Suriname’s Plan to Let Loggers at Rain Forest Runs Into Knotty Opposition : Environment: The government views foreign concession as lucrative. Jungle-dwellers, ecologists rally to decry proposal.

There’s a new sound in the forest. To the squawk of parrots and the roar of rapids, add rumbles of discontent from native tribes that want to keep out the whine of chain saws.

Leaders of this small South American nation, struggling with a sluggish economy and reduced foreign aid, want to let foreign companies start cutting one of the world’s largest undisturbed tracts of tropical rain forest.

“The chief and his people do not agree, and say to the government in Paramaribo that they cannot force the people to accept this,” declared Chief Songo Aboikoni of the Saramaka tribe.

Asidonhopo, a remote cluster of palm-thatched Saramaka huts in a clearing no bigger than a football field, is separated from the capital by 130 miles of dense forest. With no roads, visitors arrive by river.

But in their opposition to the logging plan, the Saramaka have allies as far away as Europe and Malaysia, and as varied as conservationists and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Suriname, a sparsely populated country of 400,000 people on the northeastern shoulder of South America, encompasses about 100 million densely forested acres of the Amazon Basin.

The government of President Ronald Venetiaan wants to let loggers cut trees on nearly 10 million acres--a chance to inject money into the economy in a pre-election year.

Parliament is expected to approve the first contract soon with the Berjaya Group Berhad of Malaysia. Companies from Malaysia and Indonesia are negotiating two more contracts.

Berjaya is offering to invest $100 million, and says it will open a sawmill and furniture factory and create 15,000 jobs, becoming Suriname’s biggest employer.

But critics of Malaysian loggers say they have destroyed forests in their own country.

So conservationists and aid agencies were alarmed when Suriname asked the U.S. Agency for International Development last year to help draw up the contract with Berjaya.

Malaysian environmentalists accused Berjaya of ruining their country’s environment. Others are urging Suriname to raise its proposed annual fee of $3 an acre, saying loggers in the Pacific Northwest pay 10 times that.

One member of Berjaya’s board of directors, Surindra Mungra, is the brother of Suriname’s foreign minister.

Legislators say personal ties will not affect their decisions.

Trying to persuade Suriname to reject Berjaya, the Inter-American Development Bank is offering to help finance the budget while it finds ways to make use of the forest itself.

Such utilization could include more limited logging, tourism or the development of medicines from forest plants.

“None of the world’s arguments have convinced us,” said legislator Iwan Krolis, a forester who is negotiating logging contracts.

Mungra, the Berjaya director, accused the United States of using “bullying tactics” in “an economic competition between emerging companies that are the underdog” and U.S. importers of tropical wood.

He said Berjaya’s 25-year contract to log 2.8 million acres would not destroy the forest because the company would be restricted to cutting only about 10 to 15 out of every 200 trees.

But Krolis said the contract would allow logging of 55% of trees.

Russell A. Mittermeier, an environmentalist with the Washington-based group Conservation International, said the contract had so many loopholes that Suriname probably would make only $2 million a year, while the loggers made $28 million.

Berjaya would be forbidden to cut trees within 4 1/2 miles of remote tribal villages.

But the government cannot even enforce the logging contracts it already has signed. Parliament and the forestry commission say another Malaysian company, Musa, is cutting more trees than allowed.

Musa is clear-cutting vast stands of trees, leaving bare plains in the middle of the forest’s carpet of green. The company takes logs out by river, which critics say would make it easy to hide excessive cutting.

“People say we have indigenous people and they have rights, and that’s true,” Krolis said. “But we have to look at it in comparison with the rest of the population.”

Venetiaan’s government will have to contend with tribes that have shown they are not powerless.

The Saramaka and other Bush Negro tribes, who make up 15% of Suriname’s population, waged a guerrilla war in 1986, accusing the government of violating their rights with plans to develop the interior.

Unable to defeat the rebellion, the government gave in and signed a treaty in 1992 recognizing the tribes’ right to benefit from economic development in their regions.

Aboikoni, the Saramaka chief, said the government has not responded to a letter he sent April 20 asking what his people would gain from the logging proposal.

“A lot of promises were made, but nothing changes here. It just gets worse,” he said.

In mid-August, Aboikoni and other chiefs from the four Indian and five Bush Negro tribes held a summit and declared that they were setting up “The Highest Authority of the Interior” in a challenge to the government’s authority.

The government said the chiefs, who represent 50,000 residents of the jungle, were being manipulated by “forces which want to create an atmosphere of rebellion.”

In an interview, Aboikoni said: “The companies must negotiate with us, because only we can ensure the forest is not destroyed.”

If the government controls the contracts, he said, “the benefits will stay in Paramaribo and we will get nothing.”