Borneonization

BN Continues to Leave Dayaks Behind

2011-04-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

Dayaks still backward with no relief in sight

More than 40 years after the NEP, Vision 2020, New Economic Model, ETP and Score the indigenous people of Sarawak still rank the lowest in terms of educational attainment, occupational hierarchy and more than 50 percent of them have either primary or no formal education.

These findings are confirmed by the 1991, 2000 Population & Housing Census and projected figures from the 2009 Labour Force Survey. The percentage share of the Dayaks in the Agriculture sector is growing in Sarawak instead of declining.

This contradicts the Vision 2020's objective that an economic sector should not be dominated by one ethnic group. This shows that there is no upward mobility for the Dayaks. The majority of the Dayaks cannot move up to the more value-added tertiary sector.

Those Dayaks in the tertiary sectors are working as elementary workers. More than 70 percent of these Dayak workers are still expected to be around after 2020 or 2030. How can they be benefited from the jobs generated by Score.

How can Score train extra 1.5 million skilled workers by 2030 when currently less than 1 percent of the enrolment in the secondary schools are in Secondary Technical and Vocational Schools?

All these show that the Dayaks are moving in the direction of economic exclusion and marginalisation. I appeal to the Dayak scholars and academicians to compile the human capital base of Sarawak by ethnicity and to simulate the scenarios by 2030 or 2050 based on the current affirmative action plans formulated by the federal or state government to integrate the Dayaks into the economic system of Malaysia.

The two ethnic groups in Sarawak which are most neglected are the Iban and "other bumiputera". They are so far behind that it takes more than a generation for them to attain educational parity with other ethnic groups.

Source: http://www.malaysiakini.com/letters/161854

Breaking Away

2011-01-23T16:52:00.000-08:00

We’re all born the same, unfettered by preconceived limitations. Eventually, we submit to laws. There are those we must embrace in order to be free . . . the laws of hard work and discipline. Then there are those we must challenge for that very same freedom . . . the laws of conformity and small-mindedness. The weight of these Barisan Nasional chains can be so subtle, we forget them. This is how we are shackled, tamed. Normalcy becomes the rule and we grow comfortable with limits. Like a dog at the end of a Barisan Nasional leash, we move but never of our own will.

It is time to defy, time to rise, time to change is NOW . . .

We will test our mettle, pull hard against these restraints and together we can achieve more than what we can possibly do on our own. We will not let conventional thinking rule us. As we live here in Sarawak, the Barisan Nasional chain will bury deep into our flesh, the weight will pull us and our future generations down. But we must fight. We will defy Barisan Nasional. If we fall now, we will get right back up.

My friends, life is short and every minute that passes hurtles us closer to the end. In the time that we have, we must commit ourselves to this cause that’s far greater than ourselves and the cause bind into us – these words are the contract that bind us to our promise for the future generations . . . Upon this contract, I have signed by name in blood, sweat and tears – to unbind our future generations from the chains of Barisan Nasional.

What Works for Reforming Sarawak's Failing Education System

2010-12-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

Education reform is a top agenda of the new Sarawak state government. We have seen that despite massive spending by the Federal government and ambitious attempts at reforms, the performance of our education system has barely improved in decades. In fact, compared to school systems in the region, ours has seen a decline.

The Malaysian Smart Schools System - developed by a consortium led by Telekom Malaysia, and a flagship application of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) initiated by the then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir in 1997, has failed to bear fruit despite the billions of ringgits being spent. The Federal government’s 2009 National Key Results Area (NKRA) for education has not produced any report card to convince us that the NKRA initiatives are delivering results.

Children in Sarawak cannot be allowed to fall victim to Malaysia’s failing education system. It is a priority of the new Sarawak government to immediately and quickly establish a new education system that works to raise Sarawak children to a level as those in Korea, Finland and Singapore – countries that have that world’s best performing education systems.

The Sarawak Community Action Network (SCAN) has undertaken a year-long study to understand how to develop a high performing education system for Sarawak. The result of the study is to be used by the new Sarawak state government to establish an education system that truly works for children of Sarawak. The new government cannot afford to have a single child fail and that is what today’s adult Sarawakians owe to the coming generations of Sarawakians.

The study involved an analysis of selected education systems from different countries that have improved significantly, analysis of education systems that have been maintaining top positions, interviews with some thought leaders in those education systems and an analysis of the annual OECD PISA results from 2003 to 2009. During the course of the study, elements that are specific to the individual system and those that are of universal relevance were explored in order to help Sarawak’s new educational leaders replicate the success of high performing education systems. This study is sponsored, in part, by Sarawak’s own entrepreneur, innovator and change agent, Mr Granda Aing.

This paper presents a summary of the findings of SCAN’s study.
The study began with these key questions: Why do some education systems always perform better and improve at a faster rate than others? Why do some schools consistently succeed where others do not? What do successful school systems have in common? What methods and tools do they employ to improve learning outcomes of students?

The SCAN study found three most important universal elements that work:
1. Selective hiring of the right people to be teachers,
2. Develop them into highly effective instructors, and
3. Ensure that the system is capable of delivering only the best instruction for each student.

The successful systems demonstrate that significant improvement in desired results can be achieved in a short time – 3 to 6 years. The systems also show that by applying these practices, significant improvements is achievable in failing school systems and that the practices are applicable to any system, irrespective of culture and geography.

The following commonly used approaches to improve education systems in many countries, including the US and the UK, have been shown to be least effective, in that they do not contribute significantly to student outcomes as measured by scores in mathematics, science and reading:

1. Increase in public spending per student,
2. Improvements in student-to-teacher ratio,
3. Decrease in class size,
4. Decrease in school size,
5. Structural reforms in the governance of schools, such as autonomy of schools governed by elected boards and decentralization of powers to local school districts,
6. Reforms in curriculum standards,
7. Changes in assessments and testings,
8. Funding of schools,
9. Inspection of quality, and
10. Reforming relationship of schools to communities.

The SCAN study shows unquestionable evidence: student learning cannot be improved without improving quality of instruction. It is also noted that almost every education system have undertaken the process of reducing class size. For example, most countries in OECD over the past 7 years have increased the teacher-student ratio. However, evidence shows that this effort does not significantly result in better student outcomes, except at the very early grades. More teachers translate to less money per teacher and systems cannot be selective about who could be teachers.
Evidence from the SCAN study suggests that the new Sarawak educational leaders must focus on quality of teachers as this is the main driver of the variation in student learning. The quality of any education system cannot be higher than the quality of its teachers.

For example, a seminal research in one education system shows that if 2 average 8-year-old children were taught by different teachers – one a high performing teacher and the other a low performer, the learning outcomes of the students diverge by more than 50 percentile points within 3 years. Reducing class size from 30 to 15 students improves an average student’s performance by, at most, 8 percentile points. In a study of another system, evidence shows that students in earlier years of schooling, when placed with low-performing teachers for several years consecutively, suffer from irreversible educational loss. In some systems, students who score in the top 20% on literacy and numeracy at age 7, are twice as likely to obtain a university degree as children in the bottom 20%.

Sarawak’s new educational leaders now have evidence suggesting that even in good education systems, children who do not make good progress in their early school years because they are not taught by teachers of sufficient skills and competencies, have very small chance of recovering the lost years. All top performing education systems depend ultimately on the quality of its teachers.

All top performing systems from Dallas to Seoul and from Singapore to Helsinki, dispel the common belief that it is impossible to make teaching a preferred profession for good number of high-performers and that attracting better people requires the government to pay higher salaries. These systems have shown that making teaching the career of choice does not depend on high pay, but more on small, simple policy choices such as: designing and establishing robust hiring and training processes, giving attractive starting pay, and managing the status of the profession more carefully. For Sarawak’s new educational leaders, it means legislating an entirely new policy on education so that a new education system can be implemented rapidly.

By continuing the education system of the Federal government in Sarawak, we will only fail Sarawak’s future generation.

http://tinyurl.com/edsys2012

BAKUN DAM IS GOING TO BE ANOTHER WHITE ELEPHANT

2010-06-16T04:17:00.000-07:00

You want another dam????

See what the Bakun was "behind the scene".... by Malaysian Observer

The whole 15 Billion Ringgit Bakun dam project (Supposed to produce 2400 Mw) was conceived by corrupt Mahathir to steal the 10 Billion ringgit worth of Timber from the Chief Minister of Sarawak Taib Mahmud who “owns” all the Timber in Sarawak.
The timber from the forest the size of Singapore (otherwise would be extracted by the CM) is now stolen by Mahathir as Bakun is a federal project.

Mahathir asked his favorite crony Ting Pek King to extract the Timber. Ting Pek King Subcontracts the extraction to Hii Chang Pee who underreported the volume extracted thereby ‘cheating’ Ting. Mr.Hii subsequently had a high profile court case with Ting. That is another story. Hee just opened his new "Pullman Hotel", 2 years after Ting's "Four Points Sheration", both in Kuching. Ting is building another Sheraton in Miri, his 2nd hometown, after Bintangor his birthplace.

Now Bakun can provide enough electricity to supply Sarawak’s need 4 times over. Yet Taib Mahmud wants to build another dam Murun,amongst many. WHY?

His brother in law Aziz Hussein runs the company building the dams. His sister's company provides the construction work. Taib’s company CMS is producing the cement! And he also controls and profit from the steel imports!

Now Sarawak electrical company Sesco is now privatized and owned by the CM Taib and his ministers who call it Sarawak Energy Bhd. Taib does not want to buy the electricity from Bakun because of his Timber 10 billion worth was stolen by Mahathir, therefore he wanted to build another 900 M v Murun dam upstream from Bakun costing 5 billion (1/3 the size of Bakun) Now Murun is 10% completed and need more funds which international banks will not lend to Taib’s company Sarawak Energy because it is privately owned by Taib and his cabinet. So Taib now wants to reverse ‘privatize’ the Sarawak Energy company after striping the assets to the government of Sarawak and then obtain loans from foreigners.

So they say Rio Tinto an Australian co is interested to use the Bakun electricity which is not true. Then they say a Chinese co maybe keen. This is a lie as the federal groups now realize Bakun is becoming a white elephant.

Now the 600 mile cable from Bakun to west Malaysia has to pass 70% of the way near few islands owned by Indonesia and only 30% of the way is Malaysia owned. So Indonesia has not given permission and is also not keen on to buy Bakun electricity as it cannot afford. There is not a single company in the world that can make a 600 mile long cable. The electricity loss would be tremendous. (80 %?) And the earth quakes would break the cable. Sabotage and damage due to ships anchors and other passing ships have to be factored in.

I would not be surprised Bakun will produce electricity in few years time but remain a white elephant – much to the credit of the reckless and corrupt PM Mahathir with many stupid ideas and corrupted CM of Sarawak Taib Mahmud who is reputed to be one of the richest men on earth.
"A Malaysian observer

June 12, 2010 5:23 AM

Our Real Assets

2010-06-15T04:57:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t read, the book entitled “What Color Is Your Parachute?” is recommended reading, even if you are having a steady job and progressing in your career. A best-seller, it’s about more meaningful work, changing career and job-hunting. More so, it’s about exploring and discovering what you want out of life and who you are as a person. The book takes a relook in a different perspective at the question, “What type of work am I willing to do?”

What’s the significance of a book that talks about meaningful work?

Often, within the short time spent in a lift with office workers getting to their offices, the common conversation is about share price and stock market. All news channels in print or electronic, have something about share market performance. There’s no shortage of stock market news on the Internet. Company board meetings certainly touch on boosting share price.

Is the stock we own our most valuable asset?

An employee share option scheme left a number of a company’s employees in debt and their savings nowhere to be seen following the drop in share price that came in tandem with the recent financial crisis. The hope and expectation of making some money from exercising the ESOS turned tragic.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist, Gary Becker, said that in modern economy, up to 80% of a person’s economic output comes from human capital, against land, machinery and others. Many people are mesmerized by how rich they can be with the portfolios of stocks and properties they own, but do not see the crucial asset they have in their earning power. Our education and training are worth a lot. We can get value not just from shares, but from ourselves and the mechanism of getting the value is a job. Our salary is the dividend on our human wealth.

Those of us who’ve been affected by economic recessions and financial crisis or those of us who’ve lost our jobs may already relearn how to create wealth as we relook at our jobs differently. Especially so if that thing we do in the office every day is our sole financial lifeline. Those who have not been affected would not know the true value of what we have until it’s gone.

These days, a predictable salary seems more appealing than big bonuses and ESOS. Government jobs, one of the last bastions of security, is definitely getting even more appealing. A better option now is to use whatever money we have to take a class, instead of spending on shares, unit trusts or properties. Perhaps, soon we’ll find ourselves perusing a list of the best-paying, fastest-growing professions as we visualize ourselves as a network engineer or wellness therapist.

Sarawak's Growth Agent

2010-06-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

One of the objectives of Sarawak's several huge dams is to generate economic activities. But there are more pragmatic, easily executable alternative actions that have been proven to achieve that objective.

More than 70% of all businesses have less than 6 employees. This demonstrates that thriving small businesses generate the most jobs and economic activities. Microenterprises created 37% of all new jobs between 2001 and 2007. For Malaysia, small and medium-sized enterprises account for over 75% of all enterprises and are responsible for more than 60% of private sector employment and 55% private sector turnover. Massive hydro-power dams or huge aluminium smelting plants do not create the kind of employment opportunites that small enterprises do. Find out more at,

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/notes/sarawak-community-action-network/sarawaks-growth-agent/429969021553

One speech Najib will be infamous for

2010-06-05T04:39:00.001-07:00

Institute for Indoctrination

2009-12-03T20:06:00.000-08:00

Again, another Barisan Nasional's denial.

The lies, cover-ups and spins. Finally, a 360 roundabout turn. This is the Barisan Nasional's deep-rooted culture of propagating racism and hoodwinking the people until some people brings it into the open. Thanks to Pakatan Rakyat.

Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz insisted today (1st Dec 2009) that the Cabinet wants to overhaul the Biro Tata Negara (BTN), while also admitting the programme had been used to promote certain government leaders.

Nazri revealed that the Cabinet conceded that BTN’s courses were racially divisive. Earlier, a fellow Umno government leader defended the civics course and insisted it would be “upgraded” instead of “revamped.”

Datuk Ahmad Masalan, who is Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, came out defending BTN against allegations by the Pakatan Rakyat that its courses were teaching racial hatred.

Nazri said there was no use in Ahmad or other government ministers denying the Cabinet decision.

Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yasin, was the first UMNO leader to take a defensive stand and publicly stated his views on the issue just hours after Nazri made the disclosure. Ahmad was the second Umno minister to come out in defence of BTN despite the revelation by Nazri. Nazri also said that BTN was also used as a programme to “instill confidence among the Malays” in the early days of its establishment but stressed that times have changed and “so must BTN”.

Ahmad said the allegations of racist teaching might have come from a mere “minor slip-up” by BTN lecturers. “Out of the 1,000 lectures given, maybe only one minute the lecturer had a slip-up so it is unfair that you portray BTN as racist just for that,” he said, adding that the allegation is a mere attempt by the Pakatan Rakyat to exploit the issue.

Pakatan Rakyat claims that testimonials by former BTN participants show the course instils ideas like Malay supremacy. Ahmadresponded saying, “They (participants) are taught about the Federal Constitution, the social contract, the position of the Malays in this country and 60 per cent of the population are the bumiputras. Are they racists? These are facts, so are they racists?”

Ahmad also said the government’s decision to “upgrade” BTN is not linked to the Pakatan Rakyat-led Selangor government’s move to ban its civil servants and students within its state-run educational institution from attending BTN courses.

Tell more lies.

Began with a denial and lies.

Billions Misappropriated and George Chan Must Resign

2009-11-29T00:59:00.000-08:00

For the billions of taxpayer money siphoned off, Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr George Chan can only have himself to blame, take full responsibility and resign immediately. Who else is responsible for the misappropriation of more than 60 percent of Government allocations for vital infrastructure projects between 2002 and 2008? Any person with a gram of intelligence knows that answer.

As reported in The Star, the Deputy Minister now wants to find out who was responsible and take appropriate action against them. Dr Chan, who is also State Industrial Development Minister and State Minister for Agriculture Modernisation must own up instead of ordering another internal investigation into the findings by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC). An investigation will be another waste of taxpayer money and undermine the work and independence of the MACC.

MACC Deputy Commissioner Datuk Zakaria Jaffar had earlier issued a statement that the MACC had uncovered cases in Sarawak where up to 60 percent of Government allocations had been ''diverted'' away from the projects for which the funds were meant. Zakaria claimed that such misappropriation of funds had happened between 2002 and last year and that MACC investigations had shown that only 40 percent of the money given by the Government for the projects was spent on the projects proper while the other 60 percent were leaked to elsewhere.

No wonder Sarawak’s rural population continue to live below the poverty line.

One question we need to ask now is, why is that MACC have not prosecuted any party?

Diverted Elsewhere - 60% of Development Funds

2009-11-28T03:06:00.000-08:00

The revelation by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) that 60 percent of Government allocations for key infrastructure projects have been diverted elsewhere is most shocking.

MACC's investigation revealed that between 2002 and 2008, only 40 percent of the money given by the Government were spent on the projects proper.

Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr George Chan responded by wanting MACC to give full and detailed briefing on their findings.

If we learned from what happened to the Auditor General's report on abuses on the state administration, MACC will have to retract their report or revise to a milder version.

For as long as we continue to keep Taib Mahmud, PBB and Barisan Nasional in power, we Sarawakians will continue to lose out while the powerful few will continue to amass wealth.

Bakun Mega Scandal

2009-11-08T06:51:00.000-08:00

This article is taken from Malaysiakini, written by Dr KUA KIA SOONG, director of Suaram. He was member of parliament for Petaling Jaya from 1990 to 1995.

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.

The English did it with brutality and thoroughness through “butcher” Lord Cumberland and even obliterated the 'wild' Celtic mode of life.

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.

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...

All this happened while Dr Mahathir Mahathir was the prime minister. Wasn't he a liability to the BN government then?

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!

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.

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.

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?

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?

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!

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.

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 peninsula 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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

When will Malaysians ever learn?

Removing The Weakest Link In The Chain

2009-11-07T07:02:00.000-08:00

Dr Jeffrey Kitingan is like a pampered boy who sulks each time he is unhappy with his parents or does not get what he wants from his mother. Like the pampered boy, his self-centered and narrow-minded tendencies makes him the weakest link in any chain of relationship.

Dr Jeffrey quit as PKR vice-president, citing his dissatisfaction over the party’s choice of state liaison chief. Oh really? More likely he resigned because he was not made the state liaison chief. So what if someone else gets to do the job? Sulk and quit? Or has he been paid by UMNO?

“I’m quitting as I’ve lost confidence in the party’s leadership decision-making process in terms of decisions affecting Sabah,” he said. “There appears to be no seriousness on the part of the party leadership in taking the views of Sabah PKR leaders. As such, I see no reason for me to remain in the party,” he added.

Isn't he part of the party leadership? With him leaving, one weak link in the Pakatan Rakyat is removed, thus further strengthening the coalition and PKR.

Here's Dr Jeffrey's legacy - no, he did nothing to save Sabahans from the grips of corrupt UMNO.

• Dr Jeffrey quit as PKR vice-president on Tuesday citing his dissatisfaction over the party’s choice of state liaison chief.

• Quit PBS in 1994 just before the collapse of the PBS-led state government.

• Following his resignation from PBS, joined the Parti Bersatu Rakyat Sabah, only to leave in less than 24 hours to sign up with the now defunct Parti Akar.

• Following a leadership tussle in Akar, Dr Jeffrey rejoined PBS just before the 1999 Sabah state election and contested, and won under the party’s symbol.

