Filed under: Films, Indigenous People, Land, Logging, Media Reports, Oil Palm
From AlJazeera English
July 15 2009
Once considered the green lungs of Asia, Borneo now provides a lucrative home for palm oil growers and timber corporations.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, the rate of environmental destruction in Borneo is faster than in the Amazon.
In the second of a three-part series, Al Jazeera’s Tony Birtley investigates the role of politics in the growth of palm oil plantations and timber concessions.
note: Segan Degon was mistakenly acknowledged as Jengga Ahak in this video.
by Jules Ong
from Malaysiakini.com
A review of the 36-minute documentary by Hilary Chiew and Chi Too
What Environment? It’s occupation and terrorism.
I watched What Rainforest? and immediately felt that it should not be called an ‘environmental’ documentary. But it was conveniently lumped under environment at its debut showing at the 2008 Freedom Film Festival recently.
As environmental issues become mainstream, its messages becomes simplified and stereotyped…. and boring. Add the indigenous people, and the Hollywood theme of Guardian of the Rainforest gets even more tiresome.
Here goes – Primitive but wise with the way of the jungle, the indigenous people fight a losing battle against modern development to protect their way of life and identity. How heroic. How sad.
I think it’s time to move on. Because if you sing this refrain over and over, people stop caring. And it gives ammunition to those who don’t give two hoots about the environment or native rights to respond: Hey, wake up man. We have to develop. We have hungry stomachs to fill. Why should we be sorry for cutting down a few trees?
The West finished cutting their trees and now wants to stop us?! And those lazy natives, why are you so anti-development? You want to be uneducated, poor and hungry ah? (as if they were offered any choices).
That’s the typical answer politicians in Sarawak love to give when you present them facts about illegal logging. Nevermind the criminal element of illegal logging, they will bring out that tiresome narrative about development vs environment.
The 36-minute documentary What Rainforest? by Chi Too and Hilary Chiew is a different sort of film with an environmental sounding name. It made me sit up. It made me burn. It’s not about development vs environment with pretty pictures of virgin rainforests and its cute denizens thrown in.
Palestine-like
It’s really about occupation and terrorism. Much akin to what the Palestinians are facing in their homeland. Driven out of their land and occupied by others while the rest of the world looks on.
Except that in this case, it is perpetuated not by foreign enemies but done with the aggressive support of the state using our tax dollars backed by dubious sections of the law. So in effect, it’s state terrorism.
Ok, I’d say the Palestinians have it much worse, but the fact of the matter is that occupation and terrorism is happening in the Land of the Hornbills. Occupation – people’s land are being occupied illegally. Terrorism – people are being threatened and even beaten if they refuse to leave, if they put up blockades, or if they’re organising their people. There have also been cases of mysterious disappearances and deaths of activists. Recently, NGO’s have claimed that Penan women and girls were raped and sexually abused by loggers. All these are part of the terrorism tactics to cow a people into submission and to abandon their claim of the land.
If the same events were to be transplanted into Peninsular Malaysia middle-class life, there would be lawsuits, and rolling heads. No, it wouldn’t even happen to begin with. If it did, the closest thing that can bring that kind of outrage is the demolition of places of worship. It would bring no less than a Hindraf Makkal Sakti kind of respond.
When handbags get snatched, when houses get burglarised, especially when it’s a politician’s wife and a minister’s house, they get frontpaged. When someone’s land in Sarawak is being grabbed in broad daylight, and the owners terrorised by gangsters and police stand and watch, it’s either too sensitive or too complicating to report. Let me just put it simply.
Licence to log
Imagine someone coming into your house and cart all your furniture out. Then, they put their own furniture inside your house and tell you, get out, this house belongs to us now. You go to the police. They do nothing. Ok now, put yourself in the native’s shoes, or bare feet. Those bulldozers and loggers come, and they plunder your trees – trees that give shade, wood and fronds to build homes, herbs and roots for medicine, trees that shelter animals so you can hunt them for food, and strong roots to keep soil in place so you have water to drink and wash from clean rivers– in short, everything you need to survive. No need to venture into global warming talk or critters at the brink of extinction.
