Shrinking forest: A drone pic showing widespread land clearing in the interior Nabawan district in Sabah, which has left Murut tribespeople like Basusah (below) unable to access their native land areas and with dried up water streams.
KOTA KINABALU: After living in Kg Balantos in Sabah’s interior Nabawan district for eight generations, Basusah Anturi and her family find themselves in a dilemma.
They face eviction in a matter of days from their native land, which has been allocated to a company tasked with carrying out sustainable forest management under the Forest Management Unit (FMU).
Anturi has received a third and final notice from the Forestry Department to move out of the secondary jungle that was once part of an FMU area.
“I have got until Feb 12 to leave as they say my house is within the second-class forest reserve,” lamented Anturi, who travelled 200km to get here with other village heads from Kg Salung and Kg Balantos to highlight their plight to The Star.
The ethnic Murut villagers claim that parts of their native forest land were demarcated under FMU purview in 1997.
Though this move did not immediately affect their villages of residence, it had then severely impacted their traditional hunter-gatherer livelihoods and activities.
The group claimed that they had written to the authorities and various Chief Ministers since 2013, each time requesting the return of thousands of hectares of their forest land that had been taken away.
They said things started to change for the worse when the aforementioned company took over management of the land, beginning to chop large areas of forest – including over 150 fruit and durian trees grown decades ago – as well as blocking access to their ancestral burial grounds.
To make matters worse, they said that the felled trees were close to crucial water catchment areas, leaving the once-pristine rivers murky and shallow.
“All we are asking is for the government to help us get back our native customary land. We have lived on it for generations,” pleaded Markus Tinghalou, deputy native chief of Kg Balantos.
Koyoon Kimin, the Kampung Balantos village head, said that they sought in vain for the state government to gazette their area as native land under native customary rights way back in 2013.
Kg Kuala Salung village head Undi Ampakat said their ancestors had settled in the area a long time ago, also producing photographs to back their claim.
The village heads said they have also made representations to Pensiangan MP Datuk Arthur Kurup and Nabawan assemblyman Datuk Abdul Ghani Yassin but nothing had been done.
They said their last hope was for Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor to intervene and help put their lives back in order.
