The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen

by Paul Sochaczewski

  “If you don’t want us to cut down our forests, tell your father to tell the rich countries like Britain to pay more for the timber they buy from us….

  “If you are really interested in tropical animals, we have huge National Parks where nobody is allowed to fell trees or kill animals….

  “I hope you will tell the adults who made use of you to learn all the facts. They should not be too arrogant and think they know how best to run a country. They should expel all the people living in the British countryside and allow secondary forests to grow and fill these new forests with wolves and bears etc. so you can study them before studying tropical animals.

  “I believe strongly that children should learn all about animals and love them. But adults should not teach children to be rude to their elders.”

  The other common response is that “we’re resettling the Penan for their own good.”

  I asked Alfred Jabu, an Iban who is deputy chief minister of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, and who is a member of the indigenous Iban tribe, numerically the largest population group in the state, why he was so concerned about changing Penan lifestyles. He answered: “To give them the chance to enjoy the same benefits other Malaysians have.”

  This humorless refrain is repeated whenever you talk to someone involved in resettling their less fortunate (and always more isolated) brethren. “We want to help them enjoy the fruits of our development.”

  A government report admitted that “In trying to bring development to the Penans, the state government realises that the Penans are a simple people and that an overnight change is not possible. Although the government has been generous in providing the Penans with facilities and services, care has also been taken to ensure that the Penans will not be overdependent on the government so that they will not expect handouts all the time…Penans will be trained to stand on their own and learn to face the challenges of modern living like other Malaysians.”

  Alfred Jabu added the final proof that the Penan are happy. “They have a Penan elder as spokesman. He lives in a big house and drives a Mercedes.”

  What might have happened to Manser?

  Perhaps the Malaysian security forces finally caught Manser and left him for compost in the rainforest. That way the authorities would have saved themselves an embarrassingly visible deportation or trial.

  Another possibility, which I hope is the case, is that Manser has gone walkabout and is hanging out with his Penan buddies. Perhaps he got bored with Switzerland, perhaps he felt that he could do more for their cause by advising them close up. Perhaps he is planning a large media coup.

  But Newsweek has reported that four Penan-led search parties have not turned up any traces of Manser, and John Kuenzli, secretary of the Bruno Manser Foundation, says, “We are resigned that if Bruno Manser were still alive, he would have been found.” Perhaps Bruno’s fate is destined to become an unsolved Asian mystery, like the 1967 disappearance of Thai silk entrepreneur Jim Thompson in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands or Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance in the Asmat region of New Guinea.

  And what will happen to the approximately 9,000 Penan, of whom about 300 are jungle wanderers?

  Certainly change is inevitable for the Penan and the thousands of other, generally more sophisticated, indigenous people of Sarawak.

  Who has the blueprint for that change?

  Several years ago I consulted Dato James Wong Kim Min. In a juggling act of heroic proportions, he was concurrently a state minister and one of Sarawak’s biggest timber tycoons, a combination that might befuddle a lesser man.

  James Wong loved to talk with foreigners about the Penan, whom the foreign press idealized as a group of innocent, down-trodden, blowpipe wielding, loin-clothed people who are wise in the ways of the forest but hopelessly naive when faced with modern Malaysian politics.

  “I met with Bruno’s Penans in the upper Limbang [River],” he said. “I asked the Penan who will help you if you’re sick? Bruno?” Here Wong laughed. “The Penans now realize they’ve been exploited. I tell them the government is there to help them. But I ask them how can I see you if you’ve blocked the road that I’ve built for you?”

  On a scale of wealth, James Wong is on a scale similar perhaps to a Borneo version of Donald Trump. But he has a sensitive side, plus a defensive fiestiness common to many Asian politicians and businessmen. “We are very unfairly criticized by the west,” Wong added. “As early as 1980 I was concerned about the future of the Penans.” He read me a poem he had written:

  “O Penan - Jungle wanderers of the Tree

  What would the future hold for thee?….

  Perhaps to us you may appear deprived and poor

  But can Civilization offer anything better?….

  And yet could Society in good conscience

  View your plight with detached indifference

  Especially now we are an independent Nation

  Yet not lift a helping hand to our fellow brethren?

  Instead allow him to subsist in Blowpipes and clothed in

  Chawats [loincloths]

  An anthropological curiosity of Nature and Art?

  Alas, ultimately your fate is your own decision

  Remain as you are - or cross the Rubicon!”

  Has Manser been successful?

  From a public awareness point of view he has certainly directed considerable media attention to the plight of the Penan and other tribal groups.

  But he failed at his major objective: getting the Malaysian government to declare a biosphere reserve to protect the Penan and their forest. In an article in the newsletter of the Bruno Manser Foundation, the activist admitted, “success in Sarawak is less than zero.”

  Chris Elliott, the WWF executive who met Manser several times, agrees that the future isn’t bright for the Penan and their forest home. “There is severe pressure from unsustainable logging, forest fires and conversion to plantations,” he says.

  Manser had a cautious relationship with the conservation mainstream. No doubt he felt that groups like WWF were too soft.