The greedy loggers don’t care about any of that. They show you their licence to log with Sarawak chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud’s signature on it and laugh in your face. They send their gangsters to intimidate you if you try to fight back. And while you’re slogging out in court moving at a snail’s pace to prove that the land belongs to you because your ancestors were there first, they flout court decrees and start logging anyway.
Before the judge can postpone the next trial date, they start planting palm oil. Then they claim the land is theirs because instead of leaving the land ‘idle’, they cultivate it. Next they apply ownership papers to justify it.
What do you do? You’d better start planting palm oil before they come. Forget about your old life of living in harmony with nature. Forget about your cultural identity and traditional way of life, and most of all, the environment. Log the trees, sell the timber and with the money, plant oil palm. Lots of them. Then you can prove that the land is yours. Beat the greedy companies in their own game ha ha. That’s what the last man standing did, Segan anak Degon. Hmm, tidak Segan sama sekali, brave man. Hell, that’s what I’ll do if I were in his place.
Watch What Rainforest? online
(Note to future film fest organisers keen on showing this film: This film should be put under the category: Occupation and Terrorism and shown with other films of this nature, such as the Palestinian conflict, and the War against Terrorism. Not under Environment.)
36 minutes
English/Malay/Iban with English Subtitles
Synopsis:
When bulldozers mowed over the ancestral farmlands of Kampung Lebor, Segan Anak Degon stood his ground and defended his land. Now, he is the only person out of 101 families, whose land is left intact and unaffected by the oil palm plantation.
However, Segan is the rare few who managed to halt the feverish onslaught of oil palm advancement that threatens to devastate the embattled Sarawak forested landscape.
The accounts of an Independent reviewer:
It had all the necessary ingredients for a thrilling Hollywood blockbuster:
A stoic hero and his long-suffering wife.
Ruthless land-grabbing corporations.
A plot that wove a tale of David minus his slingshot versus Goliath.
Of conviction of strength in the face of greed, gangsters and cockamamie policies.
And also a credible supporting cast and beautiful long-range and wide angle shots of one of the world’s oldest rainforests.
But What Rainforest? neither thrilled nor entertained.
Of course, the co-producers of this 36-minute documentary – Hilary Chiew and chi too – never intended for it to. Instead, they succeeded all too well in making you burn as you watch the outright trampling of basic rights of the indigenous Iban folk and their ancestral lands.
When oil palm barons began encroaching onto their native customary rights (NCR) land with claims of buyovers sanctioned by the government, the families in Kampung Lebur, near Kuching in Sarawak, were devastated.
One man stood his ground. Segan anak Degon was the only one of 101 families who managed to hold off an oil palm plantation from replacing his ancestral patch of forest which included his paddy field and fruit trees planted by his forefathers.
Like his fellow villagers, the forest was the sole source of livelihood for Segan and his wife. But unlike his fellow villagers, Segan fought … and won. And this is his story.
The Freedom Film Festival has just concluded with a screening a in Penang. So farm the response to the film has been most encouraging with many still recovering from the shock of what they have learnt through the film. With the festival over, we will very soon upload the film on the internet for everyone to watch.
The film was also reviewed by The New Strait Times. The following story was published on November 14th 2008 in the features section.
Reel-life woes
by LAVIINIA DHANAGUNA
At the recent FreedomFilmFest 2008 screenings, LAVIINIA DHANAGUNAN discovers scenes of ironical situations
THE sound of a whirring chainsaw hitting the hard bark of a tree in our tropical rainforests is my current ghost.
I just can’t seem to get rid of it ever since I saw the documentary, What Rainforest?, co-produced by activist Chi Too.
The last 10 minutes or so of the film, which was shown at last week’s FreedomFilmFest 2008 by Pusat Komas (Community Communication Centre), are powerful.
With every whir of the chainsaw came the testimony of an indigenous person talking about the value of the forest in their daily life.
What Rainforest? is short but gets you to sit up and reconsider your knowledge database.
Chi Too, who insists on a face-to-face interview, says the film is an extension of his last offering on the Penan people about the issue of illegal logging.
“I just want to inform as many people as I can about this issue. It is not the first time that logging has affected the indigenous people of East Malaysia.
