We park the car along the side of a rutted dirt road in the middle of an acacia tree plantation five times as large as Singapore. Lani anak Taneh points out a metal sign, the size of a paperback book, pounded into the ground at ankle height, which announces that the land we are about to enter belongs to his longhouse, Rumah Nor.

We start walking through a desolate landscape that is all too common in Sarawak  what once had been rainforest owned by a local community has been grabbed by government-supported big business and destroyed in the name of development.

Rumah Nor, some 60km southeast of Bintulu, site of the worlds largest natural gas complex, is ground zero in a land-rights battle in which Sarawaks indigenous people are fighting, and winning, against powerful government and industrial powers that previously had been considered invincible.

Lani, 33, was one of four plaintiffs in a legal battle that one conservationist has called a major victory for the indigenous tribal people of Borneo  as important as the 1954 anti-segregation decision Brown vs Board of Education was in the United States.

Lanis Iban tribal longhouse community of some 70 families successfully sued to regain 672 hectares of land that the court decided had been illegally acquired by Borneo Pulp and Paper (BPP) and the Sarawak state government.

The Rumah Nor case resembled a David vs Goliath battle. BPP is owned by two powerful shareholders. New York Stock Exchange-listed Asia Pulp and Paper, the largest pulp and paper company in Asia outside of Japan (corporate slogan: Caring today for a better tomorrow), owns 60 percent of BPP, while the state-owned Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corporation holds the remaining 40 percent and plans to increase its shareholdings to a majority position. JC Fong, the state attorney-general, sits on the BPP board.

This case will open the floodgate to other suits, predicts Baru Bian, Rumah Nors lawyer. Anyone can now sue the government based on this precedent. He estimates there are more than 20 similar cases now pending in Sarawak against companies involved in oil palm, logging, pulp and paper and mining.

Business as usual

Nevertheless, Len T Salleh, acting general manager of Borneo Pulp and Paper, claims that the Rumah Nor case will not have a major impact on their operations. We take it as part and parcel of doing business, Salleh said. We have acquired land based on our normal process and have no plans to change the process. Its business as usual.

Like mad dogs and Englishmen, Lani and I walk on dirt tracks under the mid-day sun. When the forest was cleared the thin layer of topsoil washed away, leaving sand and clay that eroded into curious cream-coloured spires. We walk for an hour, with no protection from the equatorial sun. This is our pulau menoa , our rainforest, Lani explains, gesturing to the barren landscape. This is what we won back.

I first lived in Sarawak in 1969, when it was largely covered in forests and people travelled to isolated longhouses by boat.

Today, logging roads criss-cross much of the state, making it all too easy to see that much of the natural forest  up to 70 percent according to one observer  has been destroyed or damaged.

When I meet Sarawak government officials to ask about the situation they bridle at outside criticism, and argue that the timber business brings in needed revenue and that development will benefit local people.

Lani counters, We are not against progress, only against injustice.

Government officials tell me that the United States built its wealth by using its natural resources, so why shouldnt they do the same? They point out, to my chagrin, that my (US) president is actively expanding this policy of economics above environment.

How else can we get money?

A few years ago I asked James Wong, at that time the state minister of tourism and local government and simultaneously one of the states biggest timber tycoons, why the state encouraged rainforest exploitation. Where else can we get money for schools and hospitals and transport if not from the forest? he asked. He did not add that granting timber concessions is a lucrative process for politicians, concessionaires and contractors.

Like many Malaysian authorities, James Wong was testy about outside critiques, with some justification.

If the West can do as well as we have done and enjoy life as much as we do then they can criticise us. We run a model nation. We have 25 races and many different religions living side by side without killing each other. Compare that with Bosnia or Ireland. Weve achieved a form of Nirvana, a utopia.

Nevertheless, some people are unhappy enough in this equatorial utopia to blockade timber operations and sue the government. Which I suppose is a healthier alternative to killing each other.

Sidi Munan, an Iban who is on the supreme council of the Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak and former deputy chairperson of the Sarawak Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority, says thankfully up to now we have been free of the kind of hatred that we see in neighbouring Indonesian Kalimantan, referring to the rampage of beheadings that took place earlier this year across the border.

Fight over land

On the surface those 500 gruesome murders in Indonesia appeared ethnically-based. Beneath the race issue, however, was the fact that indigenous Dayaks were fed up with arrogant Madurese immigrants coming in and taking away their land. The core of the fight was over who owns the land.

How ugly was this conflict? A friend sent a horrifying photo of one of the victims  an Asian girl, maybe six years old, lying on the ground, her arms splayed at impossible angles. Her dress is hiked up and her head is tilted from her body, like a broken puppets. On closer examination you can see that her head has been sliced off, and not too carefully placed near her neck.