  “We differ on the means,” Elliott says. “WWF tried to work in partnership with the government and had some success – a few protected areas were established, there was training of staff, and new wildlife legislation was created. But neither Bruno nor WWF succeeded in getting the authorities to create a biosphere reserve,” Elliott notes, adding that WWF now has little activity in Sarawak.

  Nevertheless, history isn’t written by people who follow the rules. Manser sensed a major injustice and challenged the status quo in which his friends the Penan were paternalistically treated as the bottom of the Sarawak social totem pole.

  So, how will the Swiss be judged by history? As an obstinate fighter for a lost cause or a romantic visionary for a victorious change in policy?

  What motivated this man from rich Switzerland to live six years in the forest of Borneo with virtually nothing that most people would consider essential? He learned to process food from the starchy sago palm, learned to hunt with a blowpipe, learned how to live a life that was simultaneously ridiculously hard and unimaginably rewarding.

  Manser wrote of his epiphany: “It happened in a prison in Lucerne. I was imprisoned there for three months because I had refused to learn how to shoot at human beings. One day I suddenly perceived the space inside the four walls of my cell…how my body acted as a biosphere…to be so small and yet so incredibly rich and important…I flew out of the prison, over to my parents in Basel, to my friends in Amsterdam…I flew on and left our solar system. Then I turned around and flew back. There I sat, back in my body. Since then I carry this certainty in me: everyone of us is nothing and simultaneously the most important creature in its space and place. Indispensable from the first to the last breath. So when people say: ‘don’t be active, it’s just a waste of time, it won’t help anyway’, then you already know that they’re scared of losing profit and would even sell their own grandmother. Does it have to be the children today who dare sa
y out loud to the politicians and the economists: support what is real and true, avoid what is bad!”

  Chapter 2

  SPIRITUAL LEADERS HELP TO RE-GREEN KRISHNA’S BIRTHPLACE

  Sadhus combine religion and pragmatism

  VRINDAVAN, India

  When I visited Vrindavan in north India, birthplace of Lord Krishna and site of a city-wide re-greening effort, I was asked if I wanted to plant a tree. I arrived at the designated site and found that the hole had already been dug. For me, digging my own hole and getting dirty is part of the ritual, a point I politely explained as I took up the spade.

  I was reminded of the observations of Richard St. Barbe Baker, who led a movement he called Men of the Trees. “Planting a tree is a symbol of a looking-forward kind of action;” he said, “looking forward, yet not too distantly.”

  Vrindavan clearly needs quick environmental action. During the 1960s Vrindavan was among the cleanest towns in India, with streets washed twice a day and clean water available to all. Today, during the monsoon season, cholera threatens. Monkeys destroy vegetable gardens. There are few public toilets. Politicians get rich while public services are reduced. People are fed up.

  Vrindavan is a one-business town: Krishna. Every year the town of 70,000 swells by some 2.5 million pilgrims; more people visit Vrindavan’s 5,000 temples than gaze at the Taj Mahal, just 70 kilometers south.

  The irony is that in their search for spiritual blessings, people have destroyed the natural beauty that made Vrindavan special in the first place.

  The Yamuna River, where Krishna playfully hid the clothes of bathing maidens, is today brown with sewage and industrial wastes. Most of the 36 forests of Krishna’s time have been cut. The greatest scar is the condition of the holy parikrama, an 11-kilometer pilgrimage route. In some parts it is lined with newly constructed ashrams and shops. Pilgrims on this route, who are instructed to touch their feet to Vrindavan soil, are forced to walk for several kilometres on burning asphalt while dodging traffic. In other places they risk parasites of a most diverse kind as they tread on a rainbow of excrements.

  However, in the midst of these very real environmental problems in a very holy setting, there are a few signs that Krishna’s ideal vacation site might just get restored.

  The renewal effort in Vrindavan is an interesting combination of logic and belief.

  People are complex, and make decisions and assimilate information with their left brains (logic, statistics, facts, rationale) in combination with their right brains (religion, emotions, creativity).

  In Vrindavan the facts are clear – the place is a mess and something has to be done to maintain basic health.

  But the soft, fuzzy side of the argument might be even more persuasive.

  Swami Rathadas Ji Maharaji offers his temple’s land and services for a tree nursery. “Plants are revered,” he explains. “We felt we should contribute to the community. And we’re not alone; many ashrams are eager to take part.” He explains that trees are more than trees in this part of India. “They’re monks who haven’t finished praying and who requested to be reincarnated in a forest.”

  Swami Raman Das, a forest monk, shows me an ancient ax scar on a centuries-old jamun tree. “See this cut?” I’m skeptical of his religious-storybook tales, but he explains how, long ago, a woodcutter started to chop this tree. In order to save itself, the tree turned into a woman wearing a green sari, who complained to the resident sadhus: “Tell this guy to stop hacking away at my body. I haven’t finished praying yet.” And the saints spoke to the woodcutter and he apologized to the tree.

  The massive tree-planting program has catalyzed a burgeoning social movement.

  In one corner of Vrindavan two toddlers join forces to lug a half-filled bucket of water to care for “their” tree in a tennis-court-sized park built on the site of a former dump. “We encouraged the government to put in a water pipe and provided saplings,” notes Sanjay Rattan, the WWF coordinator of the re-greening effort. “But as you can see, the people themselves take responsibility for keeping it alive.”

