The villagers allege the company encroached on their land and felled 109 trees at Ba Byepangah. While Samling and the Long Ajeng villagers are at a quiet standoff at the first blockade, tensions are rising in Long Pakan. A map created by the Penan of the Long Pakan area, which they regard as their ancestral territory. The land in question has not been officially surveyed by the government, leaving space for ambiguity over its legal ownership. “We are still waiting for government approval.”Īccording to the Penan community maps, the blockades are constructed on their land under Section 18. “We did the mapping for all the Penan,” Nalan said. A group of Penan leaders approached the state government in 2017 and handed over community maps of 70 villages demarcating each community’s territory. To combat further losses, the Penan carried out their own surveys under Section 18, which recognizes a community’s entire territory. “The Penans lost so much land under Section 6, but when we took it to court, the court ruled that the people lost their rights and lands forever because they agreed to the Section Six survey.” “The government deliberately wanted to do their perimeter surveys under Section Six,” Nalan said. This was disastrous for the Penans, who are a nomadic people. Activists say the state government often chose to demarcate land as “native communal reserves” based on Section 6 of the code, which only recognizes the perimeters of farmland. The logging problem faced by Sarawak’s Indigenous communities stems from land surveys carried out following the enactment of Sarawak’s 1958 Land Code. Samling rejects allegations that it has operated without consent on Penan land. Samling machinery at work in Long Pakan in Sarawak’s Upper Baram area. “The government and loggers control the forests,” Penan leader and activist Balang Nalan told Mongabay. However, the state government has been slow to respond. They called on the government to intervene and stop Samling from logging the last primeval forests in the Upper Baram region, which is designated as a protected area. The headmen of these villages say they immediately filed police reports after discovering the encroachment, and only established the blockades after authorities failed to take action to stop Samling.įollowing the Long Ajeng blockade, 12 community leaders from around Sarawak sent a joint letter to Chief Minister Abang Johari Tun Openg, the equivalent of the state governor. 22.īoth the Long Ajeng and Long Pakan villagers claim that timber giant Samling illegally encroached on Penan land, logging trees without their consent. 9, and their second in Long Pakan in the Middle Baram region on Sept. The Penan erected their first blockade at Long Ajeng in the Upper Baram region of Sarawak state on Sept. Indigenous Penan tribespeople have set up road blocks to stop a timber company from logging on land in Malaysian Borneo that they consider part of their ancestral heritage. One blockade, in the Long Ajeng area, has led to tensions between villagers opposed to Samling’s presence and those in favor of it, and has been dismantled and reinstalled multiple times.
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