Malaysia’s Native People Feeling Bite of Logger’s Ax

It is night. The river is quiet, free of the growl of timber barge engines, shrieking horns on passenger expresses and the sputtering of outboard motors as farmers ferry shallow praus to their paddy fields.

Up on the Tutoh’s high bank, beyond the line of coconut palms, the longhouse stands in shadows. The generator is on, and all along the concrete veranda that stretches the length of this vast home to 170 families, many of those 170 doors stand open to the night air, sending out a fluorescent glare from tube ceiling lights. A few also send out electronic sound that prevails, pierced occasionally by the snarling of a group of fighting dogs.

Here, under a star-filled sky, well into the interior of Borneo, among the Kayan people and their timeless riverine culture, comes the sound of Pat Sajak’s voice.

The scene repeats itself across several thresholds. The neighbors have dropped by those households with televisions, and there sit 20 or 30 people: children; elderly women with spliced, elongated ears hung with heavy metal rings that reach their chests; old, tattooed men; young married couples tired from a day working on the farm but freshly bathed and relaxed in clean sarongs and T-shirts.

They sit on the floor on rattan mats, chewing the betel nut that has reddened their gums and blackened their teeth, a few doing beadwork or mending fishing nets. They are spending their evening much as they have for centuries--except that now they sit glued to the set, watching Vanna White turn the cards, the contestants on “Wheel of Fortune” jump up and down and Pat Sajak make jokes in a language few of them understand.

The door is closed, however, at the quarters of Jok Ding and Usun Jok. The television is not on. The family is serving boiled ears of corn and sections of durian, the creamy, malodorous fruit then in season, to their guests. With Jok Ding and Usun Jok are their married daughter, Mujan; a grandmother in her 80s; an in-law, and their niece, Dorothy Luhong Ding, a nurse from Kuching, the state capital, home for a few days with two visitors.

The conversation is on the way to becoming a family quarrel.

They are talking about logging--specifically, the timber camp across the river. Luhong, the hosts’ niece, translated while her relatives revealed their sad story and bitter feelings, her own mood affected in the process.

The worst part, she said later, was that the quarrel was a familiar example of how her people were being robbed and cheated out of what was theirs and were being divided in the process. With more than two decades of logging in this region of Sarawak, a Malaysian state that accounts for the highest export of tropical hardwood timber in the world, there is not a family at Long Panai whose lives have not been affected, and probably changed forever, by it.

Jok Ding, a man in his 50s and already old, recalled how the timber camp manager had approached him when the site nearby was about to reopen for the third time in 25 years. His rubber garden was an ideal spot for the proposed office, dock and loading area.

As a young man, Jok Ding had planted that garden on land that had been his father’s and forefathers’. It was a small plantation, about two acres, and it yielded perhaps four bathmat-sized sheets of rubber a day, which he could sell for about $12 Malaysian ($4 U.S.).

The manager offered to pay $1,000 Malaysian, plus $20 per tree. Jok Ding asked for more but was told the offer was the going rate. Feeling bullied and not sure he could say no, he decided it was better to follow precedent. And besides, he needed the money, even though he was losing in the long run.

The rubber garden is now history.

His daughter Mujan, listening with growing impatience, blurted out: The rubber garden was her inheritance. She was the one who had worked it, getting up before dawn to tap it. She used it. She needed it.

“We’re old,” her parents reproached her, “and you’re not taking care of us.”

It needed no translation to pick up the sounds of disappointment in each other and the sense of betrayal in their voices.

But the family was in agreement on one thing, and their caved-in voices reflected the defeat. Sounding sad and defeated herself, Luhong said, “If they didn’t sell, another family with land would have given permission and gotten the money.”

“The first person who died of timber in my longhouse was my cousin,” Luhong said several weeks later in Kuching. “It was more or less murder. He was a skilled lorry driver, and when he was assigned (the job), an Iban from Sibu got jealous and felled a tree over the truck. The Iban (a member of Sarawak’s largest indigenous group) ran back to Sibu. There was no police investigation.”

