The Borneo Project and the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association is campaigning to save the longhouses, farmlands, and protected forest of an Iban Dayak community of Rumah Nyawin, bordering the Similajau Forest Reserve, Bintulu,
Sarawak, Malaysia. This 11-door longhouse of 120 people has occupiedan area of 333 hectares for the past twenty years, practicing their traditional culture, farming, hunting, fishing and gathering forest products.
According to interviews with community representatives, they have a strong case to prevent eviction anddestruction of their lands. They are now working with Native Customary Rights lawyers to bring the Land and Survey Department to court.
But time is running out, and the community is extremely anxious that they will face the guns, bulldozers and chainsaws of the police and military in less than two weeks time. They are prepared to go to jail, but they are not prepared to lose their homes, their crops, orchards, and protected forest.
The longhouse community is calling on all allies to make their voices heard now. We may yet be able to help spare their lands, which are also home to a great diversity of lowland rainforest wildlife, including hornbills, macaques, bears, pangolin, tortoise, civets, flying squirells, flying lemurs, mouse deer, wild boar, fishingeagles, owls and other living creatures.
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susan,
how can we help?
please advise.
can i add cut and paste this onto my blog (i will credit it back to you) so that more people will know?
It’s so sad to see greed in the disguise of development.
Why can’t the authoritise develop land elsewhere.
It’s abuse and exploitation of power.
I guess when the colonial powers left, we created our own.
Can’t these natives be left to pursue their way of life and culture?
We should be ashame of ourselves.
We are trying so hard to be modern yet we are so uncivilised when comes to culture as we are prepared to destroyed others to achieve modernisation .
Good photos…