In what is seen in some quarters as trying to hint indirectly his thinking o­n the leadership struggle issue in the party, Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS) president Leo Moggie has said that PBDS should remain Dayak-based.

"In Malaysia, it is acceptable for all the ethnic groups to have their own parties to foster unity in diversity via the Barisan Nasional," he was quoted by the Sunday Tribune , a local English daily, as saying o­n Friday when declaring open three PBDS branches -Telang Usan, Tutoh and Apok in Ulu Baram.

Acceptable trend

He added: "In Peninsular Malaysia, we have Umno for the Malays, MIC for the Indians and MCA for the Chinese while in Sarawak it is accepted that SUPP represents the Chinese and PBDS the Dayaks."

"Even though we are opening our doors to our non-Dayak friends, PBDS is still a Dayak-based party."

The statement would seem to indicate that Moggie, who is also Minister of Energy, Communications and Multimedia, is at variance with the view of his information chief Dr James Masing, who has declared himself as candidate for the president's post o­nce Moggie steps down.

Masing, the state minister of social development and urbanisation and leader of his own faction within the party that had declared they are going for broke at the party's next triennial delegates conference (TDC).

Masing, who announced party vice president Sng Chee Hua as his running mate for the deputy president's post, has gone o­n record as saying that the top leadership of the party could still consist of non-Dayaks "as long as they are capable."

Memory lane

At a PBDS dinner o­n Saturday in Marudi, where the party held its supreme council meeting earlier in the afternoon, Moggie, according to the Sarawak Tribune , "urged party members to go down memory lane o­n why PBDS was formed and why it joined the Barisan Nasional."

PBDS was a breakaway group from the now-defunct Sarwak National Party (Snap) in the early 1980s after Moggie and his group refused to accept James Wong Kim Min as the new president of Snap in a bitter contest.

In an interview with The Sunday Tribune , Moggie said the Dayaks were still far behind other communities and that a lot still needed to be done by themselves.

Moggie together with Bernard Dompok, the Minister in the Prime Minister's Department and Sabah's Upko leader, were the main force behind getting a Federal Government-endorsed seminar in Kuala Lumpur in April last year focusing o­n the present economic status of the Dayak and Kadazdusun communities.

As an off-shoot of that seminar, well attended by intellectuals, academicians and politicians from both communities, a Sarawak Dayak Chamber of Commerce has been formed with Leonard Linggi Jugah, o­ne of Malaysia's most successful Iban businessmen and enterpreneurs, as its first president.

The seminar, organised by the Sarawak Dayak Graduates Association, was declared open by Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who promised more support o­n behalf of the Federal Government to improve the economic status of the bumiputra minority groups.