She counted off other victims: a crane operator who died instantly when a rope slashed his chest; a cousin whose husband died when a log rolled over him, and another, who--after a series of family difficulties that Luhong attributes to logging--committed suicide.

“That was the first suicide in the longhouse. We had never heard of suicide before,” she said.

Her youngest brother, Wan, works with a downriver logging crew and worries the family. “What a lot of money we spent on his education,” she said. “We want him to get safer work in town, but he won’t leave this. The money is good, about $1,500 Malaysian a month. We don’t know what he does with it. He has nothing to show for it. Most of it goes for drink, I think.”

Suicides and broken marriages and boys drifting away doubtless would have come without the felling of the trees. Indeed, many of the social conflicts Luhong cited say less about logging than they do about change and the 20th Century coming to a pristine place that time had almost left alone.

But many longhouse people blame logging for the negative changes that have befallen them. Nonetheless, they are not clinging to the past or against development that deals them in, they say.

Luhong is a nurse living in Kuching, where she supervises midwifery for the divisional medical office. Uncertain of the year of her birth, as are many indigenous people, she thinks she is about 40 and is of the first indigenous generation to be educated. Her people, the Kayans, are one of the small ethnic groups known as orang ulu, or upriver people. She and her husband, George, an Iban, have three children.

Although it is true that she drives a car, has bought her daughter a piano and helps run a rape hot line in her spare time, it is also true that Luhong’s hands and feet bear an abbreviated version of the elaborate tattoos her female ancestors have worn for centuries.

She is like many of her generation--people who will never again live the old life, but who are proud to come from their unique culture. Their hearts and loyalties are fiercely there.

Luhong adores her father, Ding Ngau, and is sad to see how his nearly 80 years are telling on him. Her mother, Lalang Jok, is a strong woman, and she admires her, knowing full well where she gets some of her own strength and determination. Indeed, in many ways Luhong is the materfamilias, the one the family turns to for advice and to deal with officialdom.

She leads a full, involved life and seems to enjoy it. But invariably, when the conversation turns to logging and its effect on the orang ulu , her mood darkens; she talks cynically and with an angry bravado or, alternately, fights back tears.

Sounding neither impressed nor grateful, she says of logging’s impact, “Materially, we have definitely benefited in wages. Most of my brothers (and other male relatives) have worked in timber camps.”

The real loss, she declares, is land. Longhouse villages do not farm communally; rather, families farm plots handed down for generations. Practicing shifting agriculture, they abandon some fields for years, allowing the jungle to regrow and the soil to recover. Other lands are not cut: Traditional law allows their use for hunting and collection of jungle products such as rattan, resins and medicines, but not commercial exploitation.

“The thing we are losing is our customary-rights land,” Luhong said. Those in power, mostly ethnic Malays, have licensed out land to politicians or their nominees in huge tracts that often include customary lands. The Malay licensees subcontract it to timber companies, and the contractor, usually an ethnic Chinese, insists that his permit includes the disputed area--which it now does.

When natives protest or file applications for legal title to what is theirs through traditional law, they are ignored or turned down for lack of proof, informed in the process that those lands are now state reserves, or protected forest--off limits to natives.

“We have no title to our customary-rights land. It’s only a concept,” Luhong said of what the orang ulu are learning the hard way. “Slowly, slowly--maybe in 10 or 20 years, if we don’t do anything--we won’t have any land at all.”

Fighting her tears, she continued, “I’d be very happy if they banned logging altogether. Of course, the longhouse people would be hurt. They would have to look for other jobs. But that’s nothing compared to what we have lost. I would have wished it (didn’t) happen. But it’s happening.”