John Walker, a lecturer in politics at University College, the Australian Defence Force Academy, says, Far from having its origins in ethnicity, the present killings in Central Kalimantan, like those in Western Kalimantan in 1998-99, reflect deep conflict over natural resources.

In the current scenario, the Indonesian government encouraged farmers from the over-populated islands of Java, Bali and Madura to transmigrate to lesser-populated outer islands, such as Borneo and New Guinea. The new settlers  there were some 100,000 Madurese in Kalimantan at the time of the massacres; many have since left or been evacuated  were encouraged to cut down the forests and make farms.

Businessmen and military leaders from Java, encouraged by government policies and a laissez faire attitude towards the environment, denuded the rainforest for timber and to make way for oil palm plantations.

The hitch was that the forests traditionally belonged to local people such as the Dayaks who lived, to varying degrees, in some kind of harmony with nature. But as John Walker adds, Indonesia does not guarantee indigenous peoples rights over land. The Dayaks were left disenfranchised and land-poor.

Michael Dove, a professor at Yale University, adds, For three decades, the indigenous Dayak have seen their natural resource base steadily eroded. Vast amounts of Dayak lands and forests have been destroyed or appropriated for logging concessions, rubber and oil-palm plantations, pulp plantations and transmigration sites.

Riska Orpa Sari, an Indonesian Dayak woman who wrote Riska: Memories of a Dayak Girlhood , says the current conflict is based on control of the forests. For centuries, our needs and rights have been denied by the government, she says.

So, betrayed and exploited, the anger exploded, she adds. Being used, neglected and ignored left our people bitter. Vengeance emerged. The need to defend our land has come to the surface, the need to take our land and natural world back.

I thought of Euripides statement that there is no greater sadness on earth than the loss of ones native land, and how easily sadness can evolve into fury.

Native customary rights

The Rumah Nor case was important for several reasons.

According to Baru Bian, Weve challenged Section 5 of the Land Code, which says that native Customary Rights can be extinguished at any time.

Sarawak High Court Judge Ian Chin, perhaps recognising the historical importance of his decision, took pains in his 96-page verdict to document the history of native customary land rights, ruling that indigenous land rights were in existence before any external power controlled Sarawak, and therefore such rights were natural rights and not dependent for its existence on any legislation, executive or judicial declaration.

Another key point is that in his decision Justice Chin significantly expanded the interpretation of ownership of traditional land to include not only land that is cultivated but also land that is left intact.

One of the most important aspects of the case, according to Baru Bian, is that Justice Ian Chin recognised the importance of virgin rainforest.

Prior to the ruling, recent laws had steadily reduced the definition of native customary lands, until only farmlands in permanent cultivation by forest-dependent communities were protected. Other non-productive lands, such as forests, rivers, burial sites, tree plantations and swidden farmland, became de facto property of the state.

To the surprise of observers, the judge ruled against current practices and said that in future cases tree data would need to be collected and inquiries into land claims conducted before any logging could proceed on tribal land. If local communities were shown to have land rights, these communities would have to be properly compensated for any appropriated land, and the compensation must take into account not only current land values, but the value of the land for future generations.

The forest in question is a Pulau Menoa, literally a community life reserve  a rainforest that is left untouched so it can provide hunting food, materials for shelter.

Peter Kedit, an Iban who was curator of the acclaimed Sarawak Museum, describes a Pulau Menoa as land bank, hardware store, nature reserve.

New vs old system

Kedit sees the Rumah Nor case as a clash pitting an old system that values land as a reserve bank that is essential for survival, against outsiders in a new system who view land as a surplus that provides monetary return.

He suggests that one way to safeguard the interests of native customary land owners and prevent clashes of the two value systems would be to codify NCR (native customary land) through the use of modern surveying methods, such as GPS, that would transfer the mental map of the NCR owners into a modern mapping system.

The Rumah Nor legal case was won partly on just such a mapping of the communitys traditional lands.

Like many courtroom dramas, the Rumah Nor case hinged on a single witness, in this case Samy Ising, an indigenous mapper originally trained in cartography by the Borneo Project, a California-based non-profit organisation providing mapping training and equipment to Sarawak community groups since 1995.

Borneo Pulp and Papers lawyers aggressively attacked the legitimacy and accuracy of Isings map. Ultimately, Judge Chin accepted the accuracy of Isings work and gave legal guidelines that pave the way for the acceptance of community-based maps in future court cases.

Part II

will appear tomorrow.

PAUL SPENCER SOCHACZEWSKI lived in Sarawak from 1969-1971 and returns regularly. His latest novel, Redheads , is set in Borneo and deals with tribal uprisings against timber operators, corrupt government officials, fraudulent scientists and schizophrenic orangutans . This special report written for the Borneo Project was originally published on April 17 under the title Rumah Nor, Sarawak, Malaysia.