  In another part of town, religious leader Pran Gopal Mishra presides over a meeting of religious leaders. Their decision: seek help to regreen Gyan Gudari, one of the city’s holiest sites. “The trees spoke to Krishna,” Pran Gopal Mishra says. “If we learn how to listen to the voice of the earth, things will come right. The real solution to Vrindavan’s problems will come from trees. Social problems, environmental problems, they’re all linked.”

  Another leader, Swami Raman Das, dug deep into his treasury of metaphors-to-live-by. “The ancient scholars said that the story of Krishna demonstrates what all human beings are capable of,” the monk said. “Krishna shows that a two-armed, flesh-and-blood mortal, when energized by the spirit of the highest god Vishnu, can stand up to myriads of multi-armed demons. Every human being can perform miracles.”

  In spite of modest success and soaring philosophy, some monks are very frustrated. Sadhu Tyagi Baba has travelled the world, but has chosen to settle in a simple ashram along one of the prettier parts of the parikrama. “It’s not easy to stop this destruction, to stop the search for money,” he says. “But we’ll gather the religious leaders together. The environmental problem is as political as Sarajevo. We must force a cease-fire to all tree cutting, a cease-fire to all new construction.”

  After planting the seedling in Vrindavan I realized that after I left India the tree would become orphaned, with no one having responsibility for it. So I asked Rajni, the ten-year-old son of the chief gardener, if he would do me the honor of watering and caring for my tree in my absence. Together we painted on a metal plaque that is affixed to the metal tree guard: “Planted by Paul.” And in Hindi: “Looked after by Rajni.” We both signed it. To further cement the agreement I promised Rajni that I would plant a tree in his honour on my return to Switzerland.

  Both trees are flourishing.

  Chapter 3

  TO CUT THAT TREE, CUT THROUGH ME

  Chipko women’s movement keeps on huggin’

  RENI, Uttaranchal, India

  Any new-age nature-lover can hug a tree, and many do. But it takes a special kind of person to embrace a tree which is about to be chopped down, and challenge the woodsman: “If you want to cut the tree you’ll have to cut through me.”

  The Chipko movement in north India was founded on this kind of challenge.

  I met Srimati Bali Devi Rana, a leader of this rather unstructured movement, at her at her 210-person village of Reni, about an hour above the Indian hill station of Joshimath in the state of Uttaranchal.

  Sitting on the roof of her two storey-house, with hay drying at our feet and tall peaks just a few kilometers away, she welcomed me with glasses of cold clear water, tea and homemade nibbles made of corn flakes, peanuts and masala. Srimati, an animated woman wearing an orange woolen head scarf and homespun jacket and shirt, ran me through the historical origins of the movement.

  Around 1730, people of the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan tried to protect their community forests by hugging the trees; some 363 people were killed by soldiers following orders of the Maharaja of Jodhpur. On hearing of the massacre, the maharaja ordered timber cutting to stop.

  That established the principle that tree hugging is a viable, but sometimes bloody way to protect local forests. Tree hugging as a social movement became as Indian as chapati and dhal. And the need to protect trees grew more and more urgent as India’s population grew, new roads opened up previously inaccessible regions to exploitation, and people in the lowland cities saw that there was considerable money to be made by exploiting the forests. But mountain folks argued that the forests were their sole source of livelihood, since their terrain and weather prevented significant agriculture.

  In April 1973 the movement sprang up again. The issues were (and remain) complex, but basically the government, which owned most of the forest, gave logging and exploitation rights to commercial companies from the faraway plains, excluding the local m
ountain folk from economic gains that they depended on.

  This situation festered and finally exploded when the local village commune set up to run forest-product industries was denied its annual quota of ash trees so they could manufacture farming tools; the government instead gave the logging rights to a large “foreign” manufacturer of sporting goods.

  The villagers were incensed by this disregard of their traditional rights, and loss of an important income source.

  Srimati explains that the forest contractor sent in 200 axemen one evening when the contractor knew that most of the men had gone into the town to collect seasonal compensation from the district headquarters. “Two of our women, who had gone down to the river to collect water saw these forest laborers going up and quickly informed and alerted the rest of us,” Srimati explains. “All the women decided that even in the absence of men, we must act on our own try to stop these laborers from cutting trees.”

  The women confronted the contractor’s axemen and tried to talk them out of it. When that failed the women rushed to protect the trees, “embracing them as children”, and challenging the contractors to swing their axes against the unarmed villagers’ backs.

  This protest, and subsequent actions, led to a major victory in 1980 with a 15-year ban on tree cutting in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh, by order of India’s then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. The movement later spread to other states and helped to get government officials to focus on the need for natural resource policies which were more sensitive to people’s needs and environmental factors.

  As Srimati, who is the head of the Mahila Mangal Dal (Women’s Welfare Group) in northern India, offered me fresh slices of cucumber and homemade biscuits, I told her about my first contact with Chipko, which is a Hindi word meaning “stick to” or “cling” – not “hugging” as the feel-good western translation puts it.