At the 2019 National Orang Asli Convention at the Putrajaya International Convention Centre, the prime minister recommended enhancing education and ecotourism as a way of contributing to the economic development of the Orang Asli community.
These actions continue to displace the rightful indigenous stewards of the land from access to traditional hunting and cultivation areas and too often from their ancestral burial grounds as in the Bakun Dam and Sungai Selangor dam projects. A new Pakatan Harapan government that is prepared to restore the NCR land to the indigenous peoples of Malaysia would ensure that our laws recognise two land categories that the indigenous peoples consider to be part of their NCR land, namely, “Pemakai Menoa” and “Pulau Galau” .
The Bakun dam project was given its go-ahead after Dr Mahathir Mohamad came into power in 1981. Environmentalists and NGOs opposed this monstrous project because it would have a generating capacity of 2,400MW when the energy need for the whole of Sarawak was less than 200MW at the time. Eventually in 1998, 10,000 indigenous people belonging to 15 different ethnic groups were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homes to the Sungai Asap resettlement scheme, a fate described as “ethnocide” by a local anthropologist.
At the very least, the Mahathir owes the indigenous peoples at Sungai Asap a visit to see for himself the effects of the Bakun dam project. Only then will he understand the problems faced by indigenous peoples in East and West Malaysia, problems that handicrafts and agritourism alone cannot solve.
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