• In 2000, however, he quit PBS to rejoin PBRS but left after less than two years following a leadership tussle there as well.

• He joined PKR after the 2004 general election and was appointed a vice-president.

Wishing Dr Jeffrey greater success in his future party and political career.

Sarawak Government vs Minority Natives

2009-11-06T06:59:00.000-08:00

As reported in The Star, the stand-off between Kenyah minority natives and an oil-palm giant in the Belaga district in central Sarawak is another case of the continued discrimination against Sarawak natives by the Sarawak state government. The Sarawak police continues to show its bias by providing protection for big oil palm companies to rob the natives of their land.

The oil-palm company, a subsidiary of a Miri-based land development consortium, had allegedly bulldozed its way into a plot of land to open up an access road into areas earmarked for an oil-palm plantation.

The natives claimed that the area targeted for clearing was their native customary rights land, inherited from their ancestors.

The company claimed that it has been given the concession right by the State Land and Survey Department to develop the land.

Workers from the company had ploughed their way through a plot of farmland adjacent to the native’s longhouse despite desperate attempts by the villagers to stop them.

The natives have lodged police reports against the workers for trespassing on their farms and uprooting their fruit trees, but they claimed that the police were siding with the company and were helping to provide security escort to its workers.

Letter to Marina Undau

2009-11-02T06:32:00.000-08:00

The plight of Marina Undau, an 18-yr-old Iban-Chinese girl who was denied a place in the matriculation programme because she was deemed a “non-Bumiputera” was highlighted by the Borneo Post (Oct 29:

“KUCHING: Getting her Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) result was the best — and the worst — thing that could happen to Marina Undau.The 18-year-old science stream student of SMK Simanggang scored 9As and 1B in the SPM examination last year. She thought she was on her way to university, especially being a Bumiputera and all, but that was not to be. Born to an Iban father and a Chinese mother, Marina’s life was turned upside down when her application to undergo a university matriculation programme was rejected by the Ministry of Education. The ministry determined that she is not a ‘Bumiputera’...

“Seated between her parents, Undau Liap and Wong Pick Sing, the disappointment in the teenager was obvious. Speaking in Iban, she said: ‘Aku amai enda puas ati nadai olih nyambung sekula ngagai universiti (I’m very sad that I can’t pursue my university education).’ With no chance of entering a university for now, Marina has started Form 6 in her old school.

“Asked what she thought of everything that was happening, she replied: ‘What worries me is that will this happen again when I pass my STPM next year? If I get good results, what’s next?’

“In Sarawak, under the federal constitution, both parents must be ‘native’ in order for the offspring to be classified as a ‘Bumiputera’.”

The official definition used by the Student Intake Management Division, Higher Learning Department and Higher Education Ministry:

You are a Bumiputera if

• Semenanjung — “Jika salah seorang ibu atau bapa calon adalah seorang Melayu yang beragama Islam/Orang Asli seperti mana yang ditakrifkan dalam Perkara 160(2) Perlembagaan Persekutuan; maka anaknya adalah dianggap seorang Bumiputera.” (If either parent of a candidate is a Malay who is a Muslim/Orang Asli as defined in Article 160 (2) of the Federal Constitution, the child is considered a Bumiputera.)

• Sabah — “Jika bapa calon adalah seorang Melayu yang beragama Islam/Peribumi Sabah seperti yang ditakrifkan dalam Perkara 161A(6)(a) Perlembagaan Persekutuan; maka anaknya adalah dianggap seorang Bumiputera.” (If the father of the candidate is a Malay who is a Muslim/native of Sabah as defined by Article 161A(6)(a) of the Federal Constitution, the child is considered a Bumiputera.)

• Sarawak — “Jika bapa dan ibu adalah seorang Peribumi Sarawak seperti mana yang ditakrifkan dalam Perkara 161A(6)(b) Perlembagaan persekutuan; maka anaknya adalah dianggap seorang Bumiputera.” (If the father and mother is a native of Sarawak as defined under Article 161A(6)(b) of the Federal Constitution, the child is considered a Bumiputera.)

To Marina, it may be God's wish that you do your STPM, achieve oustanding results and get admitted into one of the world's top universities somewhere.

Matriculation is, after all, much easier than STPM. There's nothing more valuable than going through the challenge of STPM - challenges helps people mature with greater wisdom. You'll be a greater person.

May be you may not even want to consider those local private universities. The universities will make you pass your exams without having to work hard.

The Ongoing Robbing of Land From Sarawak Natives

2009-10-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

We all know the ongoing land grab by the Sarawak state government from the natives. More and more natives will be landless and become illegal settlers on the land that they have been toiling for centuries.

All that, while the few will get more land and more timber and amass more wealth.

The long road to Sarawak's independence

2009-09-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

"A few things I also learned were that, when you want to help our own people to defend or protect our land or rights, you will be demonised, ostracised, branded a traitor to our country, being anti-govt or anti development or tools of foreign NGOs jealous of our country etc. etc in the local newspapers, in the radio and TV by those having vested interests or those who are after our land and resources. Some of our own political leaders who are “apple polishers” will be their local agents to mount all these accusations against you and I. Their strategy is to frightens our own people from supporting our cause so that we are weakened and left alone in our fight to defend and protect our lands and our resources." Harrison Ngau Liang

Read more here...

New accurate measure of the global markets

2009-09-01T00:32:00.000-07:00

For years, economists, along with everyone else, thought of palm oil as exactly what it looked like: a pinkish, sludgy irrelevance. People knew that it was used to make food and soap but everything else about it, including its origins, seemed slightly distasteful.

In 2009 palm oil has not changed its colour or texture, but as an economic indicator it is unrecognisable. In a world of food and energy crises, of credit implosions, green politics and the rise of Asia, it has become the gauge that straddles them all — the ultimate global speedometer.

Through its price fluctuations and ever-changing trade destinations, palm oil has become an accurate measurement of hundreds of global markets.

Its versatility is the key, which is the main reason why the world consumes 42 million tonnes a year — twice as much as it did a decade ago. For all of the criticism that palm oil plantations attract for destroying the rainforest and endangering wildlife, the demand is a reading of a global population trying to feed and power itself under challenging circumstances.

The growth of palm oil has tracked the rising wealth of the middle classes in China and India, which buy up a quarter of all global supplies every year. Those who can afford to fry more of their food, and when other edible oil stocks can not keep up, or when prices rise too far, palm oil becomes the alternative.

As a biofuel feedstock, palm oil can meet a similar demand with energy, offering an alternative strategy when the markets are knocked out of kilter.

Palm prices tell us how rich the average Chinese family feels at new year, and with what sort of food the Muslim world will be breaking the fast each night of Ramadan. It tells us where London brokers think crude oil prices are heading and what Chicago futures traders think of this year’s soya bean crop and how badly El Niño is hurting South-East Asia this cycle.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, which between them meet about 87 per cent of the global demand, palm oil price movements dictate government policy, shape economic prospects and draw billions of dollars of direct investment.

For Malaysia, palm oil competes with tourism and manufacturing as the three biggest sources of economic growth. A couple of years ago, a bumper haul and dazzling prices allowed the Government in Kuala Lumpur to give a bonus to every civil servant in the country.

In Indonesia palm oil plays an even more central role in the country’s economic future. One popular view is that Indonesia belongs in three of the world’s most promising and exciting, emerging markets. The theory is backed by the idea that an industry that already employs two million people has the scope to double its output by 2014.

Perhaps most critically of all, palm oil is the canary in the mine for biofuel policy-making around the world. Setting stomachs and cars against each other in direct competition for calories is a finely balanced game, more likely to go wrong than right.

A poorly calculated subsidy in one country can cause dangerous price rises in a food commodity on another continent. In almost all cases, the price of palm oil is where the folly emerged.

Source: The Times Online, by Leo Lewis

Getting Rich in Sarawak MEANS Dayaks Lose Homes

2009-08-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- After a stomach-churning takeoff from a 550-meter runway at Long Banga airstrip on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, the 19-seat plane soars over a green tropical wilderness. This is one of the world’s last remaining virgin rain forests.

About 30 minutes into the flight to the bustling oil town of Miri, the lush landscape changes, and neatly terraced fields of oil palms take the place of jungle. Twenty years ago, this was forestland. Now, those forests are lost forever.

The shift from rain forest to oil palm cultivation in Malaysia’s Sarawak state highlights the struggle taking place between forces favoring economic development, led by Sarawak state’s chief minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, and those who want to conserve the rain forest and the ways of life it supports.

During Taib’s 28-year rule, his government has handed out concessions for logging and supported the federal government’s megaprojects, including the largest hydropower site in the country and, most recently, oil palm plantations. The projects are rolling back the frontiers of Borneo’s rain forest, home to nomadic people and rare wildlife such as orangutans and proboscis monkeys.

At least four prominent Sarawak companies that have received contracts or concessions have ties to Taib or his family.

Transforming Malaysia

The government of Malaysia plans to transform the country into a developed nation by 2020 through a series of projects covering everything from electric power generation to education. The country’s gross domestic product, which has been growing at an average 6.7 percent annual pace since 1970, shrank 6.2 percent in the first quarter.

In Sarawak, Taib’s government is following its own development plans that call for doubling the state’s GDP to 150 billion ringgit ($42 billion) by 2020. Sarawak Energy Bhd., which is 65 percent owned by the state government, said in July 2007 it plans to build six power plants, including hydropower and coal-fired generators.

The state government also wants to expand the acreage in Sarawak devoted to oil palms to 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) by 2010, from 744,000 at the end of 2008, according to Sarawak’s Ministry of Land Development. Companies that formerly chopped down hardwood trees and exported the timber are now moving into palm plantations.

Lawsuits Filed

Meanwhile, many of the ethnic groups who have traditionally lived from the land in Sarawak -- known as Dayaks -- have filed lawsuits that aim to block some projects and seek better compensation.

Sarawak’s ambitions could be hindered by a lack of good governance, which would shut out overseas investors, says Steve Waygood, head of sustainable and responsible investment research at Aviva Investors in London, which manages more than $3 billion in sustainable assets.

“Even just the perception of corruption can lead to restricted inflows of capital from the global investment community into emerging markets such as Sarawak,” says Waygood, who wrote about reputational risk in a 2006 book, “Capital Market Campaigning” (Risk Books).

“The largest and most responsible financial institutions are very careful to avoid funding unsustainable developments,” he says.

Unilever, which buys 1.5 million tons of palm oil a year -- 4 percent of the world’s supply -- for use in products such as Dove soap and Flora margarine, announced in May that it would buy only from sustainable sources.

No Direct Purchases

“Unilever does not source any palm oil directly from Sarawak,” says Jan Kees Vis, Unilever’s director of sustainable agriculture. “We buy from plantation companies and traders located elsewhere.”

He says Unilever has committed by 2015 to buy all of its palm oil from sources certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a group representing palm oil producers, consumers and nongovernmental organizations that seeks to establish standards for sustainably produced palm oil. The Malaysian Palm Oil Association, a government-supported group of Malaysian plantation companies, is a member of the RSPO.

About 35 percent of the world’s cooking oil comes from palm -- more than any other plant, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And 90 percent of the world’s palm oil comes from Malaysia and Indonesia.

Skittles and Soap

The oil is an ingredient used in everything from Skittles candy to Palmolive soap to some kinds of biodiesel fuel. Palm oil futures have climbed 45 percent this year as of Aug. 24 on concern that dry weather caused by El Nino may reduce output. Crude oil prices rose to a 10-month high of $74.24 a barrel, spurring demand for biodiesel.

Malaysia lost 6.6 percent of its forest cover from 1990 to 2005, or 1.49 million hectares, the most-recent data available from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show. That’s an area equivalent to the state of Connecticut.

Neighboring Indonesia lost forestland at the fastest annual rate among the world’s 44 forest nations from 2000 to 2005, Amsterdam-based Greenpeace says.

“Palm oil is the new green gold after timber,” says Mark Bujang, executive director of the Borneo Resources Institute in Miri, a city of about 230,000 people in Sarawak. “It has become the most destructive force after three decades of unsustainable logging.”

While Malaysia’s palm oil exports have more than doubled to a record 46 billion ringgit in 2008 from 2006, according to the country’s central bank, the gain has come at a price.

Displaced People

Development projects and palm plantations have displaced thousands of people, some of whom have lived for centuries by fishing, hunting and farming in the jungle. Almost 200 lawsuits are pending in the Sarawak courts relating to claims by Dayak people on lands being used for oil palms and logging, according to Baru Bian, a land rights lawyer representing many of the claimants.

A handful of activists have been found dead under mysterious circumstances or disappeared, including Swiss environmental activist Bruno Manser, who vanished in the jungle in 2000.

Cutting down rain forests to cultivate palms in Sarawak has consequences far beyond Malaysia, says Janet Larsen, director of research at the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.

The forests that are being destroyed help modulate the climate because they remove vast stores of carbon from the atmosphere. Chopping down the trees ends up releasing greenhouse gases.

‘Lungs of the Planet’

“These last remaining forests are the lungs of the planet,” Larsen says. “It affects us all.”

Chief Minister Taib, 73, has multiple roles in Sarawak. He’s also the state’s finance minister and its planning and resources management minister -- a role that gives him the power to dispense land, forestry and palm oil concessions as well as the power to approve infrastructure projects.

Until last year, Taib held the additional role of chairman of the Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corp., which fosters wood-based industries in the state.

Anwar Ibrahim, the former Malaysian finance minister who’s the head of the country’s opposition alliance, sees parallels between Taib’s rule and those of other long-standing leaders in Southeast Asia, such as former Indonesian President Suharto and former Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos.

“It’s an authoritarian style of governance to protect their turf and their families,” says Anwar, who was fired as deputy prime minister by then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in 1998 and jailed on charges of having homosexual sex and abusing power. The sodomy conviction was overturned in 2004.

‘Driven by Greed’

Sim Kwang Yang, an opposition member of parliament for Sarawak’s capital city of Kuching from 1982 to 1995, agrees with Anwar’s assessment. “It is crony capitalism driven by greed without any regard for the people,” he says.

Taib’s adult children and his late wife, Lejla, together owned more than 29.3 percent of Cahya Mata Sarawak Bhd., the state’s largest industrial group, with 40 companies involved in construction, property development, road maintenance, trading and financial services, according to the company’s 2008 annual report.

Local residents jokingly say that the company’s initials, CMS, stand for “Chief Minister and Sons.”

In total, CMS has won about 1.3 billion ringgit worth of projects from the state and the federal government since the beginning of 2005, according to the firm’s stock exchange filings.

Taib declined to comment for this article. In an interview he gave to Malaysia’s state news agency, Bernama, on Jan. 13, 2001, Taib said CMS’s ties to him had nothing to do with its winning government jobs.

‘Not Involved’ in Contracts

“I am not involved in the award of contracts,” he said. “No politician in Sarawak is involved in the award of contracts.”

He told Bernama he doesn’t ask for special treatment of his sons. “I never ask anybody to do any favors,” he said.

Mahmud Abu Bekir Taib, the elder of Taib’s two sons, is CMS’s deputy chairman and owns 8.92 percent of the firm, according to the annual report. Sulaiman Abdul Rahman Taib, the younger son and CMS’s chairman until 2008, holds an 8.94 percent stake.

Taib’s two daughters and his son-in-law are also listed in the annual report as “substantial shareholders.”

Taib’s History

Taib, a Muslim who belongs to the Melanau group -- one of about 27 different ethnic groups in Sarawak -- entered politics at the age of 27 after graduating from the University of Adelaide in Australia with a law degree in 1960.

He held various ministerial positions in Sarawak and Malaysia before taking over in 1981 as the chief minister from his uncle, Abdul Rahman Yaakub. Rahman, now 81, ruled Sarawak for 11 years.

Taib, who has silver hair, appears almost daily on the front pages of Sarawak newspapers, sometimes sporting a goatee and a pair of rimless glasses, at the opening of new development projects or local events.

He lives in Sarawak’s capital city of Kuching, an urban area of about 600,000 people on the Sarawak River. Its picturesque waterfront is dotted with colonial buildings, the legacy of British adventurer James Brooke, who founded the Kingdom of Sarawak in 1841 and became known as the White Rajah. Brooke’s heirs ruled the kingdom until 1946, when Charles Vyner Brooke ceded his rights to the U.K. Sarawak joined the Federation of Malaysia on Sept. 16, 1963, along with other former British colonies.

Cousin’s Role

At Taib’s mansion, which overlooks the river, he receives guests in a living room decorated with gilt-edged European-style sofa sets, according to photos in the July to December 2006 newsletter of Naim Cendera Holdings Bhd., which changed its name to Naim Holdings Bhd. in March.

Naim is a property developer and contractor whose chairman is Taib’s cousin, Abdul Hamed Sepawi. He is also chairman of state power company Sarawak Energy and timber company Ta Ann Holdings Bhd., and is on the board of Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corp. and Sarawak Plantation Bhd.

Naim and CMS jointly built Kuching’s iconic waterfront building, the umbrella-roofed, nine-story Sarawak State Legislative Assembly complex. Naim has won more than 3.3 billion ringgit worth of contracts from the state and the federation since 2005, its stock exchange filings show.

Companies Respond

Ricky Kho, a spokesman for Naim, said the company declined to comment for this article. Naim’s deputy managing director, Sharifuddin Wahab, said in an interview with Bloomberg News in July 2007 that the chairman’s family ties weren’t why the company won government contracts.

“We have been able to execute our projects on time, we stick to the budget and the quality of what we hand over to the government is up to their expectations, if not more,” he said.

“Our teams have always acted professionally” when working with the government, whether on large or small projects, CMS’s group managing director, Richard Curtis, said in an e-mail. “CMS is governed by the strict listing regulations of the Malaysian stock exchange,” he said, adding that the chairman and the group managing director are both independent.

“The large projects carry with them an equally large risk, including a huge reputational risk, particularly for crucial projects by the government,” he said. “It is the government’s prerogative and discretion to award projects using a variety of approaches that includes open and closed tenders as well as directly negotiated processes, to the contractors and developers they feel will deliver the project as promised.”

Malaysia’s reputation as a place to conduct business has deteriorated in recent years, according to Transparency International, the Berlin-based advocacy group that publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

‘Monument of Corruption’

Transparency ranked the country 47th out of 180 in 2008, down from 43rd in 2007. Transparency also has singled out the Bakun Hydroelectric Dam, under construction on the Balui River in Sarawak, as a “monument of corruption.”

The index lacks fairness, says Ahmad Said Hamdan, chief commissioner of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, because it doesn’t take into consideration the size of the population of the countries in the ranking, for example.

“I’ve seen a lot of improvement in civil service in the past 10 years,” he says.

Dead Fish

Early this year, hundreds of dead fish started floating on the muddy river near the Bakun dam site. The fish were killed by siltation, which was triggered by uncontrolled logging upstream, Sarawak’s assistant minister of environment and public health, Abang Abdul Rauf Abang Zen, says. He says the Bakun dam has very strict environmental assessments and isn’t to blame for the siltation.

In January, Tenaga Nasional Bhd., Malaysia’s state- controlled power utility, and Sarawak Energy said they won approval from the national government to take over the operation of the hydropower project through a leasing agreement. Sarawak Energy also won preliminary approval to export about 1,600 megawatts of electricity from the 2,400-megawatt Bakun project, once it begins operating, to Peninsular Malaysia. The remaining power will go to Sarawak.

Taib announced a plan called New Concept in 1994. The aim was to bring together local people, with their customary rights to the land, and private shareholders, who would provide capital and expertise to create plantations. The plan called for companies to hold a 60 percent stake in the joint ventures, the state to own 10 percent and the remaining 30 percent to go to local communities in return for a 60-year lease on their land.

