Borneo Villagers Battle For Freedom – Sarawak

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“Everything we do is by ourselves – nobody controls us. We are the boss and we are the workers” Simo Sekam, Nyegol village, Sarawak

To power industry and supply water for Sarawak’s burgeoning capital, Kuching, vast hydro-electric dams have been built (with 6 more in the pipeline), drowning hundreds of thousands of hectares of rainforest and villages while generously lining the pockets of the power elite.

Laws to protect villagers’ rights to their forest homes are systematically ignored by so called development projects, leaving the villagers little option but to join the cheap imported labour in the logging and plantation industries that displaced them. Though many of the diverse ethnic people migrated to Kuching, some have fought courageous battles to hold onto their forest homes.

1996, when I was volunteering for Friends of the Earth’s Rainforest Campaign in London, one of our heroes was Bruno Manser, a courageous Swiss activist who was organising protest barricades and legal battles to stop the loggers’ destruction of the Penan Tribe’s forest homes in Sarawak, Malaysia. An overly effective obstacle to the loggers’ substantial profits, Bruno subsequently disappeared and was presumed murdered.

In March this year I visited a friend in Sarawak and heard how the resource-rich state of Malaysia continues to develop on the back of logging, oil and gas exploration, and palm oil plantations in its dwindling rainforest.

Telang Usan Travel organised my trip to visit one such village, Nyegol, that belongs to the Bidayuh tribe. Pre the drowning of their village by the construction of the Bengoh Dam, the villagers fought a 7-year court battle and eventually won the right to re-build their village in the hills above the huge lake formed by the dam.

To persuade the villagers to re-settle in a new-build government town, they were offered cash bribes, promises of jobs, and a free cement home with 3 acres of land (3 kilometres away) and a local school. However, only villagers from a remote village named Village in the Clouds, where children had to walk 12 hours to school, joined the settlement along with a few families from the drowned village of Nyegol.

I stayed in Nyegol village whose chief, Simo Sekam, aged 63, had for seven years battled through the courts till he won both the right to rebuild his village in the forest above the dam and the rights for 2 more neighbouring communities to continue to live in their forest villages above the dam. Only 10 stoic families from Simo’s village took on the humongous job of moving their entire village above the dam water; the rest succumbed to their childrens’ desire to sacrifice self-sufficiency for a job in an urban world that offers brutal jobs like working in a pig factory!

From the dam wall, a 20-minute boat ride passes through submerged forest valleys lined with dead tree trunks and largely intact rainforest above. At the wooden jetty I was greeted by Jacqueline, the daughter of Simo, the Nyegol village chief and sister of Jerome (jeromesimo521@gmail.com +60 19-805 9188) who runs the family’s Paradise Resthouse. She insisted on packing my few possessions in her plastic version of a traditional ratan backpack (attached to a strap across her forehead) and led me up the steep forest path to the village of about 13 wooden houses surrounded by fruit, vegetable and herb gardens.

Simo, who like his son and daughter spoke English, welcomed me and told me all about their quality of life saying; “The village is better than the town because everything we do by ourselves. Nobody control us. We are the boss. We are the workers.”

As there are so few people in the area, there is enough land for the Nyegol villagers to practice ‘shifting agriculture’ – cutting trees and planting vegetables and then moving to another area to allow the forest to grow back and re-planting more trees from their tree nursery. So that the forest isn’t destroyed by outsiders, a new family must ask permission to build a home and to plant crops from those villagers who have authority to live in the reserve.

In small forest clearings they grow durian, coconut, jackfruit, paddy rice, pepper, pineapple and lemongrass, raise chickens and limit the amount of meat they hunt to help preserve the forest wildlife.
Simo’s family restrict the use of artificial fertiliser due to it contaminating the drinking water in the river and lake. They shun food from town due to plants being contaminated from chemicals and livestock being injected to boost their growth. He said that they don’t use chemical pesticides as they have their own natural ways of protecting the plants from bugs and ants.

They don’t need much medicine as their life is very healthy with lots of physical work and healthy food. When they are ill they use traditional medicines such as 2 plants made into powder and mixed with water to create a juice that prevents infection. Eye problems can be cured with a jungle leaf that they cook and they rub the leaf sap into their eyes. They also have a cure for snake bites. When they need modern medicine, thanks to the dam, they are able to boat across the lake to the dam wall road where the bus takes them to the Kuching hospital or private clinic.
To supplement their income and learn about the outside world, they host tourists and sell fruit and veg, chickens, eggs and fish to the middlemen at the dam wall. As they mostly cook with their own firewood, they only have to buy gas and firelighters from the shops. They have their own hydro- electric and solar power and even Wi Fi via Starlink installed thanks to a Singaporeian lecturer to carry out a Cambridge University research project from the village. Consequently, everyone in the village has either a smartphone or a simple phone, to communicate with friends and family outside the forest. “Visitors just call and we collect them by boat from the dam.”

“In town we cannot simply go to people’s houses, but in village culture, every house is open”. Simo has two grandchildren who return to the village for holidays where they are free to explore the forest and swim in the river.

The villagers plan to build a Longhouse as a learning centre for traditional culture and skills, help people remember how rich life is in the forest and to return one day. For those who are not educated, don’t work for the government or a company, life in the town isn’t easy as they can’t find long term work opportunities.

When I spoke to elderly villagers who had moved into the settlement town, they lamented the loss of freedom, beauty and abundance of the forest and culture of the self-sufficient forest lifestyle still enjoyed by Simo and his neighbours in Nyegol. Villagers who left the village and accepted the compensation of house and land do not have the right to return to their villages unless they marry into the village community.

Although Nyegol village is within the boundaries of a National Park, which supposedly protects the village from logging, Simo is fearful of reprisals and declined to confirm if their winning the right to live in the Park gave any extra layer of protection from the dreaded loggers.