Borneo Penan nomads in final stand-off with loggers in Malaysia

A photo of nomadic Penan next to a modern blockade

The Penan, who have been fighting a losing battle to save their forest since the 1980s have confronted loggers in the Baram region

Originally published in The Times by Richard Lloyd Parry

Some of the world’s last nomads have mounted a blockade in the remote interior of Borneo to stop the efforts of loggers who want to cut down the island’s dwindling primeval forests.

Members of the Penan people, who live in the interior of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo, are blocking a road in the upper Baram region where one of Malaysia’s biggest logging companies has been granted the right to extract timber. The demonstration is the latest chapter in a losing struggle, between local people and environmental activists on one side and timber companies and the Malaysian authorities on the other, that has been going on since the 1980s.

Photographs taken by activists show dozens of Penan men and women, some of them armed with traditional blow pipes, standing on top of a large yellow bulldozer belonging to the company. The protesters, who began their demonstration on September 9, hold signs reading “Stop the Chop” and “Don’t cut our trees”.

The Penan are objecting to the decision to award logging concessions to Samling, one of Malaysia’s biggest logging companies. The two forest management units in the remote upper Limbang and Baram regions have a combined area larger than Somerset.

In May, 36 communities of indigenous people filed a complaint to the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC), claiming that, despite having been designated as a “sustainable” project, local people had not been properly consulted or provided with access to assessments of the effect of the logging on the jungle environment.

Samling denies all suggestions of wrongdoing and is suing one activist organisation, Save Rivers, for libel, a move that other NGOs allege is intended to intimidate them and stifle dissent. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a statement on its website says: “Samling maintains that it has adhered to all conditions and requirements imposed by the MTCC scheme.”

Some Penan say they have been forced to abandon their nomadic traditions because of the destruction of their sustaining jungle habitat by logging companies.

Up until this century the Penan lived as the last nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribe in Asia, surviving in the deep interior of Borneo by hunting and harvesting jungle plants — among them are the creeping rattans, which they use to make baskets, and the ipoh tree, from which they extract poison for their blowpipe arrows.

Nowadays almost all of the 16,000 Penan have settled down to a semi-nomadic life of hunting combined with rice farming, living in simple villages. Some have done so by choice and some under pressure from the authorities but others say that they have been forced to abandon their nomadic traditions because of the destruction of their sustaining jungle habitat by logging companies.

The trees are cut down and pulped into plywood, which is sold to construction firms for use in hoardings and building sites. There has been a rainforest in Sarawak for about ten million years but in the past 45 years alone more than 90 per cent has been felled.

The logging destroys the forest plants, food for the people and the animals they hunt. Deprived of its binding cover of plants and trees, the soil washes down into the rivers, which become polluted and inhospitable to fish.

Communities frequently become bitterly divided over the large sums of money that logging companies offer to give over their land. In 1990 the Prince of Wales enraged the Malaysian government by referring to the Penan as victims of genocide.

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