‘Emotional’ Disputes

That time period equals about two complete cycles of oil palm development. An oil palm typically matures in 3 years, reaches peak production from 5 to 7 years and continues to produce for about 25 years, says Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, a commodities analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in Singapore.

The policy has led to some disagreements. In his interview with Bernama in 2001, Taib said land acquisitions by the state have led to “emotional” disputes because some people seek too much compensation.

“We are not allowed to pay more than market value,” he told Bernama. He said people need to prove that they have traditionally lived in an area -- for example, by providing an aerial photograph -- in order for the state to grant them title to the land.

“If there are disputes, they go to the court,” Taib told Bernama.

Some local people say they received no compensation at all for their land. In Kampung Lebor, a village about a two-hour drive from Kuching, 160 families, members of the Iban group that was formerly headhunters, live in longhouses and survive by fishing and some farming. The Iban are Sarawak’s largest single group of Dayaks, who make up about half of the state’s 2.3 million population.

Land Overlap

In mid-1996, the state handed out parcels of land that overlapped with the community’s customary hunting and fishing areas to the Land Custody and Development Authority and Nirwana Muhibbah Bhd., a palm oil company in Kuching.

In mid-1997, the authority and the company cleared the land with bulldozers and planted oil palm seedlings, according to a copy of Kampung Lebor’s writ of summons filed to the High Court in Kuching.

Government ‘Cruel’

“The government is cruel,” says Jengga Jeli, 54, a father of five in Lebor. “Fruit trees have been cut down. It’s become harder to hunt and fish. Now we are forced to get meat and vegetables from the bazaar, and we are very poor.” Jengga’s village filed a lawsuit in 1998 against Nirwana, LCDA and the state government in a bid to get compensation.

The case was finally heard in 2006 and is now awaiting judgment, according to Baru Bian, who is representing the Iban in Kampung Lebor. Reginal Kevin Akeu, a lawyer at Abdul Rahim Sarkawi Razak Tready Fadillah & Co. Advocates, which is representing Nirwana and LCDA, declined to comment.

The cases show that the development projects, including plantations and dams, haven’t helped poverty among the local people, many of whom live without adequate electricity or schools, says Richard Leete, who served as the resident representative of the United Nations Development Program for Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei from 2003 to 2008.

Poverty Remains

“This is the paradox of Sarawak -- the great wealth it has, the natural resources in such abundance, and yet such an impoverishment and the real hardship these communities are suffering,” says Leete, who chronicled Malaysia’s progress since its independence from Britain in his book “Malaysia: From Kampung to Twin Towers” (Oxford Fajar, 2007). “There has no doubt been a lot of money politics,” he says.

In the rugged hills about 150 kilometers (93 miles) south of Kuching, some 160 Bidayuh families, known as the Land Dayaks, are clinging to their traditional habitat, while a dam is under construction nearby. They live by farming and fishing.

With only a primary school in the village, children have to go to boarding schools outside the jungle to get further education, crossing seven handmade bamboo bridges and trekking two hours over the hills when they return home.

The state has offered the Bidayuhs 7,500 ringgit per hectare, 80 ringgit per rubber tree and 60 ringgit per durian fruit tree in compensation for their native land, says Simo ak Sekam, 48, a resident of Kampung Rejoi, one of four villages in the area. In Rejoi, about half of 39 families have refused.

Bamboo Bridges

“We don’t want to move because we are happy here,” Simo says. “We feel very sad because our land will be covered with water. The young generations won’t know this land. They won’t see the bamboo bridges.”

The builder of the local reservoir is Naim Holdings -- the company headed by Chief Minister Taib’s cousin. The government awarded Naim the 310.7 million-ringgit contract without putting it out for bids. Naim’s statement announcing the deal in July 2007 said it won the job on a “negotiated basis.”

One of the most threatened groups is the Penan, nomadic people who live deep in the jungle on the upper reaches of the Baram River. On a steamy equatorial morning in late October 2007, Long Kerong village leader Kelesau Naan and his wife, Uding Lidem, walked two hours to their rice-storing hut. Kelesau, who was in his late 70s and who had protested logging activity in their area, told Uding he’d go check on an animal trap he had set nearby. He never came back.

Skull and Bones Found

Two months later, his skull and several pieces of his bones, along with his necklace made of red, yellow and white beads, surfaced on the banks of the Segita River. Inspector Sumarno Lamundi at the regional police station says the investigation is ongoing.

It was just the latest tragedy among activists working for the Penan since the early 1990s, when rampant logging took place. At least two other Penan were found dead, including Abung Ipui, a pastor and an advocate for land rights for his village. His body was found in October 1994 with his stomach cut open.

Manser, the Swiss activist for the rights of the Penan, vanished without a trace from the Borneo rain forests in May 2000 and was officially declared missing in March 2005.

Kelesau’s death has made the Penan willing to stand up for their survival.

“We are scared of something terrible happening to us if we don’t resist,” says grim-faced Bilong Oyoi, 48, headman of Long Sait, a Penan settlement close to Long Kerong.

Penans’ Resistance

Bilong, who wears a traditional rattan hat decorated with hornbill feathers, says his group is setting up blockades to resist logging activities. They are also working with NGOs to get attention for their plight and filing lawsuits.

With the help of the Basel, Switzerland-based Bruno Manser Fund, an NGO set up by the late activist, Bilong and 76 other Penan sent a letter -- which some signed using only thumb prints -- to Gilles Pelisson, the chief executive officer of French hotel chain Accor SA.

The letter urged Accor to think twice about partnering with logging company Interhill Logging Sdn. to build a 388-room Novotel Interhill in Kuching. The Penan community says Interhill’s operations in Sarawak have a devastating effect on them. Accor responded by sending a fact-finding mission to Sarawak to investigate Interhill’s logging activities.

“If the worst-case scenario occurs and if no action plan is implemented, we will not continue with our partnership,” Helene Roques, Accor’s director for sustainable development in Paris, said in June. In mid-August, she said she expects “good results” by the end of September.

Rio Tinto Venture

No foreign investor has made a larger bet on Taib’s development plans than Rio Tinto Alcan, a unit of London-based mining company Rio Tinto Plc. A joint venture between Rio Tinto and CMS for a $2 billion aluminum smelter has been negotiating power purchase agreements with Sarawak Energy for more than 12 months, according to Julia Wilkins, a Rio Tinto Alcan spokeswoman in Brisbane, Australia.

CMS meets Rio Tinto’s requirements as a joint-venture partner, she says. “CMS is a main-board-listed company with its own board of directors,” she says. “It has a free float of shares in excess of the minimum market requirement. The chairman and the group managing director are both independent.”

Malaysia grants special economic advantages to the country’s Malay majority and the local people of Sabah and Sarawak states on Borneo, collectively referred to as Bumiputra -- literally, sons of the soil.

Still, the country is leaving behind many of its ethnic minorities, says Colin Nicholas, a Malaysian activist of Eurasian descent who has written a book about the mainland’s oldest community, “The Orang Asli and the Contest for Resources” (IWGIA, 2000).

‘Completely Powerless’

One person trying to help the Dayaks is See Chee How, 45, a land rights lawyer who became an activist after meeting Sim, the former opposition member of parliament in Kuching.

In 1994, See witnessed an attack on Penan demonstrators who’d erected a roadblock to prevent logging trucks from driving through their land. A 6-year-old boy died after security forces used tear gas on the demonstrators, he says.

“They were completely powerless,” recalls the soft-spoken, crew-cut See, sporting a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans, in his office above a bustling market in Kuching. “They were depending on logging trucks to move around because their passageways had been destroyed by logging trails.” See now works with Baru Bian, 51, one of the first land rights lawyers representing the Dayaks in Sarawak.

Lawsuits and Votes

Nicholas says Sarawak’s people have to fight for their rights not only through lawsuits but by voting.

“The biggest problem we have with indigenous people’s rights is that we have the federal government and state government run and dictated by people who have no respect or interest for indigenous people,” he says. “We need a change of government.”

The prime minister’s office declined to comment.

Opposition leader Anwar says change is possible. His alliance won control of an unprecedented five states in Peninsular Malaysia in a March 2008 election. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s ruling coalition has lost at least four regional polls held this year.

“I think this is a turning point,” Anwar says.

Still, Taib’s coalition won 30 of Sarawak’s 31 seats in March 2008 parliamentary elections. That helped the ruling National Front coalition led by then Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi retain a 58-seat majority, ahead of Anwar’s People’s Alliance. Sarawak is due to hold the next election by 2011.

Taib defended his government’s program to turn forestlands into oil palm plantations as a way of improving living standards for the Dayaks at a seminar on native land development in Miri on April 18, 2000.

“Land without development is a poverty trap,” he said, according to his Web site. Many Dayak people, who have seen their land transformed as a result of Taib’s policies and companies linked to him, say they are still waiting to see their share of wealth.

To contact the reporter on this story: Yoolim Lee in Singapore at yoolim@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 24, 2009 17:00 EDT

Your Cell Phone Easily A Spy Phone

2009-08-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

Your cell phone’s battery suddenly runs out faster than usual even when you have not been talking more? Your cell phone is unusually warmer even in between calls? An unusual annoying pulse buzzing while you’re on a call or between calls? You seem to have trouble shutting it off, or it stays lit up after you’ve powered down? The phone sometimes lights up when you aren’t making or receiving a call, or using any other function?

Your cell phone could be transmitting every word you say, every text message you send or receive (even if you’ve deleted them) and your exact location. Even when your cell phone is turned off, it could still be used to listen to you and what goes on around you.

Most governments get their countries’ telcos to acquire and install systems that allow them to listen to any citizen’s calls or to track their location. It would be naive to think that Malaysian government does not eavesdrop. But I believe the government does not listen to you, unless you’re a gangster boss, or someone considered a threat. Or an opposition politican???

Your cell phone connects you to the world, but it could also be giving anyone from your boss to your wife a window into your every move. The same technology that lets you stay in touch on-the-go can now let others tap into your private world — without you ever even suspecting something is awry.

You can easily, in about 10 minutes, bug someone’s cell phone, enabling you to eavesdrop on every conversation, text message, website visit, and track every where the person goes. When the cell phone is turned off, you can turn on its microphone and remotely listen to what the person is doing.

How To Spy Using Cell Phone
Do you want to secretly spy on SMS text messages, calls, GPS locations and other confidential info of your child’s, spouse’s, girlfriend’s, competitor’s, boss’ or staff’s cell phone?

Before you can spy on a cell phone you need to know the following facts.
To spy on a given cell phone you should make sure that the target cell phone is compatible with the cell phone spy software. Cell phone spy softwares are compatible with the following type of phones (operating systems).
• Symbian OS (Most Nokia Phones)
• Apple iphone
• Windows Mobile

Today most of the modern cell phones are loaded with one of the above three operating systems and hence compatibility doesn’t pose a major problem. There exists many cell phone spy softwares on the market to accomplish this job and hence people often get confused about which cell phone spy software to go for. Top rated cell phone spy software include Mobile Spy and FlexiSpy.

These are hybrid spy software/service which allows you to spy on your target cell phone in real time. This unique system records the activities of anyone who uses the cell phone. For this you need to install a small application onto the cell phone. This application starts at every boot of the phone but remains stealth and does not show up in the running process list. It runs in the background and will spy on every activity that takes place on the phone, including logging:
• Calls Log – Each incoming and outgoing number on the phone is logged along with duration and time stamp.
• Every text message/MMS is logged even if the phone’s logs are deleted. Includes full text.
• The phones’s current location is frequently logged using GPS when signal is available.
• Each address entered into Internet Explorer (or any browser) is logged.
• These cell phone spy software works in total stealth mode. The person using the phone can never come to know about the presence of this software.

Simple surveillance

You don’t have to plant a James Bond-style bug to conduct surveillance any more. A service called World Tracker (available on in UK) lets you use data from cell phone towers and GPS systems to pinpoint anyone’s exact whereabouts, any time — as long as they’ve got their phone on them.

All you have to do is log on to the web site and enter the target phone number. The site sends a single text message to the phone that requires one response for confirmation. Once the response is sent, you are locked in to their location and can track them step-by-step. The response is only required the first time the phone is contacted, so you can imagine how easily it could be handled without the phone’s owner even knowing.

Cell phone apps like Loopt and the new Google Latitude also allow you to track your friends' physical locations, and be tracked in return.

Advanced Eavesdropping
Once connected, the service shows you the exact location of the phone by the minute, conveniently pinpointed on a Google Map. The company has indicated plans to expand its service to other countries soon.

So you’ve figured out where someone is, but now you want to know what they’re actually doing. With software like FlexiSpy and Mobile Spy, you can listen in, even if they aren’t talking on their phone. Dozens of other programs are available that’ll turn any cell phone into a high-tech, long-range listening device. They run virtually undetectable to the average eye.

FlexiSpy, for example, promises to let you “catch cheating wives or cheating husbands” and even “bug meeting rooms.” Its tools use a phone’s microphone to let you hear essentially any conversations within earshot. Once the program is installed, all you have to do is dial a number to tap into the phone’s mic and hear everything going on. The phone won’t even ring, and its owner will have no idea you are virtually there at his side.

It’s Totally Illegal
You might be asking how this could possibly be legal. Turns out, it isn’t – at least, not in the ways I’ve just described. Much like those fancy smoking devices designed “for tobacco use only,” the software itself gets by because of a disclaimer saying it doesn’t endorse any illegal use.

Can the government use your cell phone records to track your physical location without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause? My opinion on the matter is “no”. Any government applications for cell site location tracking information made without showing sufficient need for this kind of sensitive information should not be granted by authorities or the courts of law.

So, for our government to eavesdrop on us – it’s illegal.

Surveillance intensive future is inevitable.
A surveillance intensive future is inevitable. And cell phone tracking will be a common law enforcement investigative technique.

On the commercial side, the uses of location tracking are endless. And many of them may well turn out to be things people like. But a key principle of privacy, accepted around the world as part of the core fair information principles, is that information collected for one purpose shouldn’t be used for other purposes without people’s affirmative permission. If someone wants to sign up for a friend-finding service and understands fully what this means for their privacy (and hopefully has the ability to turn it on and off), that’s one thing. But people who are just using their mobile phones for texting and calling friends and family do not expect that companies will exploit the side effects of how cell phones work for other, unrelated purposes that invade their privacy.

Protecting Your Cell Phone
Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to safeguard your cell phone just yet. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until we see Kaspersky or McAfee-style programs to firewall your phone and keep intruders out. For now, though, the only sure-fire form of protection is to keep a close guard on your phone. Don’t accept Bluetooth connections unless you know what they are. Most important, make sure no one has access to install something when you aren’t watching. Otherwise, they may soon be watching you when you least expect it.

Gross National Happiness - New Measure of Development

2009-08-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

The new Sarawak state government, as a mainstream policy-making body, can be more sensitive to alternative approaches and start to measure Gross National Happiness and translate the indicators and data into public policy. If Sarawak’s new policymakers measure what really matters to people—health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being; economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability and real progress for all Sarawakians. Here's why:

1. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness. Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes -- and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way -- Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.

2. Jack Welch, who is regarded as the father of the “shareholder value” movement that has dominated the corporate world for more than 20 years, has said it was “a dumb idea” for executives to focus so heavily on quarterly profits and share price gains. Jack Welch, whose record at GE encouraged other executives to replicate its consistent returns, said that managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal. His comments, made in an interview for the FT’s series on the future of capitalism, come as the economic crisis has caused a radical rethinking by many leading executives and policymakers.

3. “Gross National Product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising and . . . the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play . . . the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life wothwhile.” Robert Kennedy, 1968.

The above three topics may seem totally unrelated. However, upon putting my radical rethinking hat while considering Prime Minister Najib’s key result areas and gov’t KPIs in relation to measures of progress of Sarawak people, these three subjects are indeed, totally related. Governments, businesses and citizens must focus on what really make us happy.

Sarawakians must now set out a radical proposal to the new state government to guide the direction of modern Sarawak and the lives of people who live in them. In contrast to the conventional narrow focus on economic indicators, we must call on the new state government to directly and regularly measure people’s subjective well-being: their experiences, feelings and perceptions of how their lives are going, as a new way of assessing societal progress.

Some 40 years ago, in my kampong, my parents and siblings lived better, healthier and happier lives, despite no electricity, no roads and none of today’s modern necessities. We cooked over wood fire, got our water from the cool mountain stream and plenty of harvests from the farms.

Today, the rivers and streams have fewer fishes, we use too much pesticides in the farms, we live too much on credit with our education, house and car loans and we have to work harder to pay many bills and to cope with higher and higher costs of living. In all, I’m more miserable than I was 40 years ago.

The roads and electricity supply in the modern kampong today are not making our planet any better. In fact, these modern amenities only serve to increase our carbon footprint. We’ll be leaving to the future generations, a planet that’s degenerated and too costly to clean up.

The world is facing a breakdown of communities, environmental degradation, global warming, continuing poverty, and climbing rates of hunger. It is the perfect opportunity to reconsider development, progress, and purpose in terms of what is truly most important in life. Development is under scrutiny as a cycle of more production for more consumption to boost gross national product. There is an urgency to reconsider development in a broader, holistic manner and reclaim the concept of progress as genuine desirable change.

Economists, policymakers, reporters, and the public rely on the GDP as a shorthand indicator of progress; but the GDP is merely a sum of national spending with no distinctions between transactions that add to well-being and those that diminish it.
Mike Pennock from Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI) Atlantic argued that measures such as Gross National Happiness provide a guideline for developing a framework of national accounting where suitable monetary value can be placed on assets such as the environment and voluntary work. Thus costs and benefits can be calculated and accounted for in a balance sheet, and policymakers in turn cannot overlook vital aspects of human, social, and natural capital.

Some pioneering visions of alternative progress have emerged in Asia, chief among them the concept of Gross National Happiness as coined by Former King of Bhutan Jigme Wangchuck. Gross National Happiness has four pillars: the promotion of equitable and sustainable socioeconomic development; preservation and promotion of cultural values; conservation of the natural environment; and establishment of good governance. Gross National Happiness values are measured by tracking wellness in seven domains: economic, environmental, physical, mental, workplace, social, and political.

Currently there are two parallel global movements. The first can be characterized by the World Economic Forum, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, supporting traditional notions of development. The second is the World Social Forum, Gross National Happiness, and allied movements that seek to redefine progress.

Measuring well-being would shift the goalposts for what nations regard as success. The aim is to bring about change in how societies shape the lives of their citizens. If they are to be effective, measures of well-being therefore need to influence the design of policy made by international, national and local governments.

Fact - BN gov't took grabbed and snatched NCR land

2009-06-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

It was reported as front page news in the Borneo Post on the 19th June 2009 that the BN Government will not take away the native customary lands of the natives. The PM was quoted to urge the people to “…have confident in Barisan Nasional (BN) government. We have no intention of grabbing anybody’s land. The Ibans should not worry. The BN government will not snatch your property.”

In reply I wish to say that this assurance if true, come too little too late.

The fact and the truth is that the people’s land, in particular, the natives’ customary lands had already been taken, grabbed and snatched under the BN government.

The fact that the PM made this statement today shows that the people in particular the natives are complaining that their NCR lands had been taken away summarily all these years.

The fact that my legal firm is handling over one hundred cases of NCR related cases show proofs that NCR lands had been taken, grabbed and snatched all these years, under the BN government, headed by the present CM Pehin Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud.

Despite the landmark decision in the case of Nor Anak Nyawai which was affirmed by Madeli Salleh’s case in the Federal Court, (the highest court in Malaysia), the present State BN Government of Sarawak refused to accept the said Court’s decision that NCR Land includes not only “temuda” (secondary forest) but it extends to their “Pemakai menua” (territorial domain) and “Pulau” (reserved or preserved virgin forests). This refusal to accept the Court’s decision is reflected in the State Attorney-General’s Chambers’defences representing the State Government, in these cases now pending hearing in the various High Courts through out the State of Sarawak.

