by Piyaporn Hawiset
16-JUN-99
Many of his neighbors have been moved out, and hundreds more families living near the Balui River area here in Eastern Sarawak province are scheduled for resettlement in June, July and August 1999. But 70-year-old Batok Bagi says he would stay put in the house his family has had for generations in the village of Batu Kalo, despite a local government directive that the area must be emptied of people by August.
Work on the Bakun Dam project, located at the Balui River site, is apparently about to pick up again after a prolonged lull. Yet even during the project slowdown, Sarawak authorities had already begun implementing "Operation Exodus" to resettle the estimated 10,000 residents of the area in July and August.
Bagi himself has been to the resettlement site chosen by the local officials in Asap, five hours from his home in Batu Kalo, and even lived in one of the new houses provided them there. But he elected to return to his old home and insisted he would stay there, no matter what.
"It is so small and has already started to rot," Bagi says of his family's longhouse at the Asap resettlement area, when talking to activists in May 1999. "We also cannot stand the smell there especially when it rains."
Activists, in fact, had been asking why Sarawak officials were still pushing through with the wholesale resettlement of the residents at the Bakun Dam site. After all, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had announced that the project's power generating capacity would be downscaled from 2,400 megawatts to some 500 megawatts. The reality the downscaling is just smoke and mirrors to appease international activists and environmentalists.
The original capacity -- aimed at making Bakun South-east Asia's biggest dam -- would have required the flooding of some 70,000 hectares of forests and cultivated fields, leading to the displacement of all the area's residents.
"Now that the dam has been downsized," said a statement released June 10 by Dr Kua Kia Soong for the Coalition of Concerned NGOs on Bakun, "why should the same number of people be displaced?"
Activists say local officials seem to be in too much of a rush to empty the area. Said the Coalition statement: "One would have thought that, if the Sarawak government had followed the recommendations of its consultants in the Bakun Hydroelectric Project, the resettlement would have been put off as long as possible, until just before the reservoir is flooded."
So far, work at the dam remains minimal. Kuala Lumpur did say, though, that the dam is scheduled for completion by 2002. In contrast to the sluggish pace at the dam itself, Sarawak officials were whipping up a frenzy in getting Bakun residents resettled. But critics say the breakneck speed had taken a toll in the planning and carrying out of the resettlement process.
The new longhouses, for instance, proved to be too small for the resettlers, who usually have extended families and are used to having homes twice the size of the residences the Sarawak government built for them. The resettlement houses also have no rooms, their toilets and bathrooms have dangerous asbestos sheets, and the wood used for the structures is unfinished. Some resettlers say the stairs of one longhouse gave way when a man with a sack of rice climbed them.
To make matters worse, residents are expected to pay premium prices for these houses. At the height of the public furor over Bakun Dam a few years ago, dam developer Ting Pek Khiing had said the people who would have to move would be given free housing, electricity and water. But that did not happen. Instead, the Sarawak government put a price tag of 52,000 ringgit (about 13,684 U.S. dollars) for each new longhouse, but did not furnish the "buyers" with sale and purchase agreements.
And while the resettlers do not have to make payments on the houses for the next five years, they were expected to begin doing so after that, at 300 ringgit ($79) a month which is usually much more than a family earns. Observers pointed out that a low-cost house in the peninsula would fetch about $6,700. The houses have also yet to be given the required Certificate of Fitness, apparently because their design has been deemed defective.
"The indigenous people are not getting a fair deal," says activist Zaitun Kassim, who was part of a fact-finding team on Bakun organized by NGOs last month. Indeed it is some sort of corrupt racket to profit from their displacement. She worries that the resettlers will not be able to pay for the houses and utilities since "they have been displaced from a subsistence and part-cash economy to a total cash economy".
In their former home, the Bakun people hunted in the forests as well as harvested the wild fruits there for food. They also practiced swidden farming. But Kassim says the new site does not offer anything close to that, and the soil is even infertile. There is one oil palm company in the area, but it has just planted seedlings, and it may take at least five years before the firm needs labour for the harvest work.
The resettlers had also been promised three hectares for every household. But each family has ended up with only 1.2 hectares of land, which can be reached only after a three-hour walk. There are no roads and only four-wheel drives can make the trip to their land.
Says one 82-year-old: "I have not even seen my land as it is so far away."
Kassim says that resettlers had been living off compensation money, by then fast becoming depleted. Most had yet to receive the remaining 70 percent of the amount promised them as crops and displacement allowance. Kassim added that the way some compensation sums were calculated is worrisome. "For example," she says, "a 55-year-old man received a cheque for 0.90 ringgit (23 cents) for his ancestral land." It is obviously worth much, much more than that, but officials were relying on the notion that most of the resettled people were either illiterate, did not understand cheques, or both.
By end-June, the NGO fact-finding mission would submit a report on Bakun to the federal and state governments. Meanwhile, the Sarawak government has been closing down schools and clinics in the Bakun area and cutting off electricity to the communities of Long Jawie, Long Bulan, Batu Keling and Long Geng to get people to move out. Sarawak Chief Minister Taid Mahmud says the government has provided enough facilities for the resettlers.
"We have taken care of their welfare," he explains.