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

• Main Author: Colchester, Marcus (Author)
• Corporate Authors: Survival International, Institut Analisa Sosial (Malaysia)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: London, UK Institute of Social Analysis 1989
• Series: Survival International documents new ser., 7th
• Subjects: Forest ecology > Sarawak > Malaysia; Human ecology > Malaysia > Sarawak; Indigenous peoples > Malaysia > Sarawak; Land tenure > Malaysia > Sarawak; Logging > Malaysia > Sarawak; Sarawak > Politics and government
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.

 The forests of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, are today the scene of a bitter. struggle between native peoples struggling 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. But, as this study from Survival International 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 tradi tional 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! Today, twenty-five years after Sarawak received its independence, the native peoples remain the victims of an international political economy that is under mining their very existence.