, the hornbill and the Orang Utans. Sarawak is the largest state in Malaysia being equivalent in size to Austria. It is often described as Borneo’s “Hidden Paradise” with its vast rainforest, which is home to the world’s richest and most diverse eco-system.

It is also here where you find the world’s largest flower, Rafflesia, and a myriad of species of flora and insects still waiting to be discovered. Sarawak was once ruled by the Sultan of Brunei. The first government was established during his rule.

Then, in 1838, the Sultan gave James Brooke, a trader, a portion of Sarawak as a reward for his help in defeating his enemies. Later, James Brooke acquired the whole of Sarawak through manipulation and imposition of taxes on the people.

When the people protested, James Brooke made use of the local Dayaks to fight against the other indigenous groups who refused to pay taxes. By then, other indigenous groups such as the Kenyah, Kayan, Kelabit had entered the Baram area.

The Kenyah originated from Usun Apau in Central Borneo while the Kelabit came from various places in Upper Limbang-Brunei area such as Sungai Ruap, Batu Lawi, Temburong and Lawas. They settled down in the Baram area to seek refuge from enemy attacks during the headhunting period.

(A full account of the history of Sarawak is not possible here, but briefly, James Brooke and his descendants continued to rule Sarawak until 1943, followed by British colonialists from 1943 to 1963, with an interrup-tion during 1945-1946 when the Japanese occupied the state. In 1965 Sarawak together with Sabah were incorporated into the Federation of Malaysia).

Threats by Logging and Plantations The Government made modern laws that contradicted the adat, or native customary laws. Penan rights over land and forests in the Baram area, which pre-existed these modern laws by thousands of years, were not recognized by the government under the new laws. Penan customary laws uphold full rights of the Penans over the land and areas in the Baram Area.

Our leaders and hundreds of our people are willing to face arrest and imprisonment to protect and preserve our ancestral rights over our ancestral lands. Ignoring our ancestral rights over our land, the government created and passed laws that allow the issuance of licenses to timber companies for logging. They also allow plantation companies to open up large areas for oil palm cultivation, thereby destroying the forests and polluting the rivers.

Air pollution is also caused by open burning of the cleared land resulting in haze. The irony is that the government has also passed laws pro-hibiting the killing of protected animals, for example, the Wildlife Protection Act (1972), which imposes fines or imprisonment to wrongdoers.

Meanwhile, the government 20 issues licenses to companies, allowing them to legally encroach into virgin forests for logging, thereby disturbing the wildlife and their habitats. More importantly, the forest that provides food for both humans and wildlife are destroyed.

In view of the situation, our Penan community leaders reiterate that our customary rights must be respected, including the right to make our own laws on the management of forest resources and animals. We have a deep pre-existing understanding of the protection, management and conservation of the forest and its nat-ural resources.

We know how to manage the forest and harvest its resources in a sustainable manner. There is no need for the government or any outside agency to teach the indigenous people. Instead, the government and outsiders should learn from the Penan and other indigenous peoples.

When logging concessions were established and sold to international corporations by the government, our presence and dependence on the forest, our native customary land rights, and our sustainable forest practices were ignored completely.

By the end of 1986, 2.8 million hectares of forest had been cleared in Malaysia, much of which was our ancestral land. In the 1980s, our leaders started to organize the com-munities. They turned to more powerful actions and erected 25 blockades across logging roads in the Baram and Limbang Districts of Sarawak.

Later the same year, the State Assembly declared the action of blockading a logging road an illegal offense punishable by a two-year prison sentence without trial and a RM6000 fine. In a further attempt to make our voices heard, a delegation of Penan chiefs and elders from several ethnic groups including the Kenyah, travelled to Kuala Lumpur aiming to meet with National Ministers.

The Penan people erected a wooden blockade in the late 1980s, which lasted for seven months before being torn down. Still, logging continued to destroy the Penan’s source of food, medicine, building materials and other requirements for life derived from the resources of the forest.

The government failed to act on its promise of monitoring the activities of the logging companies. To prevent any further infringement on our native customary rights (NCR) over our land, the Penans erected a new blockade on roads cutting through their customary lands in the 5th Division Penan of Upper Lim-bang.