I therefore urge the Honourable Prime Minister, to order, instruct and/or at least advise the present BN State Government through the CM Pehin Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud to return to the people all the NCR lands that had been “taken, grabbed and snatched” summarily all these years by revoking timber licences, provisional leases and replanting permit or other licences that includes and/or encroaches onto NCR lands.

Secondly, order that an independent Land Commission of Inquiry be set up to investigate all these violation of claims of NCR lands in Sarawak including the abuses by the police force of complainants relating to NCR disputes with companies, to show to the people of Sarawak, and Malaysian at large that this PM walks his talk.

This Land Commission of Inquiry should also look into all the hundred over cases now pending in the High Courts in Sarawak, thus helping in the backlog of cases in the High Court.

If the above proposal is not done within 1 month from today, I am afraid these statements are mere political gimmicks just to mislead the people in particular the Natives of Sarawak that this BN Government is now concerned with their affairs and problems. I believe these are but signs of the impending State General Election now looming in the horizon.

Lastly, it was also reported that “The Prime Minister said from his discussions with Chief Minister Pehin Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud he was convinced that the State’s model of native customary rights land development would ensure a better future for the Dayaks, particularly the Ibans.”

I believe that the State’s model of native customary rights land development referred is the “new way” of developing NCR Land popularly referred to as “The New Concept” or “Konsep Baru” the ‘brain-child’ of the present CM. Under this ‘Konsep Baru’, the landowners would have 30% shares equity, the developer 60% and the State Government 10%.

I am sad to say that the very first project launched in Kanowit based on this concept is a total failure. After 10 years of its launching, the developer is still unsure whether they can break-even in the years ahead thus causing much anxiety and trepidation to the natives who were lured in participating in this project years ago.

I have been instructed by some of these natives to take legal action against the State Government to protect the natives’ right over their NCR lands, as they have no confidence in this so called “Konsep Baru” or as the PM said the “State’s model of native customary rights land development” referred in the news report.

I dare say in the light of my knowledge of these issues, the statements made by the Honourable PM are mere political rhetoric, unless and until we can see in one (1) month time, my suggestion referred above are implemented; i.e. the return of NCR lands that had already been taken away and the setting up of a Land Commission of Inquiry to investigate these complaints of violation of NCR over lands in Sarawak.

This post is the Press Release By Baru Bian on 20 June 2009, in response to the Borneo Post on 19 June, the front page headline exclaimed “We’ll not take away your land: Najib”.

Baru Bian, renowned native customary land rights lawyer now appointed a member in Keadilan’s Political Bureau and Supreme Council, issued a press statement to refute Najib’s tall tale. Save for a Chinese daily, Baru’s statement was ignored.

Do not use the term Dayak, says Joseph Entulu.

2009-05-10T01:43:00.000-07:00

Rural and Regional Development Deputy Minister, Datuk Joseph Entulu Belaun, is again reviving the call for the government to consider dropping the term "Dayak". Entulu told reporters after witnessing the installation of the new committee members for the Sarawak Dayak National Union (SDNU) Rajang branch on Saturday night, 9-May-2009.

He said the term should be dropped because it conveyed negative connotations like being uncivilised, uncouth and “low class“. He believes it would be more tactful and exact if specific terminologies like Iban, Bidayuh, Kayan, Kenyah, Kelabit and so forth, be used.

Source: The Star Online

Sarawak Police and Broken Windows

2009-05-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

Pak Bui's broken car window post "Crime, Punishment and Torture" on http://hornbillunleashed.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/crime-punishment-and-torture, reminds us of the “Broken Windows” anti-crime policy used by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, often cited as having reduced crime in the city and ‘cleaned’ it as if by waving a magic wand.

At gatherings of the world’s top cops, the "Broken Windows" theory is often a presentation topic. The Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton built his career on the “broken windows” theory. As New York’s police chief in the mid-1990s, he implemented a quality-of-life initiative to much acclaim, and he campaigned for the top job in L.A. on a “broken windows” platform. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino cracked down on such minor misdemeanor offenses as loud house parties, public drinking and improperly disposed trash, believing that these kinds of community-disorder issues are the precursors to the violent crimes that may follow.

Giuliani and Bratton acted on the insights of the Broken Windows theory to transform New York from one of the most dangerous cities in America to the safest big city in the country by treating minor crimes like vandalism, prostitution, and loitering like broken windows.

Giuliani and Bratton deployed police to where they were most needed using the CompStat (computer statistics) system. And instead of tolerating these crimes and showing weakness to criminals and would-be criminals, the police showed strength. They instituted a “zero tolerance” policy for so-called minor crimes. When other criminals witnessed this show of strength, they were deterred.

Citizens, meanwhile, felt safer walking the streets and taking the subway. They took more responsibility for their neighborhoods and helped make them safer as well.

In the New York case, restoring a sense of order to the streets meant that police didn’t have to spend all their time responding to actual crime. Their show of strength inspired citizens to care more for their own communities and deterred criminals from committing crimes in the first place.

According to the “Broken Windows” theory, every instance of disorder, however small - such as a window broken by vandals - should be dealt with firmly. This sends a message of law enforcement and leads to a reduction in more serious crime, the theory goes. The implementation of this involved the aggressive pursuit of those who committed ‘minor’ infractions, such as painting graffiti, panhandling and jaywalking.

The influential “Broken Windows” theory that was published in a 1982 Atlantic article by James Q. Wilson, a political scientist then at Harvard, and George L. Kelling, a criminologist. The theory suggests that a disorderly environment sends a message that no one is in charge, thus increasing fear, weakening community controls, and inviting criminal behavior. It further maintains that stopping minor offenses and restoring greater order can prevent serious crime.

In 2005, Lowell, USA, was being turned into a real life crime-fighting laboratory to test the theory.
Researchers from Harvard and Suffolk University meticulously recording criminal incidents in each of the hot spots, working with police, identified 34 crime hot spots. In half of them, authorities set to work - clearing trash from the sidewalks, fixing street lights, and sending loiterers scurrying. Abandoned buildings were secured, businesses forced to meet code, and more arrests made for misdemeanors. Mental health services and homeless aid referrals expanded. In the remaining hot spots, normal policing and services continued.

The results were striking: A 20 percent plunge in calls to police from the parts of town that received extra attention. It is seen as strong scientific evidence that the “broken windows” theory really works - that disorderly conditions breed bad behavior, and that fixing them can help prevent crime.
The Lowell experiment offers guidance on what seems to work best. Cleaning up the physical environment was very effective; misdemeanor arrests less so, and boosting social services had no apparent impact.

This seems to be a solid basis for a policing strategy that preemptively addresses the conditions that promote crime. In traditional policing, cops go from call to call, chasing their own tail.

I trust that PDRM does have an effective policing strategy. Any lessons we can learn from Rakan Cop?

Free Universal High Quality Education for Sarawakians

2009-04-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

Free access to high quality learning resources is something that I believe many of us Sarawakians would never have thought could be real. Today, it's our new weapon for mass education, and great quality.

YouTube EDU and Academic Earth have done well in spreading learning.

This is welcome news for students and families around the world who have had little educational choice in the past, except that provided by the public sector. It is globalisation bringing education to students across the world, shortening the distance between countries and bringing quality lectures to emerging and developed nations.

Given that we are entering into the Web 2.0 era, Google has an opportunity to go further in upsetting status quo. It can do so by launching, in tandem with YouTube EDU, contests and small prizes for students to enrich the core material.

Opportunities for improvement include creating and sharing translations, mini-case studies, transcriptions, and slides to accompany the courses. Winners of such contests can be chosen through a combination of peer voting and expert review to ensure accuracy of the proposed enhancements.

Precedents exist for engaging students from poor communities in creation of eLearning resources. At http://www.openworld.com and http://www.entrepreneurialschools.com, sample YouTube clips and online work-study research projects show what students in extremely impoverished, war-torn areas of the world can do in response to small (USD30) microscholarships, vouchers, and prizes.

Billons of camera phones capable of recording and sharing short video clips are heading to impoverished areas of the world in the next few years.

If YouTube EDU opts to encourage co-creation opportunities for students, a wealth of new eLearning resources may be generated by media-capable students who are now shortchanged by 19th century-style schools.

This may create an grassroots opportunity for new, market-sensitive learning ventures to flourish.

In line with its “Education anywhere and anytime” vision, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) imparts on students, courses on public health, art, music and various other subjects through mobile phones. IGNOU now serves about 1.8 million students in India and 32 countries abroad through 21 Schools of Studies and an elaborate network of 58 Regional centres, 1804 study centres, and 49 overseas centres.

Looking at the mobile phone penetration in Malaysia, we can think of using the medium to impart education. Education and technology cannot be seen separately. Following IGNOU's steps in spreading learning to rural India, Malaysia can likewise, take education, especially vocational education, to our kampongs through mobile handsets.

IGNOU believes in imparting quality education to the masses. These easily accessible modules would be implemented in collaboration with the Communication and Manufacturing Association of India. The courses are offered through text, video and graphics mode. IGNOU would also provide public health courses on nutrition, public health, AIDS awareness, and many other educational contents. Furthermore, students do not have to pay anything extra for the new service.

YouTube EDU launched, on 26 March 2009, an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities”. The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good).

Academic Earth is an organization building a platform for video and other educational resources from top universities, think tanks, and conferences. The company has the stated goal of “giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.”

Academic Earth offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” The site also features a roster of famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki.

These aren't radically new ideas. Fora.TV and BigThink both offer intellectual video content online. iTunes U hosts a lot of university content as well. Unlike Big Think, Academic Earth isn’t creating original content, it’s just repurposing existing academic content. And Fora.TV seems to focus more on speeches and public lectures. But Academic Earth has the right plan around providing free course lectures. You can watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures in a few days.

Fellow Sarawakians, you know what to do.

Sarawak's Future for Middle-Skill Jobs

2009-04-21T03:27:00.000-07:00

Source: SCAN www.tiny.cc/sarawakcan
Based on 9MP figures, can our future generations have sustainable livelihood from secure income and long-term employability? From analysis of 9MP figures and global trends, few conclusions and recommendations can be derived related to Sarawak's human capital development and sustainable livelihood of its people now and in the future.

One key area to take a hard look at is middle-skill jobs. A range of new government policies could help low-income workers obtain more education and training for middle-skill jobs, thereby raising their earnings and their family’s living standards. At the same time, the new Sarawak state government must generate new demand for middle-skill workers, by developing key sectors of the state's economy and by implementing new economic, social and educational policies.

What are middle-skill jobs?

Classifying occupations into a few skill categories is awkward, given the many elements of skill required for most jobs. Under an approach that classifies jobs based on education and training levels, “middle-skill” jobs are those that generally require some education and training beyond secondary school but less than a bachelor’s degree. These post-secondary education or training requirements can include diplomas, vocational certificates, significant on-the-job training, previous work experience, or some college, but less than a bachelor’s degree.

We divide the broad occupational groups into high-skill, middle-skill, and low-skill categories based on Statistics Dept's estimates of the educational attainment and training of people in those jobs. Using this information, we define:

* High-skill occupations as those in the professional/technical and managerial categories.

* Low-skill occupations as those in the service and agricultural categories.

* Middle-skill occupations as all the others, including clerical, sales, construction, installation/repair, production, and transportation/material moving.

This definition is clearly imperfect, since there are many professional/technical and service jobs that are clearly middle-skill while there are jobs in the clerical, sales and other categories that are not; but, on average, these discrepancies tend to cancel out, and trends in these categories roughly capture the ones SCAN wants to focus on.

Salary Trends based on SCAN's Analysis

When wages as well as employment grow faster than average for a given skill group, the implication is that labuor market demand is rising more rapidly for workers in that skill category than for other workers. For workers in middle-skill jobs, recent wage patterns paint a complex picture.

The annual earnings gap between workers with college degrees versus workers with secondary school certs has certainly widened for over 30 years, although it did not increase at all between 2000 and 2006 for full-time workers above age 24. Those with associate degrees now earn, per year of education, a similar wage premium over those with only a secondary cert. In 2006, the median worker with an associate degree earned about 33 percent more than those with only a diploma, while those with a BA degree and no graduate degree earned 62 percent more.

Turning to occupational differences, several middle-skill occupations have experienced rapid wage increases in recent years. In the eight years between 1997 and 2005, the average Sarawakian worker had an overall inflation-adjusted wage increase of only about 5 percent.

Certainly, not all positions in middle-skill occupations pay well or are well-situated on career paths that promise wage advancement and not all middle-skill positions experienced healthy increases in real wages after the late 1990s. In some categories not requiring post-secondary education or training, wage increases lagged behind the average. But the figures indicate that demand for-many middle-skill occupations is rising well enough to generate not only strong employment growth, but also growth in wages.

Job Projections based on SCAN's Analysis

Using its estimates of educational requirements for jobs, SCAN projects that nearly half (about 45 percent) of all job openings in the next 10 years will be in the broad occupational categories that are mostly middle-skill. Another 33 percent will be in the high-skill occupational categories, with the remaining 22 percent in the low-skill (service) occupations.

SCAN projects that Malaysia's net growth in professional and managerial jobs as well as in service jobs will exceed net growth in middle occupational categories. But steady growth in the middle categories is still expected. For example, net job growth in the broad fields of transportation, construction, and maintenance/repair is projected at 11 to 12 percent over the next decade, only slightly below expected average growth for all jobs (12.9 percent).

The projections for detailed occupations point to average or above-average growth in several high-wage job categories that require education and training at the middle level.

All in all, these projections demonstrate that ample employment opportunities will remain in a variety of good-paying jobs in the middle of the labor market over the next decade and beyond.

Sarawak's Future Supply of Skills

Using education as a proxy for skills, SCAN's projections indicate a slowdown in the growth of skills over the next two decades, at both the top and middle of the labour market. In fact, the slowdown in growth among workers with some college education exceeds the slowdown among workers with a bachelor’s degree or more.

This slowdown might not fully materialize, for some reasons such as; if more educated workers choose to retire, if more young people or adults choose to attend college or participate in long-term training, or if more highly educated Malaysians enter Sarawak (perhaps due to changing immigration laws). But some slowdown in educational growth is almost certain to occur.

Another consideration is that educational attainment patterns may understate skill mismatches because of the limited numbers who qualify for specific occupations in high demand. Openings for registered nurses, for example, are expected to jump dramatically over the next 10 to 15 years. Having enough workers with general education at the BA or sub-BA level will do little to meet the increasing demand for nurses unless enough workers obtain the relevant occupational qualifications. Without initiatives to better link the emerging occupational requirements with the education and training obtained by current and future workers, employers will have to import workers or alter their production strategy in ways that may eliminate potentially good jobs.

Policy Implications for The New Sarawak State Government

All these means that the new Sarawak state government under Pakatan Rakyat will need to develop new economic, human capital and education policies that are seamless aligned towards generating sustainable livelihood and better income for Sarawakians.

Complementing government policies, employers will adjust to tight labor markets in a variety of ways - such as with higher wages, more aggressive recruitment, and more selective screening. They will likely also invest more in training. But these investments take time and significant resources.

Furthermore, private sector training investments by firms are often limited by a variety of market failures that lead to suboptimal investments, especially among less-educated workers. These market failures include imperfect or asymmetric information between employers and employees, liquidity constraints in capital markets, and wage rigidities that prevent employers from financing training partly through lower wages. Another reason for under-investment is that employers who train workers fear they will be unable to recoup their investment if other firms hire workers away once they are trained, Under-investments in employer-led training seem to plague less-educated workers.

These market failures might lead to lowered worker performance and productivity in some sectors in the absence of sound policy responses. And the education and earnings levels of disadvantaged workers will also remain below the levels that could have been achieved with appropriate policy measures. The likely short supply of workers in several key sectors offers opportunities to improve the earnings of disadvantaged workers. In particular, low-income kampong youth or adults can raise their earnings substantially and fill many middle-level jobs by undertaking training and post-secondary education. The result will be to improve efficiency and equity in the labor market.

How might this be accomplished? For the kampong or rural youth - especially those in school - it means expanding opportunities for high-quality career and technical education. Options include career academies or vocational training schools, which have demonstrated positive impacts on the earnings of youth and especially rural young men. Other options include technical schools and “Career Pathway” models, which provide ladders into certain well-paying occupational clusters based on school curricula and work experience, beginning in secondary school (or earlier) and continuing into post-secondary education.

For adults, effective approaches involve supplementing education or training, with enhanced links to employers in sectors with strong growth in middle-skill jobs. These approaches should include job search and follow-up services. Often, community or technical colleges, as well as private career colleges, can deliver the relevant education and training.

Labor market intermediaries can play a useful role in coordinating these components and developing connections with employers through “sectoral” training or “career ladders” that attach rural and disadvantaged adults to these sectors and provide pathways of instruction qualifying them for specific occupations and industries. To be effective, intermediaries sometimes must offer stipends during the period of study, as well as child care, transportation, and job placement services. Financial enhancements afterwards might still be needed to incent these workers to remain attached to the labor market.

Expanding apprenticeships is a particularly attractive option for upgrading the careers of both young and experienced workers. Apprenticeship training culminates in career-related and portable credentials that are recognized and respected by employers. It relies mostly on learning in context, an effective method for teaching technical and broader skills, such as communication and problem-solving.

Workers earn salaries during their training, which is particularly appealing to kampong and disadvantaged adults and youth. Sarawak's and even Malaysia's apprenticeship system is underdeveloped relative to systems in other countries, and very few Sarawakian workers are registered with any apprenticeship system. The new Sarawak state government will need to develop and fund an effective apprenticeship system.

How might these and other education and training efforts be financed? Establishment of an occupational training fund would be an important first step. The fund covers occupational training at accredited colleges only for rural youth and disadvantaged workers. One approach would be to allow the fund to provide grants to extend to shorter term training programs and to finance the classroom instruction used in registered apprenticeship programs.

Another option is to use federal government funds from the PTPTN to finance training, an approach that may require changes in how occupational training counts towards the PTPTN application requirements.

Establishment of specific funding to help finance programs for rural and disadvantaged adults. This funding could be accomplished through formula funding or through a new competitive grants program. In this proposal, grants would be awarded to districts to build comprehensive “advancement systems” for the rural kampongs that focus on education and training, pathways that link private employers to training providers and workers, and appropriate financial supports and services. The grants would match new local council or district expenditures and require a great deal of rigorous evaluation. Financial incentives would also be provided for strong performance and for taking programs to scale at the state level (that is, making them large enough to affect earnings outcomes of a substantial share of workers).

These developments must be done together with and in consideration of the development of rural industries.

Whatever exact paths are taken, the labour market data reviewed by SCAN suggest that demand for workers in the middle of the skill distribution will remain quite strong for the foreseeable future, and that policies designed to train more rural and disadvantaged youth and adults for these jobs are a good bet.

Note:
This paper is developed by SCAN for leaders and members only. Data used in the development of this paper have been taken and analysed from government publications such as the Ninth Malaysia Plan (9MP) and Dept of Statistics publications. Information provided here are SCAN's analysis.

Growing Pains for Greater Gains

2009-04-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

PR’s chain of trouble from weak link
Source: The Star Online
By BARADAN KUPPUSAMY

After one year, Pakatan Rakyat’s dilemma is that ‘little brother’ PKR is using by-elections as a way of winnowing unwanted representatives, something that does not sit too well with DAP and PAS.

THE resignation of besieged former Penang Deputy Chief Minister I Mohammad Fairus Khairuddin as Penanti assemblyman has forced yet another by-election.

