Sarawak’s Baram Dam protestors survive one year of blockading

The deadline yesterday for anti-Baram dam protestors in northern Sarawak to remove their blockade of a logging road passed without any incident, as natives marked the first anniversary of their protest against the mega project that will flood their ancestral lands.

A team of Forestry Department officers, backed by armed policemen, returned to the blockade site in Long Kesseh, which locals there simply refer to as “KM15”, but left without dismantling it. The blockade stands across the only access road to the proposed dam site.

Long Kesseh is about a four-hour drive by 4x4 from Miri. Distance to Sarawak's interior is not measured by kilometres but by the time it roughly takes to get from one point to another.

Save Sarawak Rivers Network chairman Peter Kallang (pic, right) said one anti-dam protest leader had sent him a text message to report that forestry officers and the policemen had arrived at the blockade yesterday morning.

The group is one of several environmental and human rights non-governmental organisations giving support to the Kayans, Kenyahs, some Ibans and Penans who will be displaced if the proposed dam is built.

On Wednesday, the protestors were given three days to remove the new blockade they had re-erected on the logging road after the one they had set up a year ago was dismantled by state authorities.

The first blockade was set up to prevent workers from entering the proposed dam site for the 1,200Kw hydroelectric dam that Sarawak Energy Bhd (SEB) plans to build there.

The tribespeople had held the blockade for a year, building makeshift homes at the site so that they could keep a permanent vigil.

The protest leader told Kallang that some some negotiations were held with the enforcement officers, and the forestry officers then agreed to refer to “higher authorities”.

“The blockade was not dismantled while the officers refered the discussions to their superiors,” he said.

The protestors' request to have a bulldozer of one of the dam contractors removed, was also granted. The bulldozer, which belonged to Autorich Sdn Bhd, the contractor of concessionaire M.M. Golden, had earlier been abandoned at the blockaded area and was removed at around 1pm yesterday.

Kallang said there was some anxiety among those manning the blockade when they sighted the forestry officers, policemen and representatives of the logging company returning for the second time in three days.

"But they kept their cool and composure," Kallang said.

The situation was diffused somewhat because the Forestry Department and police had sent their Kayan and Kenyah-speaking personnel “who are from that area” to deal with the situation.

Kallang, however, accused the state government of using one of the locals as a “troublemaker” to get the blockade removed.

He claimed that a local from Long Kesseh, who he named Lah Anyi, who was once given a timber concession in the area, is being used to influence the enforcement authorities so that his company could resume logging the place.

Kallang said Lah Anyi was a bankrupt and no longer held the timber concession licence.

Swiss NGO, the Bruno Manser Fund (BMF), has also highlighted the state government's use of Lah Anyi as "the latest tactic... to weaken indigenous resistance to the proposed Baram dam".

"Anyi doesn’t possess a valid concession for the area and the local communities have gone to court about the expropriation of their land for the dam and the ongoing logging activities," BMF said in a statement, noting that the natives' court case was still pending and would be heard after March next year.

Human rights organisations at home and abroad have condemned the authorities for dismantling the blockade last Wednesday, saying it was an act of intimidation.

They have also appealed to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to denounce the action.

Opponents of the Baram Dam fear that when complete, it would inundate 26 villages, including Long Kesseh, flooding 400 sq km of land and displacing between 6,000 and 20,000 people.

Today, dam opponents will mark their first anniversary of the Save Baram operation by holding a fund raising dinner in a local hotel in Miri.

Those manning the blockade sites at Long Kesseh and Long Lama will mark it with games, prayers and a barbecue. – October 25, 2014.