Despite international pressure on the Malaysian government to stop logging and to recognize indigenous rights, 27 more Penans were arrested at the end of the year for blockading.

The court trials proceeded slowly, mainly due to numerous delays caused by the officials.

Meanwhile, logging continued. Continuing pressure from the logging companies and the lack of recognition by the government led to the construction of 17 more blockades resulting in further arrests of 222 more Pen-ans in 1989. Among those arrested was our lead Head-man Kelesau Naan, who was imprisoned in Miri, Sarawak for one month. In 1991, Kelesau Naan and other Penan community leaders from the 4th and 5th Division Baram and Lim-bang erected another blockade at the upper Segah river near the village of Long Ajeng.

This blockade stood for nine months. However, it was later dismantled due to trickery by the government, after they informed the Penan community that they would conduct a registration for the issuance of the National Identity Card. No one was arrested during the dismantling of the said blockade.

Meanwhile, logging continued to encroach into Penan land in 1993. This resulted in the creation of another blockade led by Kelesau Naan and other leaders in the Upper Baram area at Ba Sebateu. This blockade was eventually dismantled eight months later on the 28th of September 1993 when the Samling logging company used the Police, Police Field Force and Federal Reserve Unit (FRU) against the people.

They used tear gas to disperse and dismantle the blockade resulting to the arrest of 11 Penan men. In addition, several people were injured including a young boy, whose eventual death a year later was suspected to have been caused by the use of tear gas during the incident.

 Another incident happened in 1997 when Penans from Long Sepigen, Long Kerong, Long Sait, Long Lai and Long Lamai confronted the Merawa Timber company, Kelsea Camp, the sub-contractors under the conces-sion of Samling Timber. The company had encroached into native customary rights land in Long Kerong.

The communities from the surrounding villages went to lend their support to stop the logging in that area. All the Penan leaders, led by Kelesau Naan, went to Ba Segita where the Penan community had been try-ing to negotiate with the company to stop working in the area. In response, the Samling company brought in the Police and Police Field Force.

The Police fired shots into the air in an attempt to scare the community away. They arrested four Penans. In the end, the company ceased its logging operations as a direct result of the struggle and resistance of the Penan. From 1980s until early 2000, the Penan community of Ulu Baram numbering several thousands and other indigenous groups set up symbolic blockades along log-ging roads.

This move was a last resort to protect our Native Customary Rights over our land and forest after attempts to hold a dialogue with the Sarawak Govern-ment and logging companies failed to materialize. Despite the arrest and imprisonment of 500 of our people and having to face various trials in court, our Native Customary Rights over land are still not recognized.

Unsustainable logging is still ongoing and our people continue to struggle to assert our rights to determine our own development. Apart from logging, in 1995 a sustainable forest management project in Sarawak called FOMISS was initiated between the German and Malaysian governments following the Rio Earth Summit in Brazil.

The Sarawak Government, Forest Department, German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and a multi-national logging company called Samling Strategic Corporation Sdn Bhd, agreed to use Samling’s concession area in Ulu Baram involving virgin rainforest for the pilot project.

Agenda 21 was signed by participating countries at the Rio Summit as an action plan meant to safeguard the world towards a sustainable development path. The document states among others the requirement for all “stakeholders” to be involved in any project.

In the Forest Management Information System Sarawak (FOMISS) project, stakeholders included the Penan communities whose land and forests are within the pilot project area, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), Sarawak government through the Forestry Department, Samling and of course GTZ for their technical input. A few years later, the GTZ-FOMISS Project was discontinued due to the strong protest and campaign of the Penan people.

Headman Kelesau Naan, Jawa Nyipa, Bilong Oyau and Pelutan Tiun filed a case in court to overturn Abdul Taib’s Concession Grant to Samling (Suit NO: 22-46- 98). The legal case languished in the courts since 1998.

Manoeuvres to bring in neighbouring Kenyah litigants to lay claim on the same land as the four Penan plaintiffs further delayed the trial. In its decision, the civil court ruled that the suit must be heard in the native customary court first before Samling’s concession can be challenged in the Miri High Court. The native customary court has yet to decide which communities have a stronger claim to the disputed land.