As it is, voters are already suffering from election fatigue after five straight by-elections since the March 8, 2008 general election.

Like the April 7 Bukit Selambau by-election, the upcoming Penanti by-election was brought about by the resignation of the assemblyman, in this case Fairus at the behest of the party’s top leadership.

PKR de facto leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is being forced to use by-elections as a way of getting rid of unwanted assemblymen who in one way or another have been an embarrassment to the PKR and the Pakatan Rakyat coalition.

When two PKR assemblymen in Perak were charged with corruption, the party defended and continued to keep them as exco members, a lapse that led to their defection and Pakatan’s subsequent loss of Perak.

PKR learnt quickly from that disaster.

When V. Arumugam, the former Bukit Selambau assemblyman, was caught in an embarrassing “bigamy” scandal, he was ordered to resign to force a by-election which PKR’s S. Manikumar won.

The PKR is taking the same route with Fairus, who resigned as deputy Chief Minister on April 8 following corruption investigation, to ensure that he vacates the seat for a more credible candidate.

In the case of the Bukit Lanjan state seat in Selangor, PKR has decided to keep Elizabeth Wong after she had resigned on Feb 17 over controversial pictures of her that surfaced on the Internet.

While Wong, who is well qualified for her job, is seen as a victim of blackmail, Arumugam and Fairus are looked upon as weak and ineffective and having compromised themselves and the party.

Nevertheless, using by-elections as a way to “clean up” the PKR can only work so far.

The danger is that an election fatigued public, worried that the politicking would drag the country down at a time of mounting economic woes, could hand PKR a defeat.

The fear of loss and election fatigue are reasons why the DAP and PAS were reluctant to engineer another by-election to save face for the PKR.

But the die is cast now and they have to toe the line taken by Pakatan supremo Anwar and prepare for yet another by-election.

The Pakatan dilemma is that PKR is the weak link in the year-old coalition.

While PAS and the DAP are able to hold on to their elected representatives and ensure compliance, the PKR is often hit by one scandal after another.

The reason is that the PKR, being the new kid on the block, is still finding its feet and shedding unwanted baggage accumulated during the reformasi era.

Engineered by-elections is also a tactic the PKR likes because it keeps their supporters bound together and in a fighting mood – a siege mentality going back to the reformasi era when the party was under constant attack.

In the case of the older and wiser DAP and PAS, their priorities are to better administer the states under their charge, deliver on the election promises and prepare for the long haul.

For PKR, the priority is immediate and bound with the future of Anwar and his dream to be Prime Minister.

In Penang, Anwar’s dilemma is that after Fairus, the two remaining Malay PKR assemblymen – executive councillor and Batu Maung assemblyman Abdul Malik Abdul Kassim and Sungai Bakap assemblyman Maktar Shapee – are seen as unacceptable for the Deputy Chief Minister 1 post.

Abdul Malik is said to be the main force behind Fairus’ resignation and giving him the post would be seen as rewarding political backstabbing, says a national PKR leader.

“Besides he is not on good terms with Penang PKR chief Datuk Zahrin Mohd Hashim,” said the leader.

The issue is further complicated as Zahrin, who is Bayan Baru MP, wants Fairus’ job.

The other candidate Maktar is “simply not cut out for the job,” say top PKR leaders.

As in Arumugam’s case, Anwar has decided to resolve the issue by forcing a by-election. He hopes to field a more credible Malay candidate, win and move on.

This method is tricky not just because of election fatigue but also because PKR, being a multi-racial party, has other options.

It can make a temporary sacrifice and pick a non-Malay PKR assemblyman as deputy Chief Minister 1 until a more credible candidate is fielded in the next general election.

Deputy Chief Minister 2 Dr P. Ramasamy has repeatedly said that “he represents all voters, not just Indians”.

This kind of thinking is real multi-racialism in which the PKR could show the way.

But now that a by-election is inevitable, voters, whether they like it or not, will be subjected to another bout of politicking at a time when the national focus should be on the mounting economic woes.

Invest In Innovation, Not 12 Dams

2009-04-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

More important than spending money on 12 new dams in Sarawak is really the need to invest in innovation. Sarawakians concerned with the well-being of the future generations to come must seriously think about what is really needed. Otherwise, we continue to become a liability to the future generations.

I am recommending that the hottest stimuli for Sarawak's future prosperity is investment in innovation, not in another dam. Failure to do so, future Sarawakians will be beggars in their own land despite the wealth of natural resources today. Because besides Korea, Japan and Taiwan, China & India will be important centers of innovation in the coming decades, leaving Sarawakians to live on scraps in the region.

Not only are both China & India producing a rising share of key technological innovations, but they are also pioneering innovations in business models that allow their companies to prosper in low-income markets. These new models tend to be capital light while heavily leveraging technology. The companies employing them produce goods and services at surprisingly low cost and use the vast scale of home markets to create new technology standards. These are practices that companies in neighboring nations will need to watch closely as they attempt to grow their competitiveness and as they meet new competitors from both countries in global markets.

Education levels are rising in both countries. China and India have world-class technical universities and produce a steady flow of talent at the top of the world’s academic pyramid. In addition, both cultures reward entrepreneurial risk taking. Innovators in China and India possess immense drive and desire to succeed. Their commitment and focus on business execution make them notable entrepreneurs on the global stage. It helps that both China and India allow successful people to retain much of the wealth they create, though both governments expect contributions back to broader society from those who become millionaires or even billionaires.

What is the situation in Sarawak? Firstly, our education system is failing us, educating us out of our inherent creativity. As the government builds infrastructure in the rural areas, GDP growth remains in the urban. Indigenous technologies is unheard of, not even in the farming or timber sectors which are the main economic activities in the state. In Sarawak, revenues from natural resources can be allocated to the benefit of seeding innovations rather than being pocketed by a few individuals.

India's flexible local entrepreneurs are creating new models that bake in low-income levels. ICICI Bank is a good example. Making intensive use of technology, it has created a banking model with capital outlays that are one-tenth those of banks in the developed world. ICICI reaches deeply into India’s rural areas using mobile ATMs and simplified Internet banking. It runs a booming and profitable business in remittances at fee levels that undercut Western Union by 70 percent. Health Management Research Institute (HMRI), meanwhile, uses technology to revolutionize medical services. Paramedics rove through rural areas in vans coordinated by GPS. Routine ailments can be efficiently diagnosed with the help of algorithms; more difficult diagnoses can be provided by remote medical experts via a video kiosk in each van. HMRI can already serve over 50 million patients.

China selects and invests in what it believes are next-generation sectors—biotechnology, electric vehicles, and clean energy. These are markets where China’s domestic demand could lead the world. The government’s goal is to accelerate the market’s development and nurture national champions. In telecom, where the Chinese market is already one of the world’s largest, the government is encouraging national standards that it hopes will eventually define the global industry.

Can Sarawak build & sustain China's & India's innovation pace and eventually move to the next level of technological innovation? Absolutely. The talent is there, as are capital and effective new government that encourages it. With stronger protection and rewards for intellectual property — a likely development as international companies begin to license technology from Sarawakian entrepreneurs — the stage will be set for the next step forward.

Sarawak must wake up to the realization that investing in innovation is more critical than the 12 dams. The most innovative countries — which will also be the highest earning in the future — will be those that embrace a model of “innovation economics,” which places technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the center of economic policymaking. Successful nations will not be content to wait for innovation to happen or expect it to occur as a byproduct of other activities, such as rural development or dam building.

On the contrary: the new leaders will search out innovation and actively create an environment that nurtures it. That is the job description of Sarawak's new leaders when Pakatan Rakyat takes over from BN.

Sources: Alessi, IDEO, NASSCOM, ADB, Global Institute for Human Capital Development

BN Admits To Keeping Sarawak Lagging Behind

2009-04-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

As reported by Bernama on April 2, Barisan Nasional admits that Sarawak lags behind in socio-economic development.

Bernama reported that PRS Information Chief Datuk Joseph Salang, who is Deputy Energy, Water and Communications Minister, said Dayak voters would be unwittingly doing the state a disfavour they elect PKR.

"We may have to give up on our immigration autonomy. This will open the floodgates for professionals from the peninsula to zero in on the employment and business opportunities in the state.

"I am not against them but they are already more prepared in comparison. We still lag behind them in certain fields," he said.

So how is it that we still lag behind despite our vast natural resources? Yeah, how is it that after nearly 30 years of Taib Mahmud's rule, we still lag behind? How is it that many highly skilled Sarawakian professionals continue to work in other countries because they can't find challenging jobs in their own state?

Yes, certainly Barisan Nasional and Taib Mahmud has ensured that Sarawak continues to lag behind. Perhaps because BN does not want clever people around so that Taib Mahmud can continue to plunder Sarawak's wealth and no one will be clever enough to question his evil doings.

2009-04-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

Former Julau MP and PRS supremo Datuk Sng Chee Hua three para statements in today's STAR page 10....denied that he has been working against the BN in Btg Ai by election.
He even added that he is a BN man and believe the BN will deliver the seat.

And in what could be a last minute ditch to save their political platform, a group of SNAP CEC members led by Ting Ling Kiew met Dpm Dato Seri Najib in Putra Jaya at 11.30 am yesterday to declare their support for BN in Btg Ai... claiming that majority of the 16 member CEC members were with them.

As i see it...... both are die hard gamblers, opportunist and political brokers.

A) Datuk Sng Chee Hua lobbied and bet to get Jawah Gerang as candidate for Btg Ai and succeeded in convincing Dato Anwar on ground that he will take care of Jawah's campaign needs from finance to manpower and to logistic. Of course there was also this four points criterias and indicators such as personality, popularity, political maturity and financial independency of which jawah had it all as opposed to NB.
He may have won his bet!
Then come the big bet on who he wants to win.... who would he bet for?
What was he doing in De Palma hotel and Quality hotel in K.L, Grand Continental hotel in Kuching and in restaurants here and there whereever Dato Anwar is around?
Is money such a powerful leverage in any political party nowadays?

B) Ting Ling Kiew.... spoke at length with my friend of his desires and lusts to topple the president of SNAP claiming he had the backing of an individual connected to pehin seri and that individual would pump in Rm30 million, if he becomes president. As the new president he would then bargain for 16 state seats within PR.
This discussion was held at Park Royal hotel in K.L sometime in december last year where he checked in as a Datuk and accorded a datuk's treatment.

Remenber the "dalang" in the fall of the PBS govt in 1994 and the eventual deregistration of PBDS and the near deregistration of PRS.

How much would Sng make from the betting and Ting must have gotten from Najib for their act as political brokers.... lets all guess

The Bidayuh Agenda for Equal Prosperity

2009-03-30T03:58:00.001-07:00

The Bidayuh Today
UNDP statistics reveal that communities living in rural areas of Sarawak are among the worse off when compared to the rest of the country, and often face considerable hardships including securing land rights and other basic rights to development.

Many of the state’s communities such as the Bidayuh have, relatively low human capital, lack ready access to basic amenities and facilities, and because the physical infrastructure is underdeveloped in the areas where they live, they remain poorly connected to markets.

We know that for a strong Sarawak, we need quality human capital across races including minority groups such as the Bidayuh. However, our education system today is failing us. Quality health care fail to reach the majority of Sarawakians who are in the rural areas. GDP growth is concentrated only in major towns, not in the rural areas where most Sarawakians are.

The Bidayuh and other Dayak people have seen escalating erosion to their land tenure held under Sarawak Native Customary Rights (NCR), from first massive logging, and then giant plantations and dam building have robbed many Dayak communities of their land. Without land, the physical survival and the survival of their cultural traditions and ethnic identity are threatened.

Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact Foundation (AIPP) secretary-general Joan Carling urged Malaysia to take up the recommendation by other countries such as Mexico, which raised the issue of poor human rights record with regards to indigenous communities during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) hearing in Geneva last year.

She said indigenous groups in Malaysia had long been fighting for their right to their native territories, and these struggles continue today. Although Malaysia adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in September 2007, there has been no real change on the ground to address the land-grab issue affecting many indigenous people, such as the Bidayuh.

Bidayuhs are a minority indigenous group in Sarawak. There are about 169,000 Bidayuhs, who constitute some 8% of the state’s population. Most of them live in Kuching, Padawan, Serian, Bau and Lundu areas in the 1st Division.

Bidayuh today remain one of the marginalized indigenous minority groups in Malaysia and represent a population of those living below poverty line. Like the other Dayaks, living mostly in the vast rural areas of Sarawak, many still live without basic amenities such as roads, jetties, clinics, treated drinking water, and electricity. Time for them has stood still since independence in 1963.

Issues of the Bidayuh Today
While the rest of the majority races in Malaysia progress in terms of socio-economic and education, the Bidayuh remain in the fringes of development and some Bidayuh communities live in poverty. Critical and urgent issues facing Bidayuh include:

1. Land are not titled and most Bidayuh are unaware of their rights under common law. Native Customary Rights land has been taken over by the state government for sale and development at any time. As Bidayuh are still dependent on subsistence farming, titled land is necessary to progress to modern farming.

2. Bidayuh participation in both the traditional and modern businesses are poor. This is hampered by limited business opportunity, highly dependent on public spending and government projects and poor networking. Some small sized firms made some inroads in small-scale construction sectors. However, none appears to be able to sustain their business due to easy entry and hence are very competitive.

3. Bidayuh form a large portion of the hardcore poor in Sarawak, living in poor housing with insufficient food supply and lack of access to quality health care, communication and transportation.

4. As most Bidayuh live in the rural areas, they are receiving the poorer quality of education than what people in the urban schools are getting. While good early childhood education is critical to the development of children, rural children are not getting pre-school development that urban children are getting. This leaves Bidayuh children to continue to lag behind others in education.

5. The high number of Bidayuh children not getting entrance into public institutions of higher learning, give rise to more Bidayuh children being left behind in the knowledge economy.

What Bidayuh Need to Achieve Equal Progress
There is widespread resentment among Bidayuh that they continue to be marginalized and continue to be left on the fringes of development. To achieve equal progress with other races, equal opportunities and privileges must be given to Bidayuh. The following are critical for the state government to provide the Bidayuh in order to achieve progress:

1. Immediate halt to indiscriminate acquisition of untitled native land by the state government.

2. Expedite the issuing of titles to all native land.

3. Allocate native land that have been designated as state land to Bidayuh families as temporary occupation for a minimum of 60 years for the purpose of modern farming. Land not developed within 3 years are to be taken back and allocated to other families.

4. Establish a well-funded and appropriately staffed Farming Program for Bidayuh that will among other things, do the following:

I. Provide financial aid to Bidayuh families to develop their land for modern farming. Access to the aid must be easy and mechanism for repayment must also be easy.

II. In addition to providing financial aid, the government must also provide quality professional assistance to upgrade the knowledge and skills of Bidayuh families on modern farming.

III. Encourage Young People to Become Farmers: The Farming Program will establish a new program to identify and train the next generation of farmers. The program will also provide incentives to make it easier for new farmers to afford their first farm.

IV. Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and will also promote regional food systems.

V. Strong Safety Net for Family Farmers: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide family farmers with stability and predictability and strengthen producer protections to ensure family farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.

VI. Support Small Business Development: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide capital for family farmers to create value-added enterprises, like cooperative marketing initiatives and farmer-owned processing plants. They also will establish a small business and micro-enterprise initiative for rural Bidayuh kampongs.

5. Improve Rural Education for Bidayuh: From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is their teacher. To improve the quality of education that Bidayuh children are receiving, the state government must provide incentives for talented individuals to enter the teaching profession, including increased pay for teachers who work in rural areas.

The government must create a Rural Revitalization Program to attract and retain young people to rural Bidayuh kampongs. More quality community colleges should be created and increase research and educational funding for community colleges in Bidayuh areas. Early childhood development centres must be established in Bidayuh kampongs and staffed by only trained and qualified professionals. The government must ensure all rural Bidayuh children have access to pre-school; provide affordable and high-quality child care that will promote child development and ease the burden on working families.

The government must ensure competent, effective teachers in rural schools that are organized for success. The government should provide service scholarships to recruit and prepare teachers who commit to working in underserved Bidayuh dominated districts. To support teachers, the government must foster ongoing improvements in teacher education, provide mentoring for beginning teachers, create incentives for shared planning and learning time for teachers.

To retain teachers, the government must support career pathways that provide ongoing professional development and reward accomplished teachers for their expertise. An initiative must be taken to help eliminate teacher shortages in hard-to-staff areas and subjects, improve teacher retention rates, strengthen teacher preparation programs, improve professional development, and better utilize and reward accomplished teachers.

6. Increase the number of seats for Bidayuh students in public institutions of higher learning: In order for the Bidayuh community to come to equal progress in education with other races, more places should be allocated for the Bidayuh students in local public colleges and universities.

7. Improve Health Care for Bidayuh Communities: Rural health care providers are often less experienced and do not have access to the latest medical and healthcare practices in order to deliver the best clinical outcome. Rural folks have to come to Kuching city to get better medical treatment and that is often when illness become more serious. The government must increase rural access to quality care by promoting health information technologies like telemedicine and staff rural clinics and hospitals with more experienced and better trained physicians and nurses. A Nurse-Family Partnership should be established to all Bidayuh, first-time mothers each year. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to Bidayuh expectant mothers and their families in Bidayuh kampongs.

8. Establish a Bidayuh Business Development Assistance Program: As Bidayuh community lags far behind in participation in business and entrepreneurship, the Bidayuh need specific business development assistance. The assistance program will include allocation of government infrastructure projects to Bidayuh community, allocation of business premises in strategic locations and access to financial aid and grants. Rural infrastructure projects must be allocated to local Bidayuh contractors.

9. Expand Access to Jobs: The government must invest in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Bidayuh succeed in the workforce. The government must also create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in job opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in important high-growth career field.

10. Establish At Least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs: The government must create at least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs in areas that have high levels of poverty and low levels of student academic achievement in Bidayuh dominated districts. The Promise Bidayuh Kampongs have a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth development efforts and after-school activities, to an entire kampong from birth to college.

The government should work with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development barriers of every one of the 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs. The government will provide additional resources to address community needs.

The government, by implementing all of the above with full commitment on a sustainable basis, can help bring the Bidayuh community on equal progress with other races. As Bidayuh progress, Sarawak and the nation thrives. The nation will be strengthened for further prosperity.

What do we do as an individual Bidayuh? On our own, we may not be able to change the future, but we can invent it through out collective effort. The power is in our hands. We owe it to the future generations to make the change. We must because we can.

Taib Mahmud's Dynasty Another Splash of Wealth

2009-03-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

Jamilah Taib, daughter of Taib Mahmud (Chief Minister of Sarawak) and her husband, Sean Murray own the 2nd most most expensive private residences in Ottawa, Canada.

The couple's house at 688 Manor Ave. in Rockcliffe Park, worth $9,609,000, equivalent to RM28,331,251.00. Read more here.

URGENT! Taib Mahmud Must Be Removed NOW!

2009-03-20T07:34:00.000-07:00

View on YouTube here.

Al Jazeera's Evidence Against Taib Mahmud

2009-03-20T07:26:00.001-07:00

Black Magic Being Used In Batang Ai

2009-03-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

In the run-up to the coming Batang Ai by-election, campaigning has taken a supernatural twist with Barisan Nasional leaders warning of dire consequences for breaking longhouses taboo.

Sarawak Deputy Chief Minister, Tan Sri Alfred Jabu and also State Minister for Rural Development and Infrastructure Development and Communications, warned opposition campaigners and native Ibans of “supernatural repercussions” that awaited those who allowed “outsiders” to enter longhouses and villages.

