KUCHING: Orang Asal leaders in Sarawak are urging Adelaide University to pay back AUD400,000 in donations received between 1987 and 2006 from Taib Mahmud, the former Chief Minister who is now Governor. Taib studied law in Adelaide in the late 1950s.
In a letter to Vice-Chancellor Warren Bebbington, eleven Penan headmen have demanded that the Taib donation be returned to Sarawak as they had allegedly been illegally acquired by him. Taib’s donations to Adelaide University had been disclosed in November under a Freedom of Information request by South Australian Greens MP Mark Parnell.
The letter was signed by the community leaders with their thumbprints, according to the Bruno Manser Fund (BMF).
The Penan demanded that Vice-Chancellor Bebbington “take a courageous decision” and restitute the Taib funds in order to correct injustices done by the former Sarawak Chief Minister: “We need this money urgently to develop the Penan Peace Park and send our children to school and for higher education. For you, AUD400,000 is not much, but for the Penan this is a lot of money which can help change our young generation’s lives.”
The Penan have been struggling to protect their rainforests against logging for close to thirty years. The “Penan Peace Park” is their latest plan for a community-administered forest reserve.
“When Taib studied law in Adelaide as a young man, he was as poor as we are today,” said the letter signed first by former Penan Penghulu James Lalo Keso.
“Our lives were good and self-sustaining until Taib gave our land away to the logging and plantation companies without our consent.”
The Penan were Borneo’s last nomadic hunter-gatherers until most of their rainforests were allegedly destroyed by the Taib government since the mid-1980s. - Free Malaysia Today
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