Long Panai is in the Baram region of Sarawak, which, with its tributaries such as the Tutoh, forms the river system where many orang ulu live. One has only to see the lower Baram--with timber for export stacked 10 feet high on both banks, the sight virtually unrelieved for a half-hour in a speeding boat--to understand just how much timber is coming out of Sarawak.

On the way to Long Panai, Luhong had stopped in Miri, a town on the South China Sea near the mouth of the Baram. Her sister, Uring, lives there with her husband; they work for the government, he in health, she in agriculture.

Several family members were in town--her uncle Baya, from Long Panai; some distant male relatives; her brother, Bit, who had recently left a staff job with Sahabat Alam Malaysia, or SAM, (Friends of the Earth Malaysia), an environmental organization that opposes logging. Bit now works in private business.

Baya, an unpaid representative of SAM at the longhouse, also was looking in on a group of imprisoned Penans who were arrested for blockading logging roads in the Tutoh area. The Penans, nomads who hunt and gather, are dependent on the jungle to a degree others are not. Logging is devastating them, and SAM has been working on their behalf.

The men ignored the chairs and sat, longhouse-style, on the floor of Uring’s quarters, smoking hand-rolled cigars, chewing betel nut and repeating in low, dry baritones the complaints about logging that can be heard in any longhouse near a timber camp: the loss of soil, of fertile land; pollution of rivers and streams; the disappearance of fish and wildlife, with one man lamenting that “the jungle is our market.” So much rattan has been destroyed that women have started using plastic from town to make harvest baskets.

They told of the huge landslide that came years after logging first started, when the camp and the trees just slid into the water.

“You could see the whole jungle moving,” one said. “And the trees just standing in the middle of the Tutoh. Some people said the dragon in the river moved, and that caused it.”

They also speculated about a rumored $80,000 Malaysian in compensation paid by a timber company to the tua kampong , or village headman, that was intended for the entire village. It is still with the headman, they suspect.

At least 80 Penans involved in the recent blockades were still in prison at that point--they have since been released--after refusing the bail terms as too high and protesting they had no money to get back upriver. Most involved in the blockades were Penans, Baya said, because more settled ethnic groups had crops and farm animals to feed.

Later, Luhong said flatly: “The Penans are braver and smarter than the rest of us. I respect what they did. It’s the only way you can protect your rights, the only way to get attention and make them hear you. Look at them. They don’t mind being in jail. How many other orang ulu will sacrifice that?”

The Penans have more at stake than anyone, she argued. To Penans, she said, cutting the jungle must be “as if the timber company chain-sawed our longhouse.” Because they are nomadic, their lifestyle has been completely unprotected by land law.

At Long Panai, Luhong’s parents live in a large set of rooms with their eldest daughter, Mujan, on one side, one son, Ngau, on the other and another son, Tuva, a few doors away. Ngau teaches at the huge government boarding school adjacent to the longhouse.

The children share responsibility for their aging parents; those in town have sent cash for the television, the electric fan, the refrigerator. Those at home have planted cash crops and help with chores. Mujan’s husband came in one day with a wild boar he had shot, carrying the beast through the longhouse to the kitchen area where, under his mother-in-law’s supervision, he cut up portions for various family households.

In general, the harsh longhouse life has become more comfortable over the years. Luhong’s brother Ngau, who worked as a bark stripper during his school holidays, attributes many of the longhouse improvements to the benefits logging has brought. He is one of the few who has no problem with the tua kampong receiving regular payments from a timber company--payments that others call bribes.

“He keeps peace with the camp,” Ngau said of the headman, “sees that people don’t steal from the camp, settles arguments. People get jealous, but I suspect many don’t realize how much time is wasted. Even if it’s $1,000 (Malaysian) they give him, by all means give it to him. But if the money was supposed to go to the longhouse and he took it, I would be angry.”

He added, “I am only unhappy that we were not given the opportunity to have a license on our own land, or at least to share a license. We are the ones who preserved the jungle. Too much of it is going.”