Jabu said that a resident of the longhouse died of mysterious circumstances two days ago after the longhouse folk allowed opposition members to enter their premises to launch a party branch.

“These outsiders do not understand that there are certain sets of rituals that must be strictly adhere to before they can enter the longhouses.

“They must respect these traditional beliefs or else the longhouse folks will suffer from the repercussions,” he said.

Jabu warned longhouse folks not to allow “outsiders” into their premises.

The opposition has accused the Barisan of trying to intimidate the voters ahead of nomination and polling.

Source: The Star Online Saturday, 14-March-2009

Unbind The Chains

2009-03-12T23:24:00.001-07:00

Unbind the Barisan Nasional Chains

We’re all born the same, unfettered by preconceived limitations. Eventually, we submit to laws. There are those we must embrace in order to be free . . . the laws of hard work and discipline. Then there are those we must challenge for that very same freedom . . . the laws of conformity and small-mindedness. The weight of these Barisan Nasional chains can be so subtle, we forget them. This is how we are shackled, tamed. Normalcy becomes the rule and we grow comfortable with limits. Like a dog at the end of a Barisan Nasional leash, we move but never of our own will.

It is time to defy, time to rise, time to change is NOW . . .

We will test our mettle, pull hard against these restraints and together we can achieve more than what we can possibly do on our own. We will not let conventional thinking rule us. As we live here in Sarawak, the Barisan Nasional chain will bury deep into our flesh, the weight will pull us and our future generations down. But we must fight. We will defy Barisan Nasional. If we fall now, we will get right back up. Friends, life is short and every minute that passes hurtles us closer to the end. In the time that we have, we must bind ourselves to this cause that’s far greater than ourselves and the cause bind into us – these words are the contract that bind us to our future generations . . . Upon it, I have signed by name in blood, sweat and tears – to unbind our future generations from the chains of Barisan Nasional.

UMNO's Pack of Wild Dogs Attack an Invalid

2009-02-27T19:35:00.001-08:00

On Thursday, 26-Feb-2009, a pack of UMNO's wild dogs in the form of Umno Youth members confronted the wheelchair-bound Karpal Singh and was prevented from entering Parliament.

The mob's criminal intent and intrusion into the august House of Parliament can be construed as treason of the highest order as they have not only invaded the physical space of the honourable Speaker and Members of Parliament but more significantly, the physical guardian of the Federal Constitution and everything that it stands for.

When these people defend their ketuanan and adab, the sovereignty of their Rulers, the Malay language and Islam, don’t they realise that they themselves must be exemplary in upholding all of these?

Do they remember at all that Islam and Malay adat is full of urgings for us to show good behaviour at all times?

When we accuse others of derhaka and treason against the Sultan, are we aware that the House of Parliament is the rightful abode of our constitutional monarchy, and to invade this sacrosanct space is more serious than demonstrating outside the Sultan’s istana?

We are a lot wiser than to vote for Barisan Nasional who are made up of gangsters like these mobs.

The following are excerpts from The Star about the incident:

The MCA has hit out at the Umno Youth members who confronted Bukit Gelugor MP and DAP chairman Karpal Singh in Parliament, calling such behaviour unacceptable.

The party’s information and communication bureau chairman Lee Wei Kiat said such physical intimidation “destroys our country’s image in the international stage”, and called for respect to be shown to Parliament.

“Any kind of behaviour or mob rule which forcibly prevents the MPs from entering Parliament not only offends the rakyat but is also an affront against the country’s democratic system, rule of law and also to voters,” he said in a statement.

Penang Chief Minister and DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng also condemned the Umno Youth members who confronted Karpal Singh, saying the incident was “embarrassing and disgusting.”

He said Umno had tarnished Malaysia’s image and called for stern action to be taken against the group.

Lim, who is also Bagan MP, said he appreciated that Backbenchers Club chairman Datuk Seri Tiong King Sing had apologised over the incident, but felt it was only right that Umno should do so too.

Police have described the scuffle between Umno Youth members and some opposition Members of Parliament at Parliament House as a serious breach of security.

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Mohamed Nazri Abdul Aziz tabled a motion under Standing Order 80A on Thursday night, saying that the eight-man investigation committee chaired by Pandikar would take appropriate action against those committing contempt against the House.

Earlier that day, Karpal Singh proposed in the Dewan that the House issue a warrant of arrest against Serdang Umno Youth chief Ungku Mat Salleh and Gombak Umno Youth chief Megat Zulkarnain Omardin to be brought before the House to explain why they should not be imprisoned under the Houses of Parliament (Privileges and Powers) Act.

Speaker Tan Sri Pandikar Amin Mulia said it was the first time that the Houses of Parliament (Privileges and Powers) Act is being invoked to set up an investigative committee for parliamentary contempt. Pandikar Amin said this had never happened before and veteran MP Lim Kit Siang (DAP – Ipoh Timur) concurred.

Batang Ai By-Election

2009-02-24T16:12:00.000-08:00

Our time is now. The upcoming Batang Ai state by-election will see a new battleground for PKR, but a most familiar terrain for PKR Lubok Antu divison pro tem chairman Nicholas Bawin.

Batang Ai is one of the state seats in the Lubok Antu parliamentary constituency. About 95% of the electorate in Batang Ai is Iban, most of them farmers.

Bawin, a former Sarawak National Party (SNAP) vice-president, has contested twice in Batang Ai. In the last state elections in 2006, he secured 2,489 votes, losing to Unting by 806 votes in a straight fight.

Bawin stood as an independent in Lubok Antu in last year’s general election, obtaining 5,159 votes but lost to Barisan’s William Nyallau, who polled 6,769 votes.

Bawin, who hails from the Nanga Tutong longhouse in Batang Ai, is the most qualified person to lead the people Batang Ai and to bring about the overdue change of government in Sarawak.

Screenshot of The Star Online

Our Failed Education System

2009-02-22T01:06:00.000-08:00

The Malaysian education system, evidently, has been deteriorating over the past 20 years. While exam scores have been on the uptrend, the quality of college and university graduates entering the job market has been on the decline. The number of university graduates that are unable to find jobs is an alarm signalling the decline in quality. A research done by a major management consulting firm found that only 11% of Malaysian graduates are employable by multinational companies. Most common weaknesses of our graduates include lack of communication skills, poor critical thinking and problem-solving skills, poor attitude towards work and possess weak ethics and integrity.

There has been significant money and effort spent to improve the Malaysian education system, such as the Malaysian Smart Schools project, the roll out of the National Education Blueprint and the implementation of the Cluster Schools concept. However, these have failed to bring about improvements to our children’s education beyond scoring straight “A”s.

As the Malaysian education system fails, Sarawak is falling behind in preparing our children for jobs, college and for life. When our education system fails, it brings down with it, all the foundations of a strong nation. Rampant corruption all along the government delivery system is the result of an education system that fails to develop individuals of high integrity. The lack of new indigenous technology, products and services that are developed in Sarawak, by Sarawakians shows that our education system has failed to develop thinking, creative, entrepreneurial individuals. The absence of emphasis on arts, humanity and sports in our education system has short-changed the overall development of our young.

These and many more failures of the current government continue to suppress progress and will continue to ensure that our beloved Sarawak lags behind all other states and nations. The failed administration of the current government continues to ensure that Sarawak will forever depend on the federal government for development aid and that many talented Sarawakians will continue to seek high-value jobs elsewhere as none are available locally.

We are anxious about our children’s future. We worry that they could become the first generation of Sarawakians to see their children do worse than they did. We remember that when we were all growing up, our parents knew that if they pushed us to study and work hard, the universities would be open to us and we could get any job we wanted. But today, parents in kampongs and towns all over Sarawak are losing that hope - they're losing the sense that their children will be able to prosper in the global economy.

Najib just bought DBNA for RM4 mil

2009-02-16T08:32:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, Deputy Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, gave RM4 million to the Dayak Bidayuh National Association (DBNA). The Sarawak state election is coming soon. Before this, Najib would not have known the existence of people called the Bidayuhs. It is very, very rare that DBNA gets any funding from the federal or state government.

Yesterday, the state government gave RM3.5 million to Bidayuhs in Kampong Opar, Bau. Bidayuhs in Serikin, Bau received RM2.5 million.

RM4 million the price of Bidayuh votes. Bau Bidayuhs cost RM3.5 million. A PKR state assemblyman in Perak costs RM10 million.

That's how cheap Bidayuh vote is. This is an insult to the Bidayuh that cannot be forgiven.

Stateless Sarawakians - Gov't Can't Help

2009-02-12T08:13:00.000-08:00

According to State Social Development and Urbanisation Minister Datuk William Mawan, there were "tens of thousands" of Sarawakian natives who were without ICs or personal identification documents.

The federal government has promised to help resolve the long outstanding problem of many "stateless" Sarawakian natives. During a dialogue session with the BN's elected representatives and leaders at Kuching Hilton on Thursday, 12-Feb-2009, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, said he would bring up the matter at the cabinet meeting to get the relevant ministry to act.

He said the ministry concerned would have to find out if elected representatives and community leaders could help to certify the status of stateless Sarawakians in their applications for MyKad.

Mawan said the SPDP would compile details of the problem and bring them up at the Barisan management committee meeting.

This is so amazing!!! Taib Mahmud and his cronies are too busy enriching themselves that they need Najib to resolve issues that have been in their backyard for almost half a century. And Mawan is only about to compile the details of the problem. Why only NOW?

WARNING! Beware of BN!

2009-01-24T05:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a photo from the Jan-17 Kuala Terengganu by-election. It speaks so loudly about Barisian Nasional and why BN lost.

We must tell our children to be always aware of UMNO and Barisan Nasional people whom, at their convenience, can become MESRA GENERASI MUDA or youth-friendly overnight. Only BN can generate instant youth-friendly so-called leaders.

And what does "merakyatkan pembangunan" mean? A phrase coined at BN's whim to suit their situation. Such desparation by pathetic, corrupt people.

BN Always Insults Our Intelligence

2009-01-24T04:39:00.000-08:00

Wasn't it Barisan Nasional that raised the price of fuel at the pump? Then who benefited from the handling of the distribution of the fuel rebate? So clever schemes it seems.

Who pays for the e-books? Certainly it is not Barisan Nasional. So why does BN think that taxpayers are so dumb as to believe that BN is so generous? No, BN does not care. This is one of the stupid ways that Barisan Nasional misleads people into believing that goodies such as e-books and low-cost houses are given by BN. Guess who benefits from the contract to supply the e-books.

PPRT - Projek Perumahan Rakyat Termiskin is a project of giving free houses to the poor. The money that pays for the houses does not belong to Barisan Nasional.

The approach of giving handouts such as free food, cash and houses to the poor does not help the poor in the long run. They continue to be dependent on hand-outs. As long as they vote for BN, they will receive hand-outs. That's BN's strategy for making sure that they get votes.

Barisan Nasional Continues It's Disgusting Ways

2009-01-24T00:12:00.000-08:00

Screenshot of Star Online report.

The Federal government bans heads of federal agencies from attending official meetings of state governments ruled by Pakatan Rakyat. This is another arrogant and disgusting behaviour of Barisan Nasional leaders. Taxpayers pay government officials to be effective. How can they be effective if they cannot attend official meetings? How can they contribute to the nation's development if they are banned from being involved?

Barisan Nasional must remember that it is taxpayers' money that pay salaries of civil servants, not Barisan Nasional's money.

Barisan Nasional is doing a disservice to the taxpayers and to the rakyat.

How long can we tolerate this arrogance?

BN's Deep Rooted Corruption and Arrogance

2009-01-23T05:40:00.000-08:00

UMNO cannot distinguish the difference between an official government function and a political campaign event. Or UMNO's deep-rooted culture of corruption at the highest level works all the time.

During the campaign for the Kuala Terengganu by-election, there were just so many official government functions that were blatantly used by UMNO as political campaign platforms. There were the opening ceremony of the MARDI office, the opening ceremony of the SMIDEC office, the launching of the Projek Pemindahan Penduduk, the oil royalty cheque handing ceremony and many more. There were Barisan Nasional and UMNO flags at all the events. The speeches by the officials, the Ministers and Deputy Ministers were all election campaign speeches.

Government cars were used to ferry UMNO officials during nomination day and through out the campaign. Function or event expenses such as rental of equipments, meals , hotels, etc were charged to the various government departments and state-owned companies.

All schools in Kuala Terengganu organized ceremahs or jamuan mesra and compelled parents to come. Some parents were disgusted and felt belittled that they had to take their time away to come to their children's schools only to listen to hours of stupid, intelligence-insulting campaign speeches.

This government car in the picture was ferrying UMNO official during election day.

Subtle Bribery by Barisan Nasional

2009-01-23T00:34:00.000-08:00

Eat my cake and vote for me.

By the way, the cake was baked, packed and distributed using taxpayers' money and money taken in some unethical ways.

Now, is the cake halal?

KT By-Election Carnival

2009-01-22T07:46:00.000-08:00

It's a carnival. General election, state election or by-election - the atmosphere is always like it's a big festival / carnival.

BN's 200 Buses of Unproductive Citizens

2009-01-21T05:23:00.000-08:00

Is this a bus depot? No. This is the Masjid Terapung or the floating mosque of Kuala Terengganu situated in Kuala Ibai.

On nomination day of the Kuala Terengganu by-election, more than 110 buses were parked on the compound of the beautiful mosque. Elsewhere, all over Kuala Terengganu, there were even more buses. I counted over 200 buses that morning. The buses brought in Barisan Nasional supporters from all over the country. They were mostly members of UMNO, Wanita UMNO, Pemuda UMNO and Puteri UMNO.

And they all did not look like they paid for their fares. These are the UMNO hangers-on, leeches, suckers, ass polishes seeking favours, handouts and contracts. Or just free rides to a place where they could not afford to go on their own.

On that nomination day, there was massive traffic jam - unprecedented. The massive number of policemen could do nothing to minimize the lost productivity of the day. Thousands were late for work and businesses, except the eateries and keropok lekor stalls did not do well.

The Silence of Sarawak MPs and ADUNs is Deafening

2009-01-19T04:20:00.000-08:00

It is deafening! That is, the silence of Sarawak's Members of Parliament and Members of the State Assembly on the issue of the use of the word "Allah" in the Herald newspaper. Our Sarawak Barisan Nasional MPs and ADUNS are so afraid to speak up on this issue, not even the Christians ones.

This is such an important issue that touches the sentiments of minorities. My dear YBs, why are you so afraid? Are you not even more afraid that you will not be elected again?

Source: The Star Online

Rakyat suffers but Taib celebrate

2009-01-13T06:23:00.000-08:00

In Bau,Serian and most parts of Sarawak, thousands of ordinary folks braces for the onslaught of the flood and related hardships. Most in the brink of distitute where temperorily evacuation centres were crowded.
General Tan Sri George, as Chairman of the Disaster Relief Committee promised all were set should there be flood or such eventuality. But i saw no personnel from his committee or agencies under his command at the worst hit areas such as major roads and kampongs where assistance were most needed.

Did you know that every time Sarawak got hit by disaster, Taib would either be celebrating or holidaying overseas.The last time Sarawak was hit by haze, Taib was holidaying overseas and this time around when Sarawak got hit by flood, Taib celebrated his wedding anniversary lavishly in an exclusive hotel in Kuching.

One's indulgence and others sufferings...How do we Sarawakian like this?

Speech by Pkr's co'ordinator for bidayuh cummunity...Mr.Granda Aing

2009-01-11T06:31:00.000-08:00

I stand here before you tonite as PKR's co'ordinator for the bidayuh community.
As such, i will confine my address to the feelings and aspirations of the bidayuh as a community within sarawak and malaysia as a whole.How do the bidayuh feel about their present situation and what do they expect for the future?

To be honest, we the bidayuh feel that, we have enjoyed some fruit of development, but at the same time we feel that what we get is a pittance, the crumbs left by others.

We also feel that we have been discriminated against, particularily in relation to another bumiputra community which is being treated with special favour. We are told by our leaders in BN that we are a united community but the reality is they have actually divided us among all the BN component parties.

As a result of the inadequate and discriminatory treatment accorded to us through this divide and rule policy we feel increasingly marginalized.

The state govt boasts a lot about its development achievement, but let me tell you, many villages in the bidayuh areas, most of them not far from Kuching, are still without some basic infrastructures. Some still do not have proper road access. Some still do not have pipi water. Some still do not have electricity. And some still have none of all three...road, pipe water and electricity. Some of the development projects in the bidayuh areas which were supposed to bring a lot of participation from and benifits, to the community ended up as a total farce.

The Borneo Heights, for example, was supposed to provide a lot of employment to the bidayuh. But not so many bidayuh are being employed there and those that are being employed there are offered only the lowest level job, worst still, the project which was to attract a lot of foreign tourists, to play golf mainly, is now only a place where the rich display their wealth, with their big concrete houses in the middle of the jungle. But the bidayuh who owned the land on where the project stand have lost their land forever.

In Mambong, the bidayuh in the area were similarily promised job opportunities from the clinker plant that's been built in the area. They were also promised that they would not suffer from the pollution that would arise from the plant as adequate measures would be taken to prevent such eventuality. But now the people in the villages near the plant have to literally shut their doors and windows against the dust coming from the plant. Instead of benifitting from these project they have become it's victims.As if that is not enough,Mambong was also choosen as the site for a rubbish dump for Kuching rubbish. Why Mambong? Surely there are better sites nearer to kuching.

In Bau, the mining of gold at Tasik Biru has turned the once beautiful lake, which used to be the town,s major tourist spot and the place to swim turned into a lake of mercury. With so much mercury being poured into the lake by the mining company involved it is now a health hazard to swim in it. The notice by the lake warn you of such danger.How much dit the mining operation benifit the bidayuh in the area? Your guess is as good as mine.. the promise to rehabilitate the lake remain a promise.

In the dam project in Bengoh, to provide water for Kuching, which supposedly will need more water in the future, four bidayuh villages will have to be relocated.The government has promised adequate compensation and that it will take care of the people involved. But the villages who had been relocated to make way for the Batang Ai dam and the Bakun dam have all ended up much worse than when they were staying at their old longhouses. Can the bidayuh people who will be relocated as a result of the Bengoh dam end up any better? I think the answer is obvious. Indeed, the government itself has already provided part of the answer. Only recently it was reported to have given out one part of the compensation, for the land that will be affected. On average each family was reported to have been given Rm79,000.00.
Considering the amount of land involved, the amount is really pittance.With the present cost of living we can easily envisage where these people will really end up, in the slump. But a more pertinent question than that of compensation is why should the dam be built there at all. If indeed Kuching need more water, can we not built multiole dam involving other rivers within the region. The Bengoh dam will not only wipe out one of the most beautiful rivers i have ever seen but it will also wipe out part of the bidayuh heritage, in particular those bamboo bridges which crosses the river in various parts. I do not know whether the government has taken these fectors into consideration but what is true is that the company concerned must have found the project very financially attractive..It had rush into starting it,s operation even before any compensation was paid for the land and property involved.

On SALCRA(Sarawak land consolidation and rehabilitation Authority), a project in which quite a number of bidayuh have surrendered their land for the plantation of palm oil.The Sarawak state minister concerned recently proudly proclaimed the benifits(dividen) from the scheme that been given out to the participants.But in actual fact these dividens are nothing at all to boast about.Dividing the total amount being paid out by the total number of participating families, on the average each family gets only ringgit Malaysia ninety (RM90) per month.. which is way below the national poverty level. By just keeping his land idle, the owner could get about the same amount if not more through appreciation of value etc.

