Pirates, Squatters and Poachers: The Political Ecology of Dispossession of the Native Peoples of Sarawak

Abstract

The forests of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, are today the scene of a bitter struggle between native peoples trying to maintain their land rights and the timber industry intent on felling their forests for profit. Denied other means of redress, the natives have flung up barricades across the logging company roads to prevent the takeover of their ancestral lands, while politicians have sought to crush native resistance through mass arrests and by invoking national security laws. As this study reveals, the roots of this crisis go right back into the colonial era, when the economic, legal and administrative machinery of oppression was first established. Having lost control of their traditional trade, the natives became 'pirates', legitimate targets for the British Navy's gunboats. Once their resistance had been crushed by force of arms, their political organisations were co-opted and their initiative subdued by a benign paternalistic administration. Progressively denied effective rights to their lands, it was not long before the natives became 'squatters' on State land. After independence the subordination of native rights and interests to external economic and political powers intensified. Top-down development policies have continued to deny popular participation and even the creation of National parks has made them into 'poachers'. Intensive logging, hydropower projects and plantations are progressively taking over larger and larger areas of native land, through a process of development that is dominated by clientelistic political structures controlled by the indigenous elite. Today, 25 years after Sarawak received its independence, the native peoples remain the victims of an political economy that is undermining their very existence.