“It is an issue I am passionate about because many people are losing out on their ancestral land, land that has been preserved by their families for generations and also losing out their basic rights in the process.
“There is a need to look beyond the romanticised concept of being environmentally conscious (doing things like recycling, saving water, etc) and looking at the core issue of the problem and trying to eliminate it.”
He says he was encouraged by the level of interest conveyed by the audience at the screening.
I have been exposed to the fight of native people in the quest to regain what is technically theirs, in Australia, as a student.
I admire the conviction and strength of the native people of Australia in rectifying what went wrong. After What Rainforest?, that same conviction and strength is present in our own native people.
The film opens with the story of Segan anak Degon, an Iban from Kampung Lebor, Sarawak who is fighting to sustain his birthright against the takeover of his land by a company involved in oil palm plantations.
Segan and his family depend on the forest, like many other indigenous people, for income and food.
His effort to protect his birthright seems to have borrowed scenes from an action-packed film, for in his struggle, Segan endures not just rain and shine but also threats by gangsters.
Lots of wide angle shots were used in the documentary, allowing for the beauty of the rainforest to be seen.
But the impact of the film really came home with the presence of Segan and his wife, Lumat anak Labong, at the screening at the Central Market.
The upshot of his fight to keep his land is that of the 101 families in his village, his is the only piece of land left untouched.
Segan is a person who has gained strength and determination in his conviction and has no qualms about sharing his stories. He says he found it amusing that the authorities encourage locals to continue their efforts in weaving and making baskets to sustain the local craft industry but still allowed plantation companies to take over the land which reduces the raw material needed to make the craft.
Meeting Segan straight off the screen, with a chainsaw whirring in my brain, you can’t help realising the irony of life today.
The Jaringan Orang Asal Semalaysia produced this most excellent music video to commemorate their struggle.
ps: Jaringan Orang Asal Semalaysia is now linked from What Rainforest? on the links tab.
Well, at last, What Rainforest -The Film was premiered at the Freedom Film Fest on Sept 6.
A 20-min version of the film was first launched in July in conjunction with What Rainforest – The Campaign targeting the 11th Rainforest World Music Festival in Santubong, Sarawak.
Being a rainy afternoon, the crowd trickled in slowly. At the start of the screening, I counted no more than 50 people in the screening room at the top floor of the Central Market Annexe – the hub for indie and progressive activities in the Klang Valley.
When the lights came on as the credits rolled, to our delight, the room was fully occupied! It might be the balmy, cozy atmosphere in the room, or maybe it’s the typical Malaysian way, the Q & A session got off to a slooow start only to see more hands going up as discussion became livelier towards the end.
The session was shared between two other films and WR. The one on the wonders of non-timber forest products (such as honey, wood resin etc) in India got some in the audience going oohs and aahs.
Yes, non-timber forest products (NTFP) are indeed heart-warming creatures.
Don’t miss the forest for the trees! There are so much more that the forests are providing us and that alone is a good reason to protect them.
Another good reason, as highlighted in the film Voices of the Forest – India, is the dependence of local communities on these natural bounties. The forests are their supermarkets, banks and safety nets. There is no need for international conferences to discuss poverty eradication if only governments around the world ensure that the forests are protected.
The 2nd film was on the Knaisaimos tribe in Papua, Indonesia. The film began with the erosion of traditional culture and hardships endured by the tribe with the advent of logging and ended on a positive note as the community found strength in their cultural values to forge a sustainable future.
Then came our film which challenged the official rhetoric of 60% forest cover. Malaysia in general but Sarawak in particular is fast turning into ‘Sawit Republic’. At the heart of this phenomenon is the violation of Native Customary Rights which in my opinion is akin to daylight robbery sanctioned by the state.
Segan and Lumat – the Iban couple from Kg Lebor featured in the film – were duely introduced to the audience. Segan was even given a sort of standing ovation when he was called to the stage. He related his experience of standing up against the bulldozer and his community intimate relationship with the land.
Throughout the 3-day festival, the couple also sold their handicrafts and Lumat even managed to weave three bamboo baskets in between catching some films and chatting with visitors.