I could go on and cite other projects that are supposed to be undertaken for the benifit of the bidayuh. I would like to highlight another feeling and concerned of the bidayuh...that is, the feeling of being treated as a second class indigenous people of sabah and sarawak. Infact the bidayuh need the assistance provided under the NEP more than their malay counterparts as they are infact in a more disadvantages position compared to the latter.They have less experience in commerce and industry and acquired modern education at a later date then the malays. But still we are only asking for our due share, no more.

Our land, which is increasingly becoming more sub urban is left largely unsurveyed, making our land and our rights to the land vulnerable to the design of greedy and corrupt BN leaders. The reasons which the BN government give for refusing to survey our land and issue documents of tittle insult our intellegence but none of our leaders in BN ever spoke for us.

The bidayuh cummunity has made some advanvement, in certain fields more than others, but i have to say that on the whole they are still lagging quite far behind particularily when compared with our more advance communities. Thier future are not very encouraging. Bidayuh are not even a third class bumiputra.As we all know bumiputra are accorded certain privileges especially under the New Economic Policy.
But except to the blind or those who choose to be so, the implementation of the NEP has been carried out in a very discriminatory manner against the non muslim indigenous people of Sarawak and Sabah in every feild, be it the extending of loan for business, the allocation of scholarships, allocation of places at the institutions of higher learning, position in civil service, the military and the police, the bidayuh and the other non muslim bumiputeras has not been given their just and fair share.It is as if there is a deleberate move to marginilize them, which is contrary to the public pronouncements of the government. Such a move, i submit, is not only unjust and unfair but it is totally uncalled for and unwise.
The bidayuh like other race need not be an expert to come to this conclusion. Just observe the bidayuh in Kuching, you will find them everywhere, the restaurant, the shop, the hotel, petrol station and car repair shop. But whereever they are, most of them are employed in low ranking jobs. These young boys and girls will end up marrying their counterpart in similar positions. It needs little imagination to see where they will end up in the economic ladder. In other words, the bidayuh are likely to be increasingly marginalized. The trend could accelerate as they loose more of their land, their main economic asset, through acquisition by the government in the name of development or because of unilateral sale to meet essential expenses such as their childrens university fees.

Now, i would like to say some word on the bidayuh political position.
We have six members of the Dewan Undangan Negeri and three members of the Dewan Rakyat. One of the main questions to raise is whether the number of our representative adequately represent us. The answer is very clear if you look at the electoral seats available and the number of electorates in them.But more important is the question of participation of our representatives.How active and effective have they been? On both counts the answer sadly is the negative. News reported during one session of the Dewan Undangan Negeri last year not even one of the bidayuh representative made any speech.What are the reasons behind such reticence? We can only speculate. It could have been a lack of interest on the subjects under discussion, it could have been a lack of adequate knowledge on the subject under discussion, or it could have been the fear of speaking out of tune with the boss. Whatever be the reasons what is clear is that the bidayuh representatives and political figures as a whole has not been effective in articulating bidayuh feelings, concerns snd aspirations...which is why i am raising this tonight.

After forty five years of independence, the bidayuh have made some advancement, but it is far from enough particularily when compared with the progress made by other communities. The measures undertaken by BN government have tendered to marginalized the bidayuh.

It make promised and poise pronouncements but seldom keep them or adhere to them.The BN in becoming more and more corrupt and inert, cannot bring about the required change that needs to take place if we are to further advance.
Only a party that is truly committed to justice and fairness and transparency will be able to bring about a true Malaysia where each community however small will have itsdue share of the national cake and a voice in the deliberation of its national affairs...That party is PKR and its partners in the Pakatan Rakyat.
We rely on such party and government to lead us into the 21st century.

Before i close since i am speaking on behalf of the Bidayuh community, i would like to request two things:-

1. That Bidayuh should have adequate representation at our party highest decission making body(mpt) as this will ensure that our voices are adequately heard and that the party will know our feelings and aspirations.

2. That we are united under one common platform(PKR) and it is important that in any elections(parliamentary or state) all the Bidayuh majority seats be contested by PKR.

NOW THE TIDE HAS CHANGE- NOW IS THE TIME FOR THE BIDAYUH TO USE THEIR VOTE FOR A CHANGE.

How Malaysia Ranks in Education

2008-12-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

Malaysia ranks no. 4 among ASEAN + 3 countries in the Education for All Development Index (EDI), behind Japan, South Korea and Brunei.

The EDI score was based on the improvement of the scores in four evaluated objectives, namely primary net enrolment rate, adult literacy rate, Gender EFA Index and Survival Rate to Grade Five.

Compared to other Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) countries, Malaysia ranked fifth out of the 33 OIC countries that participated in the survey. Among 20 Commonwealth countries, Malaysia is no. 4.

Of the the 20 Commonwealth countries that participated in the survey, Malaysia was among the top five and among the ASEAN + 3 countries, Malaysia was ranked 4th, behind Japan, South Korea and Brunei.

Malaysia’s position in the Education For All Development Index (EDI) has improved - from 56th placed to 45th out of the 129 countries surveyed.

The Global Monitoring Report 2009 (GMR 2009) survey annual report is Unesco’s mechanism to monitor education development in member countries.

The United States, Australia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam are not included in the GMR 2009 survey, which ranked Kazakhstan as first, followed by Japan, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom.

The report on the GMR 2009 was tabled at the High Level Group Meeting on EFA in Oslo, Norway on Dec 17. Malaysia was represented by Hishammuddin at the meeting which was held from Dec 16 to 18.

Source: The Star Online.

Settling Penans into misery

2008-12-12T21:10:00.000-08:00

Remember when natives were resettled for the building of hydro electric dams in Sarawak? What happened later? Did the natives actually thrive and prosper? Or were they introduced into the cycle of the ills associated with modernization - stressful life, debts, poor healthcare and poverty?

How does the Barisan Nasional government think that resettling the Penans would give them better life? Are the Penans not happy and contented with their nomadic lives? Lets not force unto others what we think is good for us. Have a deep understanding of the Penans first. Most important of all, have respect for them.

The Barisan Nasional people are forever thinking that they know better and smarter than others. What does Alfred Jabu know about improving the livelihood of the Penans when he hasn't had any impact on his own people? But then, what can we expect from someone who has been serving as the Chief Photographer for Taib Mahmud. They're forever arrogant creatures.

Let us see who gets RM566mil

2008-11-28T07:34:00.000-08:00

The Federal Gov't Rural and Regional Development Ministry is giving Sarawak RM566.7 mil next year for various development projects in rural areas.

RM420.1 mil would be allocated for rural infrastructure, utilities and social amenities such as roads, power supply and water supply.

Another RM40.5mil would go for poverty eradication projects while the remaining RM106.1mil was for human capital development, rural economic activities, land development and information and communication technology development.

Anyone can have a good guess of who owns the companies that will undertake these projects. Hint: There is only one company that undertakes road works in Sarawak.

Sarawak Rivers Hazardous to Humans

2008-11-25T21:36:00.000-08:00

As reported in The New Straits Times, Dr. Pengguang Manggil of Sarawak Natural Resources and Environment Board highlighted that several rivers in Sarawak have high bacterial concentration and are hazardous to humans. Such rivers include Sungai Bintangor and Sungai Sekama. The rivers such as Sungai Padungan and Sungai Maong cannot even be used for irrigation.

These rivers are polluted by effluents ands wastes dumped from food outlets, heavy industries, river-plying vessels and households. Rivers such as Sungai Sarawak are polluted with effluents and wastes from agricultural activities, land clearing and mining.

As the Sarawak continues to have Taib Mahmud and Barisan Nasional in power, our land and rivers will continue to be devastated. And we'll continue to destroy what we should preserve for the future generation.

Now is the time to remove Taib Mahmud and Barisan Nasional. We owe that to our future generation.

Ingenious - Solar-powered slug

2008-11-25T21:24:00.000-08:00

Eat a plant and become photosynthetic. That's an ingenious energy efficiency model. And it's green, too.

A lurid green sea slug, with a gelatinous leaf-shaped body, has ability to run on solar power. Mary Rumpho of the University of Maine, has now discovered how the sea slug gets this ability: it photosynthesises with genes "stolen" from the algae it eats.

She has known for some time that E. chlorotica acquires chloroplasts – the green cellular objects that allow plant cells to convert sunlight into energy – from the algae it eats, and stores them in the cells that line its gut.

Young E. chlorotica fed with algae for two weeks, could survive for the rest of their year-long lives without eating, Rumpho found in earlier work.

Through evolution and advances in bio-technologies, could humans be photosynthetic?

Najib Churns Out Another Rhetoric on Education

2008-11-13T04:27:00.000-08:00

Source: The Star Online

The Malaysian Smart Schools Flagship Application was created during the time when Najib was Minister of Education. If you read the Blueprint for the Malaysian Smart Schools System, what Najib said in his opening speech at the Seminar on Creating a Blue Ocean in Education and Training Sectors today is no different. He spoke of the need to achieve the same things that were in the Smart Schools blueprint.

Najib just loves to shout rhetorics. After spending a billion ringgit of taxpayers money on the Malaysian Smart Schools project, there is hardly any result to show. What is the status of the project? The project has perhaps died. Last year Hishamuddin, the current Minister of Education introduced yet another Education Blueprint.

Anyone can talk. Our education system will never rise above the level of thinking of our ministers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At another function on early education and ‘Each Child is a Gem of the Nation’ (Permata), Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said the government had recently approved the Permata curriculum and programme for children ages four and below and there would be a national roll out of the programme next year.

He said RM200mil had been set aside under the 2009 Budget for child early education (from age one to six), adding that the Permata curriculum would be made mandatory for private centres.

Najib said there were 8,814 kindergartens in the country, most of which were privately run.

He also noted that as of 2007, only 10% or 3.1mil children in that age group attended day care centres, which was far below the 80% in developed countries.

He said the government recognised that the first four years of a child’s life were formative years and that 90% of rapid brain development happened during these early years and hence there was a need for a holistic type of early education.

Najib’s wife, Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor is the chairman of the Permata committee.

Dead Rivers of Sarawak

2008-11-12T06:28:00.000-08:00

Twenty five years of Taib Mahmud's rule and Sarawak's many rivers are badly polluted, some classified as "dead".

That's Taib's politics of development. Plunder the land, pollute the rivers. For future generations, Taib Mahmud will leave behind dead rivers and raped land.

Ketuanan Melayu wld not have been if not for Sabah and Sarawak

2008-11-08T06:44:00.000-08:00

Led by Gagasan Melayu Perak, this is a group of more than a thousand people marched to the Istana Kuala Kangsar to submit a memorandum to Sultan Azlan. The Sultan spoke of the need for people to respect social contract and Ketuanan Melayu.

Melayu memang mudah lupa. Have they forgotten that without Sabah and Sarawak, UMNO would not be ruling today and that Ketuanan Melayu would have been at ground level?

Why don't Gagasan Melayu march over to Sabah and Sarawak to pay homage and respect to East Malaysians for having protected the downfall of BN last election. UMNO and Malays will forever owe Sabahans and Sarawakians their dignity and morale.

See the pics here to understand why we need to protect these weaker and more sensitive people. Poor guys, they need to run to the Sultan for protection at the slightest provocation.

Apa Itu? Dayaks Insulted by Taib Mahmud

2008-11-06T19:14:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, 1 November 2008 at the Sarawak Agro Fest 2008, Taib Mahmud arrogantly embarrassed and insulted the Dayaks saying that the shifting cultivation of the Dayaks created 2 mil acres of native customary rights land. His words, “You see, they (Dayaks) have two million acres under NCR lands just because of shifting cultivation. Apa itu?”

There is more than 7 million hectares of timber concessions which benefit Taib Mahmud dynasty and cronies.

Five companies control more than 5 mil hectares of timber concessions in Sarawak. Apa itu? Read more on Sarawak Headhunter blog here.

Obama - World's Most Powerful Man, 44th President of USA

2008-11-04T22:32:00.000-08:00

All Things Are Possible. Similarly, change will come to Sarawak soon. For Sarawak, the long road ahead starts now - the immediate removal of Taib Mahmud, Alfred Jabu, George Chan and all the BN state cabinet members. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but Sarawak - I have never been more hopeful than I am now that we will get there. I promise you -- we as a people will get there soon.

Well Put

2008-11-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

Source: The Star Online

The Star puts it perfectly - Sarawak is stunning.

But for how long? Some rivers are already so polluted and some are already dead zones. Towns, factories, farming and settlements along the rivers must now switch to eco-friendly practices. We cannot depend on the government alone to conserve Sarawak. It's our personal responsibility to our future generations.

After 50 years, Sarawak is still beggar state

2008-10-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

Sadly, Sarawak remains a beggar state, even after half a century of independence and after over 25 years under control of the Taib Mahmud dynasty. So much timber and other natural resources have been extracted from the land for as long as Taib has been in power. Yet, Sarawak is in the same financial state as African countries depending on handouts from other governments.

How many indigenious Sarawak companies export Made-in-Sarawak technologies and high value services? What is the contribution of the value of export of indigenious technologies and services to the State's GDP (excluding natural resources and related products)? For how long can we let Taib Mahmud plunder the land? When can we start focusing on developing indigenious high value-added products and services, and stop plundering the land to conserve for future generation?

Rush the Removal of Taib

2008-10-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

Now Taib Mahmud has to insult the intelligence of Sarawakians. How dare he say Sarawakians can only accept and understand change slowly?

The one mother of all changes that Sarawaks want to rush is the removal of Taib Mahmud, Alfred Jabu and George Chan.

So why is Taib calling for slow tempo? To give him and his cronies more time to amass wealth and plunder the land?

William Mawan Still Asleep

2008-10-25T01:24:00.000-07:00

The Minister has been drinking and now he is sleeping. How simple issues become complicated problems where in the hands of dumb minister.

Source: The Star Online 21-Oct-2008

Taskforce to look into ICs, birth certs of Sarawak rural folk
By SHARON LING

KUCHING: The state government is setting up a taskforce to look into the problem of rural folk who still do not have identity cards or birth certificates.

Social Development and Urbanisation Minister Datuk William Mawan said his ministry will be the secretariat of the taskforce, which will also comprise other relevant authorities including the National Registration Department (NRD), the Education Department and police.

“There are people who have applied for their identity cards or birth certificates but due to some technical reasons -- in that they could not fully satisfy the requirements of the NRD -- their applications have been delayed.

Thus they are not in possession of legal documents to say that they are Sarawakians.

“The problem here is, if the parents don’t have documents, their children won’t have documents and neither will their grandchildren. It’s a vicious circle,” he told reporters after attending a briefing with NRD officers at Wisma Bapa Malaysia here on Tuesday.

Mawan said there were 3,887 reported cases of people who had not registered for personal documents yet, 4,800 school students without documents and 1,274 cases of documents which could not be delivered to applicants.

“These are the immediate areas that we want to address,” he said.

He added that a collaborative approach involving the NRD, other departments, district officers, elected representatives and village headmen was needed to tackle the matter effectively.

“As such, the taskforce will coordinate efforts to solve this problem,” he said.

More Destruction into Native Land

2008-10-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

If you want to feel sick, take a trip to logging areas in interior Sarawak. You thought you would enjoy pristine rainforest country and cool dips in clear rivers. Instead, the sights are sickening.

Now, the beautiful Bario, so remote and undisturbed, is now victim to greedy timber companies feeding the coffers of Taib Mahmud.

Indiscriminate Extraction of Sarawak's Natural Resources

2008-10-22T02:58:00.001-07:00

Source: The Star Online 22-Oct-2008

More timber concessions to again rape the land and enrich the Taib Mahmud dynasty and his cronies.

Borneo's Longest Insect

2008-10-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

Source: MSNBC

Nearly the length of a human arm, a recently identified stick bug from the island of Borneo is the world's longest insect, British scientists said Thursday.

The specimen was found by a local villager and handed to Malaysian amateur naturalist Datuk Chan Chew Lun in 1989, according to Philip Bragg, who formally identified the insect in this month's issue of peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa. The insect was named Phobaeticus chani, or "Chan's megastick," in Chan's honor.

Paul Brock, a scientific associate of the Natural History Museum in London unconnected to the animal's discovery said there was no doubt it was the longest extant insect ever found.

Looking more like a solid shoot of bamboo than its smaller, frailer cousins, the dull-green insect measures about 22 inches (56.7 centimeters), if its delicate, twig-like legs are counted. There are 14 inches (35.7 centimeters) from the tip of its head to the bottom of its abdomen, beating the previous record body length, held by Phobaeticus kirbyi, also from Borneo, by about an inch (2.9 centimeters).

Stick bugs, also known as phasmids, have some of the animal kingdom's cleverest camouflage. Although some phasmids use noxious sprays or prickly spines to deter their predators, generally the bugs assume the shape of sticks and leaves to avoid drawing attention.

"Their main defense is basically hanging around, looking like a twig," Brock said. "It will even sway in the wind."

For Bragg, who works as a schoolteacher and catalogues stick bugs as a hobby, the discovery showed the urgency of conservation work.

"There aren't enough specialists around to work on all the insects in the world," he said. "There's going to be stuff that's extinct before anyone gets around to describing it."

The Phobaeticus chani is now a part of the Natural History Museum's "Creepy Crawlies" gallery. It went on display Thursday.

Who Cares About The Penans?

2008-10-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

As reported in The Star Online.

KUALA LUMPUR: Thirty-five non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the Bar Council want Bukit Aman instead of the Sarawak police to investigate the alleged sexual abuse of Penan women and girls by loggers.

They cited non-action over the alleged rape of a 12-year-old Penan girl back in 1994 and other abuses.

The NGOs said in a statement the affected communities had “expressed a serious lack of confidence in the Sarawak police due to their long-standing dealings with them” and the perpetuation of abuse with impugnity.

Referring to the reports of rape, sexual abuse and exploitation of Penan girls and women in The Star on Oct 6, they said that despite the serious nature of the allegations, Sarawak police had been dismissive, insisting a report be lodged before an investigation commences.

They questioned police commitment since the Marudu police had stated yesterday that they had found no evidence of abuse but “temporary” marriages between Penan women and loggers.

On Tuesday, Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Dr Ng Yen Yen announced the setting up of a task force to look into the plight of Penan women and girls. The Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) and Women’s Centre for Change, Penang, will be members of the task force.

At a press conference at the council, its chairman Datuk Ambiga said Malaysia was a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

“One of the strengths of good governance is not how well the Government looks after the majority but its minority and vulnerable groups,” she said.

WAO executive director Ivy Josiah, who said the task force had yet to meet, said WAO would like indigenous women to be represented. in the task force.

“WAO would like the task force to not just devise programmes but go on a fact-finding mission to see for ourselves the situation.”

Centre for Orang Asli Concerns coordinator Colin Nicholas called for investigations to “be conducted by Bukit Aman because the Sarawak police has shown itself by its inquiries in 1994 to be either biased or incompetent.”

Baram MP Datuk Jacob Dungau Sagan said he is “shocked” by the claims that Penan schoolgirls and young women had been raped and sexually abused by timber workers in his constituency.

Sagan, who said he had not been informed by anyone of these alleged crimes, said: “This is a serious matter and I support the call by Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr George Chan Hong Nam for the truth to be exposed.”

Against Their Will for Politics of Development

2008-10-08T01:42:00.000-07:00

As reported in The Star Online

ON a sunny Sunday morning last year, 16-year-old Cynthia (not her real name) boarded a four-wheel drive dispatched by logging company Samling to ferry students to SMK Long Lama from her longhouse in Long Kawi, middle Baram, Sarawak.

However, the driver did not send the passengers ( two boys and three girls ) to the school directly. He dropped by a logging camp and told the students that they had to spend the night there.

“It was around 4pm. Although the school is not far from the camp, the driver didn’t want to continue the journey. The boys and girls were separated into two rooms. I was with my younger sister and another girl. When night fell, the men in the camp were drinking. In the middle of the night, several men came into our room. One of them dragged me from the room and took me to the bushes behind the camp,” Cynthia recalls her ordeal. The other two girls were not harmed.

