A meaningful future for the community

Strive for development that complements their lives and culture

IT’S not written in history books, but it’s been said that the large Orang Seletar indigenous community around the Johor Tebrau Straits was the most affected when the Causeway was built in 1923. Not only was the community split into two, the Causeway also caused the waters around Tebrau Straits to stagnate and lose much of the mud crabs and other marine life that formed their staple diet. That was almost a century ago; the Seletar people had long since abandoned their dugouts to live on land, but the life-changing effect provides a glimpse of how seemingly innocuous developments can be detrimental to the Orang Asli.

Hence, Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s announcement of a National Orang Asli Development Blueprint on Monday at the 2019 National Orang Asli Convention is long overdue. Using the input gathered from the various Orang Asli communities during the convention as the blueprint’s building blocks is a great start, but input should also be gathered from residents of the 853 Orang Asli settlements in the peninsula. During the Emergency, the Orang Kanaq community, the smallest Orang Asli tribe in our country, had to be resettled from Mawai in Kota Tinggi, Johor, to Gombak, Selangor, to prevent them from being exploited by Communist terrorists. Diseases and the stress of resettling in places far away from their original settlement had not only caused deaths, but also forced a change of lifestyle and culture. They were then brought back to Kota Tinggi, and today, there are fewer than 100 of them living in their Sungai Selangi settlement.

Therefore, Orang Asli communities should be given more say on how best to move forward so that they will not be left behind in the nation’s progress while maintaining the cultural norms they want to hold on to. Using ecotourism as a vehicle to bring the Orang Asli into the mainstream economy is a good move. However, ecotourism must remain a tool to enhance the Orang Asli’s economic standing. It should never be allowed to be the end that justifies the means of getting there. A key aspect of the balanced development that the government should strive for is the Orang Asli customary land rights. Logging and forest clearing, legal or otherwise, pose the greatest danger to the Orang Asli’s way of life as such activities gobble up vast areas of forested land.

The definition of development we have for towns and cities should not be applied to Orang Asli settlements. We should not label the Orang Asli anti-development if they oppose the destruction of the forests they live in. Instead of expecting them to change their lifestyle, we should strive to create development that complements their lives and culture. Their knowledge of our forests and how they build their lives with natural resources are the basis of making ecotourism a key aspect of their development. While giving them more access to education, we must ensure that decades later, the Orang Asli children can still retain their affinity with the natural environment. Now, that is development the Orang Asli can look forward to and Malaysia can be proud of.

We should strive to create development that complements their lives and culture.