New Times in Sarawak
By Rick Mitchell
PARIS -- Prime Minister Mahatir bin Mohamad has kept himself in power by inspiring mainstream Malaysians to dream that, with hard work and determination, Malaysia will be an advanced nation by the year 2020. But "Vision 2020" is a nightmare to some of Malaysia's peoples.
The 7,000-plus Orang Ulu tribespeople stand to lose their homes to a 2,400 megawatt hydroelectric dam on the Rajang River, in the Borneo state of Sarawak. The riparian longhouses on the Rajang and its tributaries will be swept away when the dam's reservoir floods 695 square kilometers of wildlife-rich rain forest.
International and domestic protests, and lack of financing, led to cancellation of the project in 1990, but this time Mr. Mahatir is resolute. At the September groundbreaking ceremony near the spectacular Bakun rapids, he lambasted "foreign media and environmental activists" who "prefer to see us live primitively."
Mr. Mahatir awarded the $6 billion Bakun project to the Ekran Corporation, which has wide experience in logging and building hotels and resorts, but none building dams. Ekran is owned by a friend of Mr. Mahatir's, and two major stockholders are sons of Sarawak's chief minister, Taib Mahmud.
The dam -- which, at 211 meters will be among the world's tallest -- is supposed to prevent a recurrence of blackouts that crippled peninsular Malaysia in the early 1990s. There is a prospect of infrastructure and industry for Sarawak's dark-jungled heart.
Sim Kwang Yang, an opposition Democratic Action Party member of Parliament from Kuching, Sarawak's capital, says Malaysia does not need Bakun because it has several conventional plants in the works.
Mr. Sim says Ekran's vow to complete the dam in scarcely five years is reckless, and may endanger 550,000 people living downriver. But he has little hard evidence. The government's 17 feasibility studies are classified, although Ekran has already built a luxury hotel on the site, to house foreign consultants.
The government sponsored a forum in the boom town of Sibu, Sarawak, featuring five Chinese dam experts who praised the Bakun project. The Democratic Action Party had to cancel its own Bakun forum in Kuching after two hotels canceled contracts to use their meeting halls, Mr. Sim said. Iban tribespeople had come to recount what happened to them after they agreed to make way for Vision 2020 -- in their case, the Batang River hydroelectric dam, completed in Sarawak in 1985.
Promised land, new homes, cash and help starting businesses, the Iban ended up working for daily wages on corporate-owned oil palm plantations. Many owe money on their shabbily built new homes. Ironically, they have to pay for electricity.
Federal and state officials have refused to meet the Orang Ulu's elected representatives, but Chief Minister Tabib Mahmud had advice for them at a recent conference. "Realize the facts of today's world," he said. "We should not bury our noses and ignore the most important fact -- the Age of Cash."
The Orang Ulu, whose name means "river people" in Malay, have already seen that age. The Rajang has been turned murky red by soil runoff from mountains denuded by intense logging. Fish and game have died off.
At Long Murum, one of Bakun's doomed longhouses, an Orang Ulu man said, "We have told the government we don't want to go. They say we have no choice. In Malaysia, when the government wants something, they take it. We don't like it, but what can we do?"
Appeared April 29, 1995 in International Herald Tribune. Originally appeared in UN Observer & International Report (New York)
