KOTA KINABALU: Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor (pic) has promised to look into the plight of native Murut villagers, who claim their ancestral land is being “taken away” by a company tasked with carrying out sustainable forest management.
Hajiji said he has asked for a report on the matter from both the state Forestry Department and the Land and Survey Department before taking appropriate action.
“We will ensure that (native) rights of the people are protected,” he told reporters here yesterday after the launching of the Gabungan Rakyat Sabah (GRS) students wing.
Hajiji was commenting on an appeal by villagers of Kampung Salung and Kampung Balantos in Sabah’s interior Nabawan district, who said they were being chased out of their ancestral forest land, handed down for nearly eight generations, by the Forest Management Unit (FMU).
Villager Basusah Anturi said he was given a third and final eviction notice to leave the land by Feb 12.
Anturi and other villagers highlighted their plight to The Star last week, when they showed pictures of the clear felling in the Class II forest as well as polluted streams.
The leaders from the two villages, with a combined population of 550, said their traditional land was earmarked under the FMU in 1997, and this had severely affected their traditional hunter-gatherer livelihoods.
They said they had written dozens of times to the authorities and different chief ministers since 2013 to return thousands of hectares of their native land, which also included their ancestral burial grounds.
The natives continued using the secondary forest to hunt and gather produce, but things changed when the company took over.
According to them, the company started felling trees, including over 150 fruit trees – among them decades old durian trees – within the area from late 2017.
The villagers said the logging was carried out close to water catchment areas and had eroded and polluted the once-pristine rivers there.
“All we are asking is for the government to help us get back our native customary land. We have lived off it for generations,” said the Kampung Balantos deputy native chief Markus Tinghalou.
“Our ancestral rights, to the area, are there with the presence of burial grounds, settlements and fruit trees,” he added.
