BRUNO AND THE BLOWPIPES
Bruno Manser was born on 25th of August 1954 in Basel, Switzerland. During his lifetime, Bruno Manser, one of the founders of the Bruno Manser Fund and its president for many years, was the best-known Swiss activist campaigning for the protection of the rainforests and the respect for human rights. He has been missing since his last journey to the Rainforest of Sarawak.
In the jungle of the Eastern Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, near the Indonesian border of Kalimantan, Manser created richly illustrated notebooks during his stay in 1984 to 1990 with the Penan people. He stayed with the nomadic band of Along Sega, who became the Penan figurehead for their struggle. He also visited many other settled Penan communities in the Upper Baram district. These notebooks were later published, with some succes.
Having spent much of the 1970s educating himself in a stunning array of practical handcrafts, Manser took himself off in 1984 to find a way of life in which he could use his skills for greater benefit. Arriving at the home of the Penan, he liked what he saw, settled, and showed no inclination to re-emerge. Yet re-emerge he did in 1990, armed with a mission to get help. The Penan's habitat was being destroyed by the Sarawak's timber industry, and the few surviving nomads would be soon to follow. He helped the Penan to resist further intrusion by the logger and became the international mouthpiece for the treatened people of the primeral forest.
Declared 'enemy of the state number 1' by the Malaysian government, Manser bristled to the challenge, and founded the Bruno-Manser-Fonds in Basel to raise attention to rainforest issues, those of the Penan in particular. During the 1990s, his determination to make governments take notice and action to halt rainforest destruction revealed his stamina and flair for the dramatic. . In 1993 he conducted a 60-day hunger strike outside Bern's Bundeshaus to highlight the need for an import embargo of tropical woods. The strike received nationwide support, but little action resulted. He travelled, he lectured, he exhorted; but change was coming too slowly.
He felt the tide was flowing faster and faster against the Penan, and he grew more desperate. Making the occasional undercover visit to the people who had adopted him and called him Laki Penan. He made a diplomatic overture to Sarawak chief minister Taib Mahmud, offering to take responsibility for creating the Penan's biosphere himself, but he got no response. glider He learned how to parachute, planning to float down with a lamb of peace on the Hari Raya festival in Kuching.
The Malaysian embassy successfully lobbied the airlines to stop him, so he parachuted into Geneva instead. No response. He flew above the Taib residence, and landed, allowing himself to be arrested. He was transported.
In 2000, he made one final attempt to do something, anything, to save the Penan. Allowing himself to be filmed as he made his way through the jungle to Sarawak, he sent off a few hundred postcards, and on 22 May was seen crossing the border alone into the land of the Penan. The jungle has not returned him.
In my opinion, Bruno Manser was right to stop the government from developing the jungles of Sarawak and to defend the Penan from change. This is because the jungles of Sarawak used to be the 'home' of the Penan until nowadays. But i do disagree to Bruno Manser because people in Sarawak, especially the Penan people, need some development to expose them to the modern globilisation so that their lifestyles can be inproved.
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