by Dr Colin Nicholos
The article titled “20,000ha gazetted for Orang Asli reserve” (New Sunday Times 21.9.2008) and the accompanying features appear as if the Department of Orang Asli Affairs is going on a PR campaign to promote itself as the godfather of the Orang Asli (something at least one previous Director-General has been fond of claiming).
I can understand why it has to. The Department has come under fire not just from the Orang Asli themselves but from some government agencies as well who feel frustrated by the obstacles placed by the JHEOA in their genuine efforts to help the Orang Asli. I can personally attest to this.
But it is one thing to blow your own trumpet and quite another if in doing so you mislead the public.
For example, the Department proudly proclaims that “almost 20,000ha of land – twice the size of Kuala Lumpur International Airport and the vast land surrounding it – had been gazetted as Orang Asli reserve in Peninsular Malaysia”.
The truth is, a decade ago there was an additional 1,062 hectares of Orang Asli reserve which today has been lost to the Orang Asli.
In fact, KLIA was the homeland of two Temuan settlements that had to unwillingly make way for the airport and be resettled in a swampland 40 km away.
The Department also boasts that 31,000 hectares of land had been approved for gazetting but have yet to be formally gazetted by the states. The truth is: much of these approvals were done in the 1960s and 1970s. Decades have passed and the simple paperwork of putting out a gazette notice was not done in al these cases. As a result, due to the insecurity placed on their lands over time, the Orang Asli have lost 6,932 hectares of their traditional lands to others, often without them knowing it, let alone being consulted.
This has prompted one Court of Appeal judge in the landmark Sagong Tasi land rights case to chastise the JHEOA for making the Orang Asli victims of the Department’s negligence in not gazetting or under-gazetting Orang Asli lands.
It is also easy for the JHEOA to lay the blame for such non-action on the premise that it is federal agency while land is a state matter. If Felda, also a federal agency, succumbed to such defensive justification, the many thousands of Felda settlers would not be land-owners or even millionaires today. Why the double standards?
The JHEOA admits that poverty and hardcore poverty remain a sad situation for the Orang Asli. That a people who make up only 0.6 per of the national population should account for 20 per cent of the nation’s hardcore poor (and 46 percent of the nation’s poor), is not something anybody should be proud of. Especially for a department that has been directed by law to be responsible for the “protection, wellbeing, and advancement” of the Orang Asli, and which has been endowed with generous government funds for this purpose for the last five decades.
Yet, the basic structures that keep Orang Asli families in poverty are still in place. A case in point is the agricultural development programmes that the JHEOA touts about as a success story.
RM30 million in dividends for 2008 may sound like a lot of money. But when divided by 10,000 households, and into monthly payments, it works out to only RM500.00 per month – not enough to keep the household above the official poverty line.
But should it be so? Orang Asli who manage and sell their oil palm or rubber on their own smallholdings have been raking between RM2000 to RM3000 per month during the same period.
It is no wonder then that several Orang Asli communities have asked for these JHEOA-manoeuvred ‘agricultural development projects’ to be given back to them to manage on their own. They can see for themselves the rotten deal they are getting.
But they face uncompromising resistance from the so-called management agencies who prefer to keep the we-do-everything-for-you-for-a-fat-fee concept. The Jakun community in Bekok have been forced to take this matter to court to assert their right to work their own fields. Others, as in Betau and Buluh Nipis in Pahang, have been detained by the police, for wanting to assert their agricultural independence.
It is clear that the top brass in the JHEOA are unable to see this fundamental flaw in the development programme of the Orang Asli. And as to why many Orang Asli still live in poverty when they should not.
It is also easy to see why certain officers at the local level do not want to do away with this scheme, and why it remains a favoured programme of the JHEOA.
So, in light of the above, it is no wonder then that many Orang Asli have become more conscious of their situation and have begun to assert their right to land and economic justice.
To accuse them of being easily influenced by outsiders who harbour certain agenda or by international-linked NGOs who aspire to become heroes and champions of human rights, not only reflects the Department’s ignorance of the Orang Asli situation today but also reveals a closed mind incapable of seeing viewpoints other than the official propaganda.
The Orang Asli and natives of Sabah and Sarawak (collectively referred to as the Orang Asal) are no longer the timid natives roaming around in loin-cloths in the forest, waiting for handouts from the government.
They have participated actively in national and international fora and have made their demands clear. Orang Asal leaders have also been active in international standard-setting deliberations such as the UN Convention of Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as in several regional initiatives on a host of issues involving indigenous peoples. Many of these interventions are available in published documents.
In fact, Jannie Lasimbang, an Orang Asal from Sabah is one of the 5 experts sitting on the Geneva-based Expert Mechanism on Indigenous Peoples Rights established under the UN Human Rights Council.
So perhaps the JHEOA should take a cue from the Orang Asal and go international. Then it would know that after 24 years of debate, discussion and consensus among indigenous peoples in the world, the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was finally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 13 September 2007. Malaysia is a signatory to this convention.
The articles of the Declaration – which speak of self-determination, recognition of land rights, and the need to get free, prior and informed consent before any activity involving indigenous peoples – is now international customary law, which the government is obliged to follow.
International customary law also recognizes native title i.e. the right of the Orang Asli to own their traditional lands which they hold by custom. Our courts have also recognised native title based on common law.
Thus, for the Director-General to brush aside native customary rights as being the prerogative of the Borneon states only, frightens me into thinking that more and more Orang Asli lands are going to be lost due to fiduciary neglect resulting from an uninformed perception of the Orang Asli land issue.
It is time for the JHEOA to raise its awareness to the level of the Orang Asli and to work towards justice.
Colin Nicholas
Coordinator
Center for Orang Asli Concerns
Mobile: 013-3508058
http://www.coac.org.my/
Sept 20, 2008
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