The old man, Ding Ngau, was more circumspect in his criticism and ready to defer to authority, like many of his generation who reflect years under colonial rule. Sarawak was ruled for more than a century by the British, first indirectly through the Brooke family, known as “the white rajahs,” and, after World War II, directly as a colony until 1963, when it joined the new nation of Malaysia.

“I don’t want to see the virgin jungle cut down,” Ding Ngau said. “But the government tells us it is for progress and development, that it will benefit us. If so, then I accept it.”

But he did not accept that now “no one seems to care” or respect the traditional family boundaries recognized during the rajahs’ time. “We expect compensation,” he declared--although he seemed unclear what that should involve.

During her visit, Luhong’s brother Tuva took her and her companions to the timber camp across the river. And there, below his former rubber garden, was their uncle Jok Ding, standing in the river in a soaked sarong, binding logs into rafts. Tuva said he earns $1.50 Malaysian per ton and can collect up to $20 Malaysian a day (about $7 U.S.).

Tuva, about 42, lives with his wife and six children and farms and hunts. Defying government instructions, he has planted rice on land now called “protected forest.”

He has a loping walk that disguises a limp. Years ago, when the camp across the river first opened, he worked for it until the day some logs rolled off a trolley and crushed his hip.

As is usually the case, he said, he received no compensation from the company and the manager avoided him thereafter. Now, he cannot carry heavy objects or do taxing jobs, he said.

Tuva currently is also a volunteer representative of SAM at the longhouse, along with his uncle Baya and a friend. Recently the tua kampong asked the SAM volunteers to negotiate with a nearby company for land compensation, a new practice. They asked for $5 Malaysian per ton and got $2 (about $100 Malaysian per family a year).

Native people, often illiterate, are not in a strong bargaining position, operating on little or no information, appealing to ordinances and policies they have never seen and trying to sort out rumors--or what is left of them--that have made their way upriver.

Tuva was vague about the deal, saying the company argued that the volume of logs was less than expected. About volume, he said: “We have no way of knowing how much. We don’t even know how it is determined.”

During this visit to the timber camp, the manager expressed little interest in Tuva and his party and agreed to let them hitch a ride on the rail trolley once the timber was offloaded--a favor readily provided to longhouse dwellers wanting to avoid a long walk to their fields. For all the controversy, individuals on both sides of the issue seem to get along. If anything, Tuva asserted, most of the laborers, natives themselves, support SAM’s work.

The trolley makes its way to the logging area through the remains of the flat peat swamp forest, now a wasteland of bark piles, stagnant pools, abandoned logs and injured trees parched gray in the harsh sunlight. Farther in, where the land begins to climb, less wood has been cleared and it still looks like a forest, although a thinned one.

Along the way was a small shrine, with several talismans hung from branches. Before cutting, the crew insisted on making an offering to the gods of the forest, Tuva explained, to appease them for the disturbance they would create.

Later, farther upstream at another camp, Tuva and Luhong’s nephew, Laing Wan, a crane operator, spoke during a work break while playing with his baby at his home, a barracks in a treeless, muddy area stacked with logs.

If he had the opportunity to work in construction, he said as rock music blasted from a cassette player, he would rather do that. He has worked in timber for almost 10 years, ever since completing junior high, doing unskilled labor for the first seven years.

As a crane operator he earns $780 Malaysian a month, with a commission ranging between 50 and 80 cents Malaysian a ton. If he wants, he can work overtime because for the last two years some logging activities have gone on virtually around the clock.

Why such a rush?

“The company is always in a rush to get money,” he said with a shrug.

Fiddling with a pack of cigarettes, he said he has read of global warming and the greenhouse effect that many fear will occur with the disappearance of the rain forest. He believes the warnings are probably true. But he has no stand on the issue, he said.

