Clearing the air on the “mysterious†NGOs – on a lazy Malaysian Sunday
By Sim Kwang Yang
Finally, the truth is out: Penan girls had been raped by timber camp workers, according to the official reports put out by the task force appointed by the federal Ministry of Women, Family, and Community Development.
The official report had been ready and approved by the federal cabinet in April I hear, but has not seen the light of day until a group of PKR Wanita protestors led by their chief Hajjah Zuraidah went to the office of the Minister. There were promptly given a copy.
The report confirming the rape of very young Penan school girls is lie a slap on the face of the Sarawak Ministers who had denied such rapes ever happened. But some people have very thick skin on their face; they do not feel the heat of the slap, even when they are soundly slapped.
The Deputy Chief Minister and Minister in charge of Penan affairs Alfred Jabu promptly questioned the findings of the task force, blaming the mysterious hands of the NGOs in influencing the outcome of the task force’s investigations.
Alfred Jabu has slapped back at the face of the whole federal government, and in particular the Minister of Woman, Family and community Development Shahrizat, by suggesting that the federal government can be so easy to be subverted by NGOs.
Who are these NGOs anyway? Jabu has mentioned Bruno Mansur several times.
I have not met Bruno Mansur, but the last I heard, the possibility of his dying in the Sarawak jungle quite a few years ago is very high. I leave you to speculate what had caused his possible death.
But I do know many people working in the Malaysian NGOs. For those years when I was MP, I had to take on the environment portfolio, so I started to build a network of friends in Malaysian NGOs, to learn from them, to work with them, to get information and advice from them, and to speak up for them.
Then sometime in the 1990s, I was invited to go to Europe, to meet the NGOs there, and to go to the European Parliament in Brussels to canvass for the anti-logging movement. I was invited by the Green Party MP from Germany who was also the Vice President of the European parliament.
Then I travelled through Europe, mostly by rail, to attend quite a few international NGO conferences, to tell them about the logging problems and the plight of the indigenous people who suffered so much from logging activities in Sarawak. I met many people from NGOs from Europe and even North America. I particularly remember with fondness Peter Frenke from Germany. Dr. Paul Lind, an exile from Singapore, looked after me very well on my trip.
