There is little oversight in these matters in Sarawak. The WTK group was accused of illegal logging in the Amazon, and the Ta Ann group has been criticized for logging old-growth temperate rainforests in Tasmania. The second largest logging company, Rimbunan Hijua, has repeatedly been accused of violating human rights and abusing indigenous people. It has been accused of illegal logging and environmental destruction throughout Southeast Asia, in the Amazon, and the Pacific. Owning 1.3 million acres, Samling is the largest timber company in the Sarawak. Research assistant at the Economic Geography Group at the University of Bern in Switzerland, Faeh is the author of Bruno Manser Funds’ report. “ track records of diversification and internationalization, however, go hand in hand with the violation of human rights, political patronage and the destruction of the environment in their home country and many other parts of the world,” writes Daniel Faeh in the report. Over the past three decades the logging operations have grown exponentially, expanding timber operations worldwide and spreading into such non-related areas as the media and construction. While the 1980s saw some of Borneo’s richest forests fall, it also saw the rise of a number of Sarawak logging companies including Samling, Rimbunan Hijau, WTK, KTS, Shin Yang and Ta Ann. Eight percent of the remaining forests are protected in parks, but these protected areas are chronically threatened by illegal logging and even government concessions. With government approval, rampant logging began in the 1980s and has continued to present day, transforming Sarawak’s once verdant forests into a shadow of their former selves-environmentalists estimate less than 10 percent of the state’s primary forests remain. Most recently, the report describes in great detail how the tropical timber trade in Sarawak has undercut indigenous groups while toppling some of the world’s greatest rainforests, all at the expense of the Sarawak people. Chief Minister Taib and his decades-long administration are no strangers to such allegations, but a new report from the indigenous-rights group Bruno Manser Fund (BMF)-amid criticism from independent media sources, such as Sarawak Report and Radio Free Sarawak-are adding fuel to the fire. Environmentalists are using the occasion, along with new revelations, to highlight corruption and nepotism they say have characterized his regime. Photo courtesy of Google Earth.Īt the end of this month it will be 30 years since Abdul Taib Mahmud came to power in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. It is an urgent account of the reality of globalisation – and the astonishing story of how one person made a difference.Logging roads criss-cross Sarawak’s forests. Sweeping in scope, The Sarawak Report provides a jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes narrative of Malaysia’s recent turbulent political struggles, revealing, as never before, how government-funded cyber-warfare and fake news operate, and, in an era of threadbare mainstream media, demonstrating that epoch-changing investigative journalism is still possible. The US government made its largest ever kleptocracy asset seizure, while banks and bankers fell. Her reporting – exposing the shady dealings of international politicians, finance powerhouses, prominent PR firms, and Hollywood glitterati – convulsed Malaysian politics and reverberated around the world. To nail down absolute proof, Rewcastle Brown criss-crossed the globe and, defying danger, pieced together the evidence of the 1MDB scandal – the theft of billions from the country’s sovereign wealth fund. She was soon running a radio station too. Determined that the public should know the truth, she started a blog, which became Malaysia's go-to news outlet for information that the government was trying to suppress – and whistleblowers wanted to get out. Investigating the deforestation of Sarawak, Borneo, and the dispossession of its people, journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown followed a trail of corruption that led her to the heart of Malaysian politics and to Prime Minister Najib Razak himself. The Sarawak Report is the stranger-than-fiction tale of how one woman uncovered the world’s biggest theft which, in 2018, brought down the Malaysian government.
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