Taib Shows True Colours In Tasmania
By Sarawak Report
As news reports are beginning to show, Australia is beginning to get a true picture of Taib Mahmud and his behaviour in Sarawak.
TV scenes of rowdy loggers disrupting and breaking up a local meeting in a town hall in Huonville, Tasmania will not go down well.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/20/3222344.htm
The meeting had been called by environmentally concerned local people, who are anxious about logging in their area, which is being carried out by none other than Taib’s own family company Ta Ann. The loggers are shown to have been aggressive and abusive towards the seated audience and one woman speaker was threatened with rape!
Classic behaviour
Those women who live in Sarawak’s interior can, of course, testify to the seriousness of that threat of rape. There have been numerous police reports and complaints about rapes and vicious attacks on women and schoolgirls by loggers, many of them independently verified by NGOs. However Taib has blocked all attempts at an official investigation.
Indeed, as Sarawakians all know, threats and intimidation have been the established method by which the loggers, licenced by Taib, have dealt with complaints by local forest people and those communities who have Native Customary Rights to the land they have taken. Fear of the Thugs and Gangsters hired by loggers pervades the whole state.
Minggat Nyakin, beaten up by loggers earlier this year for asking them to leave his land
We have covered a number of recent incidences showing how these gangs have been used by logging companies to come in and do their dirty work, attacking villagers with clubs, knives, explosives and guns. Complaints are routinely ignored by the police, who know that this behaviour is tacitly sanctioned by Taib Mahmud. The Chief Minister, who is also Finance Minister, Resources and Planning Minister and Head of the Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corporation, has taken a vast personal cut from the profits from logging in the State over the last 30 years and more.
Taib’s global reach
Companies which began and grew rich in Sarawak have been spreading their logging activities across the globe. They have muscled their way in to remaining hardwood areas in Indonesia, Papua, the Soloman Islands, Congo, Amazon and now Tasmania.
Laughably the Australian taxpayer even paid Ta Ann a massive $10,000,000 grant to set up its saw mill factories on the island. Whose bright idea was that? Ta Ann is run by the multi-billionaire Hamid Sepawi, the cousin and business proxy of Taib himself, who has been listed personally as one of Malaysia’s richest men. Why have the taxpayers of Tasmania had to pay out to have him come in and cut down their forests now that Sarawak has run out of its own wood?
Indeed, when the Tasmanian forestry authorities did their assessments into sustainability and the Taib family record on logging, did they take an environmental impact check on Sarawak? We are looking at the man who in 30 years has razed and destroyed the world’s oldest (130 million years) tropical hardwood jungle. The surrounding environmental impact on rivers, wildlife and communities, owing to his negligent and corner-cutting methods, has been nothing short of devastating.
