Sarawak's natives have won two important court cases over native land issues, their attorney announced this morning in the Sarawak state capital of Kuching on the island of Borneo.

The cases had been filed by the natives against the state government of Sarawak and an oil palm company that planned to establish an oil palm plantation on native lands.

Lawyer See Chee How of the Kuching-based law office Messrs. Baru Bian announced that High Court Judge Datuk David Wong delivered two favorable decisions in favor of a native Iban and a Malay community in Sarawak.

In both cases, Justice Wong declared that the local communities have native customary rights over land unlawfully claimed as state land by the Sarawak State government.

In one of the cases, the Court declared that the customary practice of Malays must be given the force of law, which is a landmark decision.

See Chee How called the rulings "a great victory for the people" and said that it was "a historic day for Sarawak's native landowners."

The Iban plaintiffs had filed a suit in 2001 against the oil palm company Ladang Sawit Bintulu and four other defendants, including the state government, seeking a declaration of native customary rights over their land.
They claimed that the provisional lease issued in 1996 to oil palm company Ladang Sawit Bintulu Sdn Bhd had wrongly included their native customary land. They argued that their native customary rights over the land had never been extinguished and therefore, the issuance of the provisional lease was illegal.

In granting the Iban plaintiffs their rights to the land, the court ruled that the provisional lease over the 1,214 hectare disputed area was null and void.

The court ordered the oil palm company to leave the disputed area, excise it from the lease and return it to the Ibans.

In the view of Deforestation Watch, this landmark court decision effectively nails the lie that native peoples have been displaced with impunity in Malaysian Borneo (comprising the states of Sabah and Sarawak) by the expansion of palm oil plantations.

One notable source of this blatant misreporting is The Independent which had been trundling out these lies on a regular basis in their environmental columns.  According to The Independent, palm oil is causing massive deforestation, threatening the extinction of the orang utan and displacing native peoples!

The BBC in a program called “The End of the Jungle” hosted by Angus Strickler went so far as to claim that “It's estimated that only 3 percent of the primary rainforest of Malaysian Borneo remains. Logging has devastated much of the land, but now campaigners say the palm oil plantations have taken over. And it's not just the forest that's gone. Since the early 1990s whole communities have left - driven, they say, from their farms."

Writing to media across the region, the CEO of Nature Alert Sean Whyte, in an article entitled "Palm oil industry must get out of denial mode” published in the Jakarta Post and the New Straits Times, Whyte called the palm oil industry "arguably the most environmentally destructive in the world."

He further alleged that the palm oil industry is "responsible for the deaths of thousands of orang utans, tens of millions of other wildlife forms, and logging - both legal and otherwise, on an industrial scale throughout all of Kalimantan and Sumatra."

Writes Whyte: "In Sarawak, there have been innumerable reports of this same industry denying indigenous tribes their rights to their land. Although less reported, the same happens in Indonesia."

Whyte’s unique talent for hyperbole is quickly exposed when we consider that his wild claims of loss of tens of millions of wildlife forms flies against the face of facts when the total number of known species for ALL animals living on this planet other than arthropods is only about 250,000!  

 Last year in an unprecedented move, the Malaysian government said it would grant ownership of farming land to about 20,000 indigenous families to improve their lives.

It is pertinent to point out that all 3 palm oil critics hail from the United Kingdom which had been the original developers of the palm oil industry in Malaysia.  It is a legitimate question to ask whether these moral guardians of world opinion would have been just as singularly vociferous with their criticism of the palm oil plantations if the British had continued to own and operate them?

In the view of Deforestation watch, ethical behavior in journalism can be distilled into one simple injunction - it is simply that main stream media like The BBC and The Independent, before airing their respective programs and publication of their series of reports on matters such as that of palm oil and deforestation which is highly controversial and hotly contested, should take the trouble to verify their facts and sources and strive to give both sides of the story.  By failing to do so, mass media like The BBC and The Independent have taken credulity to a new low! THE END.