I was at the Malaysian Nature Society HQ today for the Great Green Promotion and I think it was pretty cool. Especially when I found out that one of my branch’s committee members is a fellow Wolverine! Go Blue baby!
I particularly enjoyed “An Inconvenient Truth” since I had been anticipating the documentary since May 2006. The most enlightening documentary however was “Paradise Bus”, produced by a Malaysian named Chi Too. It’s about how a community of aborigines in Papua New Guinea handles the devastation brought upon them by illegal logging activities. Within the documentary itself, a segment on Kiunga-Aiambak road project caught my attention.
Kiunga is located in the mid-western area of Papua New Guinea. It’s the red dot; the blue dot is Aiambak:
This map is taken from Google Maps. The exact location of Kiunga could be seen at Welt-Atlas.de. Barcelona Field Study Center might have a more accurate representation of the location of the road project on map. For the location of Aiambak, a map is accessible here; taken from the University of Taxes Libraries. Public domain.
At first, the aborigines thought the project was an innocent road project crossing their land. After all, it was presented to them by the government and a firm called Concord Pacific — a subsidiary of Samling group of companies which during that time was controlled by Malaysian Yaw Teck Seng — as a road project. The aborigines soon realize that the project is a proxy for logging activities. The road — earth road by the way — wasn’t designed to be straight. Instead, it was planned to be curvy from the start so the road would pass through areas with the best and the most timbers. Suffice to say, the whole project was a big fat lie perpetrated by Samling.
A person interviewed in the documentary, Galeva Sep, reserved some harsh comments for Malaysian logging companies operating in Papua New Guinea. He said that the companies, Rimbunan Hijau in particular, have corrupted the government of Papua New Guinea from the top to the bottom. His allegation is hard to ignore since reports as such one published in The Age, are common:
The Government’s review team is ringing alarm bells after visiting earlier this year, suggesting Rimbunan Hijau has transformed a local police taskforce into a private army to suppress opponents. The police must be immediately replaced by “trustworthy” officers “so that the Government of PNG regains control of law and order”, its report states.
If it means anything at all, the current chairman of Rimbunan Hijau, Hiew King Tiong has nearly 45% equity stake in Nanyang Press. He bought 20% stake back in October this year from MCA. In the same The Age article:
The multinational company has a net worth of nearly $2 billion and sits at the apex of political influence in PNG, branching out into restaurants, supermarkets, even one of the nation’s two daily newspapers.
Talking about the companies, you could read more about them here, though information there might be outdated.
The aborigines along with Greenpeace worked hard enough to fight off the Malaysian company. In July 2003, the company managing the Kiunga-Aiambak road project was served an injuction:
LMROA filed an injunction against Concord Pacific in July 2003, with the help of Celcor, an NGO which provides legal support to landowners. At the same time Association members protested by boarding the last barge to transport the illegally logged timber from the region.
The injuction stopped the whole operation, and earnings from the log sales were put into a national court trust account — a total of three shipments of logs worth about 1.7 million kina. That money is still there now.
If you are interested in watching the documentary, the Malaysian Nature Society will be screening it again for free on January 28 2007.