A life ruined:
Mindy, 21, is saddled with two children after being coerced into having sex by a timber company worker.

The Form 3 student became pregnant and delivered a baby girl a few months ago. Cynthia, who harbours hopes of being a nurse, is now unsure of her future as she has been absent from school due to her pregnancy.

The fair-skinned, soft-spoken girl had previously been harassed by workers from a Samling camp but managed to elude them.

Samling, when contacted, says the camp implicated in the incident may not have belonged to the company and urged those making the allegations to contact the police and provide accurate information to enable criminal investigations.

Samling’s head of corporate communications Cheryl Yong says: “We are very concerned over the latest allegations even though we do not operate in the Temela Camp (where the alleged sexual assault took place). We do not condone any criminal acts within our premises or by employees.”

Yong explains that Samling has a zero-tolerance policy towards alcohol consumption during work hours. Furthermore, alcohol sale is unavailable on its premises and anyone found consuming alcohol while working will be dismissed.

At Long Belok, Rina (not her real name) who was raped in her house and delivered a baby girl in May 2005, is fearful of timber camp workers. “If I see them in the village, I will run and hide in the forest.”

She is glad that she did not have to marry the man who raped her despite persuasion from her parents and neighbours’ unkind remarks.

The youngest in a family of two boys and two girls, Rina, 20, says life is difficult with an extra mouth to feed. At times, she confesses that she feels like running away.

Mindy (not her real name) of Long Item, recounts the intimidation, deceit and harassment of a 40-something man who works for Interhill.

“We know him as Ah Heng. My parents and I got a ride in his vehicle from Ba Abang sometime in 2005. Shortly after that, he came looking for me in the village. He offered to take care of me but I declined. He then said I should give in or he would hurt me and my family,” says the 21-year-old woman who eventually acceded to his demands and has since borne him two girls, one in 2006 and another in February.
Ah Heng now rarely visits nor provides maintenance for the family after his wife found out about his activities and accused Mindy of seducing her husband.

“I don’t want him to come here anymore; I will raise the kids myself. I don’t even love him,” says Mindy.

The Penans Are of No Importance to S'wak Gov't

2008-10-06T05:56:00.000-07:00

Source: The Star Online

Monday October 6, 2008
A neglected people

THE Penan’s protracted resistance to deforestation and the international attention the tribe continues to receive must have irked the Sarawak government.

The state government continues to dismiss their concerns over the loss of forest resources brought on by industrial logging that degrades the forest and pollutes the rivers.

At the height of the international anti-tropical timber campaign in the late 1980s, the state set up a Penan Affairs Committee to help the nomadic tribe to lead a settled life with promises of socio-economic development. The state announced allocations worth millions of ringgit.

Two decades later, the benefits remain elusive for many Penans. The rapid expansion of acacia and oil palm plantations eats into their ancestral land. To top it off, the natives are becoming illegals with many not having official documents.

The Human Rights Commission (Suhakam) has raised the issue of poor MyKad registration which complicates the issuance of birth certificates.

Suhakam has thus far failed in persuading the state government to resolve the land rights issue inflicting every native group in Sarawak.
In recent years, the Penans are turning to the court of law to stop further encroachment.

But the nomadic Penans face a tough battle in claiming native customary rights (NCR) as the Sarawak Land Code 1958 states that one cannot stake a claim for NCR if one had not cultivated that piece of land before Jan 1, 1958.

In May 2007, further restrictions were imposed when the clause “any other lawful method of establishing land claim” in Section 5(2) was dropped. Lawyers had previously used that provision to argue for a broader interpretation of land use.
“When environmental groups suggest setting aside forests for wildlife, the state will agree but when we demand for our forests to be protected, we are ignored. It seems that the wildlife living in the forests are more valued than us humans,” notes a young Penan.

Although disillusioned, the Penans remain hopeful.

As Balan Jon of Long Item puts it: “It’s not only our livelihood but our culture and survi val as a tribe has been affected for so long. We’ll die if we continue to be neglected.”

Ongoing Harassment and Abuse of Sarawak Natives

2008-10-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

This is how the Politics of Development championed by Taib Mahmud and Sarawak Barisan Nasional Government works.

As reported in The Star Online:

Friday October 3, 2008
Eviction of 10,000 residents ‘put on hold’

MIRI: The 10,000 residents who have been evicted from their centruty-old villages in northern Sarawak have been given a reprieve for Hari Raya.

The Sept 29 deadline for the residents of the 13 Kedayan-Malay villages in Bekenu district came but there were no bulldozers in sight to demolish their homes.

They had been asked to move out of the land that had been leased out to a Miri property developer for an oil-palm plantation and had sought the help of Sibuti MP Ahmad Lai Bujang.

Ahmad told The Star yesterday that the villagers had been living on the edge, worrying when their homes would be bulldozed.

“Luckily, the Hari Raya proved to be a reprieve. I did not see any Land and Survey Department enforcement teams or workers from the private company attempting to demolish any houses.

“The eviction has been put on hold, it seems. However, I worry what will happen after the Hari Raya.

“The issue has generated a lot of publicity. The dispute is over a big area.

“The villagers have been living there for many generations and yet the company has staked a claim as the rightful owner.

“This is turning into a big dilemma because the developer’s lawyer has issued a letter saying that the villagers are illegal squatters,” he said.

The villages are located some 40km south of here, along the Sarawak Second Coastal Highway near the Miri-Bintulu divisional boundary.

On Sept 27, the desperate villagers staged a public demonstration along the highway to garner attention to their plight.

Asked whether the villagers would get an injunction against the eviction order, Ahmad said they were looking at all avenues.

“They are appealing to the Government first before resorting to any court action,” he said.

Ahmad said that the villagers have a strong claim to the land, as they had been living there continously since 1910 and have native land rights by virtue of their ancestral background.

The Kedayan-Malays are direct descendents of the Brunei Malay and migrated to Sarawak during the British colonial era.

Authorized Abuse of Sarawak Natives

2008-10-02T19:47:00.000-07:00

Yet another abuse. This is how Taib Mahmud's Politics of Development works.

As reported in The Star Online:

Friday October 3, 2008
Ministry to probe sex abuse claims by Penans

PETALING JAYA: The Women, Family and Community Development Ministry will investigate claims of timber workers sexually abusing Penan women and girls.

Minister Datuk Dr Ng Yen Yen said she had instructed the womens affairs director-general to meet Sarawak Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Alfred Jabu and obtain more information after the Hari Raya holidays.

“We are very concerned about the matter,” she said.

“I have also talked to the Health Ministry to do something as we want to ensure the health of the Penans has not been compromised.”

Alfred, who is also the chairman of the steering committee on the Penans, had dismissed the sexual abuse claims, saying he had not heard about such complaints from the tribe’s community leaders.

Dr Ng was responding to Suhakam commissioner for Sarawak, Dr Mohd Hirman Ritom, who said on Tuesday it would investigate the sexual abuse claims.

Suhakam commissioner Datuk Dr Denison Jayasooria had urged the ministry and federal police to look into the matter since the Sarawak police said that they could not investigate as there was no official report.

The claims of abuse first surfaced on the Bruno Manser Fund website.

2008-09-26T01:16:00.000-07:00

MIRI: Village folk from 13 Kedayan-Malay kampungs in northern Sarawak are up in arms over a move by the Sarawak Land and Survey Department and a private developer to evict them from their century-old settlement.

These Kedayan-Malays, who are descendants of the Brunei Malays, are in dire straits after the entire population of 10,000 people from the 13 villages were issued an ultimatum to move out by Monday.

They have received eviction notices from the department, and a letter from the lawyer of the company that will be taking over the land, to vacate their homes by Monday. The affected villages are located some 40km south of Miri City, along the Sarawak Second Coastal Highway near the Miri-Bintulu divisional boundary.

On Saturday, dozens of these affected villagers staged a demonstration at the roadside of the highway starting at 8am to get the attention of passing motorists towards their plight. They unfurled banners and placards denouncing their eviction. The crowd grew as passers-by joined in the protest.

Two elderly Kedayan chieftains, Penghulu Sahar Pusha and Bengkil Bangkol, also joined the demonstration.

They showed The Star the lawyer letters they had received dated Sept 15, this year. The letter states that the villagers must vacate their homes within 14 days from Sept 15. Sahar said the 13 villages affected by the eviction are Kampung Batu Satu Beraya, Kampung Kejapi, Kampung Keluru Jaya, Kampung Orak, Kampung Beraya, Kampung Butir, Kampung Keluru Tengah, Kampung Subok, Kampung Sapaou, Kampung Sebayau, Kampung Tusan, Kampung Uban and Kampung Telud.

“This move to evict us is a huge shock to all of us. We have been living in these villages since 1910. Recently, the State Land and Survey Department and the private developer sent us letters informing us that the land we are living on had been taken over for development purposes.

“We were told that they have plans to develop sawmill and oil-palm plantations. We were informed that 1,800 hectares of our land had already been allocated to a sawmill.

“All the 13 kampungs have a total of 5,500 hectares of land. The total population is about 10,000. This sudden move to evict us is shocking indeed. Where are we to go? This is our ancestral home. We have been here for almost 100 years,” he said when interviewed at the site.

Bengkil said the private developer had already bulldozed four cemeteries in its effort to clear the land to build an access road. The desecrated cemeteries are Kubur Kejapil, Kubur Batir, Kubur Sungai Jalil and Kubur Sungai Payau, he said.

“We have sought urgent meetings with the relevant authorities to help us. We have recently met with the Miri Land and Survey Department officials but they told us we have no rights over the land because we only have provisional leases.

“We protested saying that we have native customary rights because our ancestors have been there since 1910. However, they refuse to withdraw the eviction directives,” said Bengkil.

The affected villagers are now appealing to Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud to intervene and stop the eviction.

Source: The Star Online

Analysis: Anwar's New Malaysia

2008-09-14T09:05:00.000-07:00

Analysis: Anwar's New Malaysia (Part 1)

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim shares his vision of a new Malaysia and says "Patriotism, and I will include here racial politics, is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

Accountability, transparency, good governance, the need to eradicate corruption, cronyism, and nepotism--these are the values of Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s ‘reformasi’ (social reform) agenda.

Speaking about them has been his platform for the last ten years, for which he has endured a lot.

His words have lit a spark in the people of Malaysia, as a younger generation--free from the fears that plagued the older generation--with access to knowledge and information, began to take his words to heart.

They were exposed to the ways of the world, and saw in his words a hope that was exhilarating in its audacity of promises. The world was passing Malaysia by, and the need for change--for the basic reason of adapting to the changing world--was becoming imperative. Today, the desire for change has grown stronger, as the seeds that Dato’ Seri Anwar’s words planted in people’s hearts 10 years ago have germinated and blossomed.

And in this exclusive interview with Passions magazine, Dato Seri Anwar Ibrahim shares with us his vision for a new Malaysia.

New economic agenda

Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s words are a refreshing change from the talk of race and religion that is seemingly the wont of so many political personalities in the country. Instead of beating about the old communalist bush, he spoke issues--economic, social, and political issues that affect all Malaysians regardless of colour and creed.

It was therefore apt, considering the current global and local economic climate, that the first thing he spoke about was his New Economic Agenda, which promises to bring about a seismic shift in the Malaysian economic climate. A shift, perhaps, for the better. But are Malaysians and Malaysia ready for such a change?

For Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim, the question is a no-brainer. As he puts it, "Malaysia has been stuck with an obsolete economic programme, which has led to the loss of competitiveness, the diminishing attractiveness of the nation for foreign investments, which is further worsened by the lack of transparency, accountability, and good governance." The answer to such a "malaise", he puts it, "is to embark on a New Malaysian Economic Agenda, based on market economic principles and driven by Malaysians working together to enhance economic competitiveness. All Malaysians," he said with conviction, "must play a part and be part of this new direction."

And thus he makes no bones about it. "Obsolete policies have to go." And to him, one of the biggest epitomes of a failed and obsolete policy is none other than the New Economic Policy or NEP.

As he puts it, "We need to promote growth, and that can only happen if we are seen to be a market-driven economy." But will scrapping the NEP bring about a doomsday scenario for the Malay community, as so many of the policy’s adherents claim? Definitely not. Because as Dato’ Seri Anwar told us, "market growth is not a zero-sum game at the expense of the poor and the marginalized.

But instead of a race-based affirmative action policy, what we should have is a needs-based policy. In doing so, the majority of the Malays will still be taken care of, and at the same time so too would the needy and marginalized among the other communities in the country, such as the Indian estate workers."

For him, the path is clear. "Economic growth and competitiveness," he told, "come hand-in-hand with good governance, the rule of law, and a free media. I do not believe that such an agenda is the concern of the present ruling establishment, although there have sometimes been some platitudes towards that direction from the establishment."

Nevertheless, to him, the Old Guard are the progeny of failed policies, which is why he believes that it important to "transform the nation and at the same time ensure that the transition is smooth and stable so as to garner hope for all Malaysians."

A new Malaysia

What Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim wants to bring about then is a Malaysian agenda. Of course some parties might be reluctant to see that come into fruition and have appealed to baser instincts such as race and religion to create a platform against him. However, as Dato’ Seri Anwar so nicely puts it--paraphrasing from Samuel Johnson--"Patriotism, and I will include here racial politics, is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

To answer his detractors, he had this to say, "I am a Malay. A very committed and concerned Malay. But I cannot see my relevance if I cannot think as a true Malaysian, and show enough concern for the welfare of all Malaysians"

Wise words indeed, and again it is a sign of how wonderfully refreshing his words are to even the most jaded of ears. Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim talks Malaysia first and foremost. However, he proudly states that he is very much pro-Malay, in a sense where it really matters - in the sense of being competitive and of being able to be proud of their achievements because they know they had earned it in merit.

And this is why he said, "I am convinced that pursuing an obsolete agenda, including race-based politics will ultimately lead, not just to a breakdown of the social fabric, but will adversely affect the morale, confidence and resolve of the Malays." Here he hits the nail right on the head. It is popular to talk about how unfair race-based policies in Malaysia are to the non-Malay communities. Yet the biggest victims of the policies are ironically the very people they try to help.

The real Malay dilemma

He asks, "How many non-bumiputra can understand and appreciate the feelings of self-doubt that has been engendered by being told for two generations that you are not capable of standing up on your own two feet, that your achievements are not based on merit alone but on other more insidious factors? How terribly confidence-sapping it must be to have such thoughts always hovering in the background like a nagging doubt at the back of the head."

"Take my daughter for example," he offered by way of illustrating his point, "she is currently studying mathematics in Georgetown University in the United States. And she is happy because she knows that she managed to get in because of what she did and not because she happens to be of the right race."

"I want to bring about that sense of confidence in the Malays through the New Economic Agenda," he said. "Now, at the same time, we would need--at first--to reassure the Malays that they would not be marginalized by it. And this is important because for the past 30 years, they have been subjected to incessant propaganda, which tells that without the NEP they would not be able to survive."

Hope in the new generation

A new Malaysia such as the one that Dato’ Anwar Ibrahim hopes to bring about would mean having what he calls, "A new generation of leaders." He is hopeful and confident about the future, noting "the younger generation of Malay Malaysians are rejecting the politics of fear, race, and religion." But there is still work to be done, and as he pointed out, "How we view issues like religion, culture, language, and education is still important.

Therefore within the Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance--the combined Opposition forces in Malaysia) leadership, we have already spelt out a clear agenda. And this is based on the Constitution, where Islam is the religion of the Federation with guaranteed freedom of practice for other religions. Because Malaysia is a multi-religious nation, and we cannot have and should not have had high-handed and unjust incidents such as the demolishing of temples."

Dato’ Seri Anwar’s licence to speak about economic affairs comes in part from his previous role as the Finance Minister of the country. So too by being the former Education Minister, he is qualified to speak on matters of education.

And this is an area where he sees a great and urgent need for change, especially when one takes into consideration the fact that the education system is the one that shapes the future leaders of Malaysia.

Being a true Malaysian, he is adamant about the importance of the national language. "As a developing nation," he said, "it is important to have a national language and everyone should be encouraged to be proficient in Bahasa Malaysia. But we should not do this at the expense of English."

"We should," he emphasised, "be committed to enhancing the proficiency of English in Malaysians because it is the international language of business and trade. Otherwise Malaysia will lose out in economic and human development."

"Take for example Indonesia and Thailand," he said. "Back in the 1960s, they were far inferior to Malaysia in terms of English proficiency. But today they are catching up and in some ways have even surpassed us." Dato’ Seri Anwar has no doubts about the direction that is needed.

"We need to have more serious efforts in the teaching of English in Malaysian schools. We cannot afford to continue on in the haphazard and directionless manner of today," he said with firm determination in his voice.

Furthermore, the importance of the languages of the other communities in Malaysia such as Mandarin and Tamil should not be underestimated. It is as he said, "Mandarin is no longer just the language of the Chinese in Malaysia. It has become a very important economic language of the region." He brings up the example of the universities in the UK where elective language subjects are usually Mandarin or Spanish.

Source: The 28 August 2008 edition of www.malaysiakini.com. This second part of this analysis, titled “Good Leadership and Good governance” will be published soon. The above article first appeared in the August edition of Passions magazine.

Malaysian Economic Agenda Set to Propel Growth

2008-09-13T07:02:00.000-07:00

Malaysian Economic Agenda Set to Propel Growth

Anwar Ibrahim says that with a resounding victory in the March 8th elections, KeADILan (Justice Party) is set to begin implementation of its economic agenda which will stimulate economic growth, attract foreign investment and ensure that marginalised and poor communities receive adequate attention and support from the government.

--(PR.com)-- KeADILan’s economic agenda received a resounding mandate on March 8th when Malaysians went to the polls and quadrupled the number of seats held by the opposition in Parliament, awarding us with 50% of the seats in West Malaysia. After a decade of economic mismanagement, unchecked inflation in recent years and lagging competitiveness vis-a-vis Malaysia’s neighbours, we are confident that under our leadership and working closely with our partners, we will begin to implement policies to ensure a stronger and more vibrant economy in Malaysia.

Looking to the future, the coalition, using its control of five key states, Selangor, Perak, Penang, Kedah and Kelantan, will implement business-friendly, free-market policies to stimulate growth, attract foreign investment and promote greater accountability and transparency in business dealings.

One of our priorities in the upcoming weeks will be to initiate dialogues with the foreign investment community already present in Selangor, Perak, Penang, Kedah and Kelantan to ensure investor confidence remains strong during the transition period and also to identify areas of concern that our new governments will address in enhancing and improving their operations and performance in Malaysia.

Our no-tolerance policy on corruption will have a major impact in reducing transaction costs and building confidence in small and medium enterprise. We also plan to divorce government employees from doing business with the government thereby reducing incentives for cronyism and insider deals which are plaguing the current administration.

The Malaysian Economic Agenda which was a cornerstone of KeADILan’s election promises can be implemented at the state level to reduce race-based affirmative action policies and begin to implement a more competitive, merit based system. This will immediately increase foreign investment, improve the state’s tax revenue and begin to promote more equity and income parity. Furthermore we will honour our promise to protect the marginalized from each ethnic community.

The unexpected margin of our victory caught the nation and the region by surprise. A short term adjustment in the KLSE and weakening of the Ringgit is expected but will not persist unless Barisan Nasional chooses to pursue a regressive policy of punishment, and withholds its commitments for development allocations to the now opposition controlled states. We would warn Barisan Nasional however, that doing so will further alienate its position with the people.

Anwar Ibrahim

The Malaysian Economic Agenda

2008-09-12T01:40:00.000-07:00