Meanwhile, the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC), which delineated the Forest Management Unit (FMU) in October 2004, refused to recognise that these NCR claims raised any legal conflict. In a letter written to MTCC in 2004, 19 native community chiefs from the Selaan-Linau area said: “Many of us have suffered due to the Samling logging operations: our rivers are polluted, our sacred sites damaged and our animals chased away.”

The Penan village of Long Kerong is located within a logging concession operated by the Malaysian Sam-ling group. Part of the community’s territory had been certified by the MTCC as logging concession without the Penan’s consent.

After a strong campaign locally and internationally, we successful stopped logging encroachment into our NCR land at Long Kerong. The Death of Headman Kelesau Naan Kelesau Naan, aged 80, was respected by all communities because he was a strong and great leader who had opposed logging activities since the 1980s.

On October 23, 2007 Kelesau Naan had gone missing. He told his wife, Uding Lidem, that he was going to check on the animal traps he had set near their hut by the Sungai Se-gita river, located about 2 hours walk from the Village Long Kerong long-house.

He left the hut never to return. His wife waited for him the entire day and when he did not return on the second day, his wife went to their village at Long Kerong to inform the people that he was missing .

Immediately, the villagers started a search. Failing to locate Kelesau despite the use of tracker dogs, the villagers feared that their headman had died. Many suspected that Kelesau had been killed and murdered because of his anti-logging activities.

On December 17, 2007, the villagers discovered what appeared to be Kelesau’s skull and bones of his thighs, ribs and hands, which suddenly surfaced near Sungai Segita. Family members of Kelesau and many Long Kerong villagers insist that the bones were that of their headman Kelesau and that he was murdered due to his vocal opposition against logging.

Kelesau’s son Nick, who lodged a police report with the Marudi police over the incident lamented that the police were not serious about the possibility that his father had been ‘murdered’. Nick said that the week-long search for his father following his disappearance had covered the very same place where his bones were later found.

Nick Kelesau said, “If my father had not been taken and killed but had died naturally after an encounter with a wild animal, why did we not come across his remains during the (earlier) search?”.

Another possibility is that Kelesau’s death was the result of inter-tribal differences that had arisen over the anti-logging resistance. Long Kerong villagers - including Kelesau who was in the frontline - felt that they had the most to lose if they yielded to loggers.

The reason is because Long Kerong leads into the last tract of non-logged areas of the Sela’an Suling Permanent Forest Estate (PFE) concession. When loggers made moves to encroach into their rainforests in 1996-1997, the barricades that Long Kerong had set up were so effective in keeping the loggers out that the State force was needed to end it.

The area is now claimed by 18 Penan villages in Upper 24 Baram as the Penan Peace Park, after the death of our hero Kelesau Naan. The death of Kelesau Naan marks the passing of a Penan hero. Indigenous peoples of all walks of life feel Kelesau Naan’s death as a deeply personal loss. He was a man who made us truly proud to be Penan, a freedom fighter who was truly loved by all of us. You are our great Hero who supported our voice to preserve the last remaining piece of Borneo rainforest.

 We hope to win this fight for you and for us. You have disappeared and left us but in our heart, you are never forgotten by all of us, your wife, children and friends. We promise to keep firm to our words and never give up the battle on your behalf and for our next generation.

Our lands are given to us from God and are a gift to us by our ancestors a thousand years ago. We were born here and grew up here in the Upper Baram area. Our rights and our land cannot be taken away from us be-cause it is a part of us.

We will never surrender our rights to others who easily forget their promises made to us. Our museum is the cave, mountain and rivers. Our history is in the animals, sago and traditional medicine. We have our own banks, supermarket, fishponds, water pipes and existing livestock.

God created the earth for us to live. He takes care of the plants and also created the animals. Yet God allows us to live freely, to own and take care of God’s creation. We can share all these with the poor and those who can care for them because the creatures of God exist only once.

We know that human beings are good in destroying the forest, rivers and animals but they cannot create them. Money and property can be created by human beings but they are not as beautiful as God’s creation. Goodbye our hero Kelesau Naan. Our great Hero. May God grant you peace and may you rest in peace.