Many visitors signed the petition (www.PetitionOnline.com/WRPFSIP1) calling on the government to respect the fundamental rights of the Sarawak natives. For their support to our fellow Malaysians and to make this country a better place, we reward them with the unique WR sticker and windscreen sticker.
We’re having our eyes peeled looking out for these stickers on the road AND an increased traffic to this website.
Next, Johor Baru here we come!
‘til then … adios!
Filed under: Campaign, Dams, Films, Indigenous People, Land, Logging, Oil Palm, Pulp & Paper
2 things are happening this week in Kuala Lumpur…
1) What Rainforest? Rescreens in KL
For those who came to watch What Rainforest?, thank you very much… it has been a pleasure having you as an audience…
For those who weren’t there, don’t worry. What Rainforest? will be rescreened at the Central Market Annexe as part of ‘PERJUANGAN ORANG ASAL – THE STRIVE OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES ‘ an exhibition organized by the Jaringan Orang Asal Semalaysia (JOAS).
Details of the screenings are as follows
date : 11 September 2008 (Thursday)
time : 9.00 PM
venue : Central Market Annexe Gallery
website : www.whatrainforest.com
Also visit this site for more information on the exhibition.
2) Perjuangan Orang Asal – The Strive Of The Indigenous Peoples
Date: 10.09.2008 – 14.09.2008
Time: 11.00 AM – 07.00 PM
The Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia (JOAS) is hosting a series of events on indigenous peoples and rights in Malaysia to celebrate the first year anniversary of the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP).
Though most of the events are not open to members of the public, there are a few that are. These events include:
1. A public exhibition on indigenous peoples of Malaysia, their contributions as well as current challenges. The exhibition includes photographs by orang asal as well as activists like Colin Nicholas, and also an installation of a typical blokade used by the orang asal to prevent developers’ vehicles from entering their territories.
2. A cultural night of exchange with performances by members of the orang asal communities. Guaranteed more authentic than Citrawarna. Sat 13 Sep, 7pm, an all-night revelry!
3. A private workshop from 10-12 Sep to discuss the final draft of a memorandum on indigenous peoples rights. While this workshop is NOT open to the public, supporters are welcome to join them in the handover of the memorandum to DYMM Seri Paduka Baginda Yang DiPertuan Agung on Sat 13 Sep, 9am. Come earlier and meet at The Annexe Gallery if you like to join.
Members of the media are invited to attend all events. Please contact Sean Rubis at [ jennaie@gmail.com; 012 883 7937] or Jen Rubis at [ seanrubis@hotmail.com; 013 873 7676].
see you there.
A grave mistake has been made in the previous announcement. I stated that What Rainforest? screens every Saturday at 2.30 pm. This is a mistake.
What Rainforest screens at 2.00 pm… not 2.30 pm. Much apologies. Once again, What Rainforest SCREENS AT 2.00 PM EVERY SATURDAY.
Sorry for the inconvenience… hope to see everyone this Saturday.
‘What Rainforest?’ the film premiers at the Freedom Film Festival on 6 September 2008.
The film will screen every Saturday at 2.00pm together with 2 other environmental films (Voices Of The Forest & The Indigenous People of Knasaimos) at these venues:
6 September – Central Market Annexxe, Kuala Lumpur
13 September – Tropical Inn, Johor Bharu
20 September – Old Court House, Kuching
27 September – Wawasan Open University, Penang
The filmmakers, Hillary Chiew and chi too will be at the screenings to answer questions during the Q&A session that follows the screening. Special guests and experts will also be making appearances.
This 35 minute film will also be available for sale in DVD format for a minimum donation of RM 20. The DVD will also include ‘Penusah Tana’, as bonus material.
Email whatrainforest@gmail.com for more information.
For a full schedule of all the films screened at the Freedom Film Festival 2008, click here.
For over 20 years, Ajang Kiew, a Penan Leader, has been setting up blockades to protect his Native Customary Rights land from the intrusion of logging companies. To his dismay, his cries and efforts have fallen on deaf ears. Now, he sets up one final struggle before oil palm and tree plantations take over for good.
For more on the Films4Conservation Initiative and Network: http://www.films4.org
