More International Condemnation of Taib Mahmud
By Sarawak Report
The UK’s most respected and established Environmental magazine, The Ecologist, has this week turned its attention to Chief Minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, with a major investigative article about his record in Sarawak.
In a devastating analysis it outlines Taib’s corruption and his lies about what has happened to the Borneo jungle and its people. Even more significantly, on the eve of the MoCS Red March, it writes about a discernible change in the mood in Sarawak and speaks of real hope of change. This is not least because Taib’s decades of self-interested destruction and plunder have been well and truly exposed.
“Three decades of government land seizures, rampant logging and oil palm expansion has decimated Sarawak’s rainforest and disenfranchised its native population. Yet a seismic political shift is occurring, which represents real hope for Sarawak’s people and its beleaguered forests. Through the work of tireless activists, a reform movement is rapidly gaining ground and exposing the duplicity of the existing government, and its ‘Godfather’, the Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud”. [Ecologist Magazine]
International reputation in tatters
Taib is the man who earlier this year commissioned the discredited FBC Media to come in and do something for his international reputation. The $5 million dollar contract was supposed to get the Chief Minister and his policies positive publicity across global TV stations, international forums and blogs.
Amongst other things FBC Media launched a new site Sarawak Report(s) and placed articles in New Ledger, an online right-wing site in the US, which focused on undermining the investigations about corruption in our own blog, the real Sarawak Report. These articles attempted to paint Sarawak Report as being run by ’wild left-wingers’, instead of professional journalists, purely because of the Editor’s family connection with the former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
So, it will be doubly disheartening for Taib that not only has his dirty contract with FBC Media been exposed and shown to have entailed a large number of illegal activities on the part of that company, but that his latest critics in the Ecologist are distinctly linked to the Conservative Party instead.
The Ecologist is owned and run by the long-time environmental campaigner Zac Goldsmith. Zac is an ex-Etonian, Conservative MP and belongs to an extremely wealthy family of businessmen. So no chance of using wild lefty accusations this time!
The truth is that all independent, onlookers, whatever their political connections, can only be appalled at the greed and theft that has been perpetrated by Taib upon his own land and his own people.