“I’m just a worker, and there is no other work to do,” he said, summing up the common dilemma of the orang ulu : They don’t want the rain forest to disappear; they don’t want to see others grow rich selling what they perceive to be rightfully theirs; they need the jobs that are leading to the forest’s disappearance.

The next day around twilight, Tuva took the group upriver to Long Iman, one of several sites where the government has been strongly encouraging the Penans to settle. Tactics are said to range from material help and instruction in building a longhouse and planting vegetables to promises of health clinics and schools--and dire predictions of what will happen if the Penans don’t settle.

For decades the government has urged the Penans to join society and face the future, but logging has intensified the pressure.

Up on the river bank stood a barn-like longhouse, and at the approach of visitors a shy group of people began emerging, pale-skinned from lifetimes of avoiding direct light--young girls holding infants, a few men, children and dogs.

After shaking hands all around, one man, Paran, dressed in cutoffs and beads, explained that many Long Iman people were still in jail in Miri from the last blockade. Anxious to talk to visitors, the Penans said they felt abandoned and called SAM their only friends.

One woman, described as the jailed tua kampong’s wife, bristled when asked if SAM or outsiders had suggested the blockades, replying indignantly: “Not at all. It is our own idea, from our own soul.”

Paran described how loggers’ tractors and bulldozers are coming closer, driving the wild boar away, poisoning the waters and ruining the rattan. “There are no more jungle tracks. I am no longer familiar with the jungle,” he said. “Also, the sun is hot. The forest cover is gone.”

The Penans are well aware that they have not assumed the accouterments of urban civilization; it is not a goal. These are people accustomed to living in temporary campsites deep in the jungle, in shelters of branches and fronds. They do not know how to farm, and they do not know how to keep house.

Indeed, they seem to be only marginally living in their long-house. Its cavernous room was dank and unlit, the open door the only source of light. Except for backless benches against one wall, the only furniture was a bedstead serving as a storage area. It had no mattress, and the wooden slats were piled with belongings.

“Look at us,” Paran said. “We don’t know what to do anymore. We want to go back to the forest, but the forest has nothing more to offer us. It can never be the same again. We have no more hope, so we live like this day by day, like somebody who does not know what to do.”

Last September, Luhong was one of two Sarawakians invited by a feminist group, Asian Women’s Forum, to a conference in Japan. It was sponsored by Japanese women, she said, who wanted solidarity with their Southeast Asian sisters.

The Japanese specifically wanted a Sarawak native to tell how Japanese timber interests are affecting indigenous people. Japan not only buys most of the timber; some of its development aid to the Third World allegedly has been used to build dams and logging roads that can expedite timber extraction.

Luhong went. But with criticism of timber politics a delicate issue in Sarawak, the local feminist group responsible for her selection made her sign a paper on the eve of her departure saying she represented only herself.

In part, the move worked. “In Japan I didn’t want to talk,” she recalled. “I told them I knew very little data and could only talk about my people.”

Now, however, she seems fed up.

More than once, she said, Long Panai has tried to get a license to operate its own timber camp. Her father and Tuva came with a group to Kuching in 1981 to apply; an earlier request made with two other longhouses already had failed.

“I said it was foolish, but my father wanted to give it a try,” she said. “Of course, they couldn’t get it.

“I guess there is no way orang ulu can protest,” Luhong said. “. . . If they protest, they’ll say they’re anti-government, against development. We are not. There’s a lot of talk that we are the native people of Sarawak, but it doesn’t give us any benefit. They want to treat us like second-class citizens, uncivilized jungle people.

“If logging had been managed properly, if they did research, if they were accountable, if they took the orang ulu into account, it might have been a different story.”

Bearing the Burden of Logging Two decades of logging in the Long Panai region of Sarawak, a Malaysian state that accounts for the highest export of tropical hardwood in the world, has been devastating to the nomadic Penans. Caught in the middle are the Kayans, or orang ulu, one of the ethnic groups that make up the so-called upriver people. The Iban are Sarawak’s largest indigenous group.