By Baradan Kuppusamy
Kuala Lumpur, Sep 26 2005 (IPS)

One hot August day in 1996, several smartly dressed men, escorted by police, walked into Bukit Tampoi village about 80 km south of the capital and told Tukas Anak Siam that he and other Temuan tribesmen must vacate some 38 hectares of forest land because it was needed for a road link to the new international airport.

But unlike other cases dispossession, the Temuans, helped by human rights lawyers, fought back. A marginalised people, often derided for their seeming backwardness, the sudden defiance of the Temuans action took officialdom by surprise.

Last week, their long nightmare of dispossession ended with a landmark court ruling which gave legal recognition to the customary land rights of the Temuans and, in the process, extending hope to other forgotten aboriginal groups.

A superior Court of Appeal ordered a developer, the Malaysian government and a government agency to pay substantial compensation for trespassing into Temuan land.

About 350 ‘Orang Asli’ (aborigines) who held vigil outside the courthouse cheered the victory.

”The judgment allows us to preserve our heritage because land is very important to us as our lives depend on it. We cannot even die properly without it,” Tukas Anak Siam told IPS.

”The ruling marks a turning point in the history of Malaysia’s tribal people,” said human rights activists and opposition politician, S. Jeyakumar.

Now numbering less than 150,000, they have suffered immensely, losing land, culture, tradition and even their lives to the juggernaut of development before which their ancient homeland in the rainforests of Malaysia were just obstacles to be rolled over.

”It is a wake up call for the government that indigenous people have customary rights over ancestral land-it is a major victory,” said Colin Nicholas, a longtime champion of the rights of the indigenous people who manages the Centre for Orang Asli Concerns, a non-government organisation (NGO) dedicated to helping indigenous peoples.

Human rights lawyers say the victory gives the long-neglected ‘Orang Asli’ or Original People as the indigenous people here are known, a firm control over their ancestral land, its usage and development and thereby preserve their unique culture and way of life that largely depends on leaving their forest undisturbed.

”The state cannot brush them aside as it has thus far doneàor patronise them and turn forest people into factory workers living in great poverty and confusion in long forgotten disease-ridden shanty towns,” a sympathetic lawyer said. ”Government policies have transformed the once rich and free Orang Asli into urban poor dependent on handouts”.

The court held that the Temuan tribesmen were the customary owners of the land and that the government had seized it without notice or compensation.

In a strongly worded ruling, judge Gopal admonished the government for failing to protect the rights and livelihood of indigenous people.

”Here you have a case where the very authority- the state- that is enjoined by the law to protect the aborigines turned upon them and permitted them to be treated in a most shoddy, cruel and oppressive manner. It is my earnest hope that an episode such as this will never be repeated,” he said.

Gopal said that exemplary damages were appropriate due to the highhanded tactics used to evict the Temuan people.

”In summary, what was done to forcibly demolish their houses and meeting hallsàand unceremoniously asked to go and fend for themselves in unkind weather… I am satisfied that this is a proper case to award exemplary damages, Gopal said.

The Orang Asli occupy about 500,000 hectares of land in Peninsular Malaysia but, until now, the tribe was not recognised as lawful owners.

Malaysian land law, much of it of British colonialist origin, assigns to the states all land that is not held by registered deeds making Orang Asli ‘squatters’ on their ancient stomping grounds.

Lawyers say after this court ruling the Orang Asli can no longer be evicted at will, that proper procedure has to be followed when acquiring tribal customary land for development and substantial compensation paid when their land is acquired for development projects. The tribes can now reject development proposals.

Most importantly, the ruling establishes that peninsular Malaysia’s aboriginal tribes are not tenants on their customary land but owners vested with land rights.

Presently, the Orang Asli Act of 1954 governs the affairs of the indigenous community but this has been rejected as ”patronising and colonial era legislation”.

A Department of Orang Asli Affairs looks after the welfare of the Orang Asli, most of whom descended from ‘Hoabinhians’ or stone-age people who are estimated to have occupied the peninsula more than 12,000 years ago.

Now little more than an anthropological curiosity, the Orang Asli comprise at least 19 culturally and linguistically distinct groups, the largest of which are the Semai, Temiar, Jakun and Temuan tribes.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Orang Asli became victims of the international slave trade and by the time this was stopped in 1883 by the British colonial government in the peninsula, their numbers had been seriously decimated.

Together, the tribes make up less than one percent of Malaysia’s population of 23 million people and have little clout in a land where ethnic Malays who form 51 percent of the population are fighting for economic and political dominance over Chiese and Indian settlers.

Despite three decades of steady economic growth, that saw the country transform into an economic miracle, the Orang Asli remain marginalised and impoverished in Malaysian society.

As the Malays and immigrant Chinese settled in the coastal plains and the fertile river valleys, the Orang Asli once were pushed back into the forests living as hunter-gatherers or engaging in swidden farming while all around them grew modern towns, swanky cities and highways, in the construction of which some found work as cheap labour.

A 1993 census showed 80.8 percent of the Orang Asli living in abject poverty, with close to 50 percent of them ranking officially as ‘rakyat miskin’ or the poorest-of-the-poor in the country.

Poverty, high incidence of infectious diseases, malnutrition and, lately, rising alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction and HIV infection have proved to be the bane of this small and scattered community of hunters and gatherers.

Social scientists link these acquired woes directly to the loss of lands due to logging, plantation activities, highways, and creation of new townships.

”This encroachment onto their lands and the resulting impoverishment of the community, has forced many younger adults to come to the towns and join the bottom rungs of the urban work force with the unfortunate corollary that quite a few Orang Asli women have become commercial sex workers,” Jeyakumar observed.

These changes have disrupted the traditional lifestyle and value-systems of the Orang Asli in a very profound way. One result is the subversion of their traditional leaders (headman), who is bought over by logging companies, township developers and politicians with gifts or money.

The subversion has adversely affected social cohesion among the Orang Asli communities, leading to social ills like alcoholism and violence in a pattern common to aboriginal populations across the Asia Pacific region.

Social scientists say their progressive marginalisation and their inability to find a place in Malaysia’s free-market, socio-economic system is at the root of continuing Orang Asli malaise.

”The Orang Asli urgently needs development help that puts their needs as a major priority and at a pace that does not tear their socio-cultural system apart,” Jeyakumar said.

The Orang Asli and their supporters believe that last week’s court victory will finally put the brakes on their relentless slide down the socio-economic ladder since before colonial times.

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