Optimistic: Residents of Sabah’s Murut villages in Kampung Balantos, Salung and Salingkuan in the interior Pensiangan area are hopeful that their ancestral rights will be protected.
KOTA KINABALU: The Murut people of Sabah’s interior are now hopeful of getting back their ancestral land in a longstanding dispute after the Chief Minister’s assurance that their native customary land rights would be protected.
The residents of Kampung Balantos, Kampung Salung and Kampung Sinikaluan in Pagalungan, Nabawan district, about 200km from here, said they were extremely happy that Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor was looking into their plight.
“We are deeply touched that our Chief Minister is looking into our plight and with his assurance that our native rights are protected,” the group of natives said in a joint statement.
After so many years, they said this was the first time a chief minister had ever responded to their plight since their ancestral land was placed under a Forest Management Unit (FMU) in 1997.
The villagers have been writing to successive state governments and chief ministers since 2013, pleading for the government to give back their native ancestral land that had been exercised out to a private contractor to carry out sustainable forest management.
However, the villagers had highlighted to The Star recently that the contractors had felled trees in their ancestral forest land, which had severely affected their livelihoods and dried up their water catchment areas.
“Imagine if you were in our shoes – we have been living in Sapulut for decades, carrying on with our lives freely according to Murut native customs.
“We practise shifting cultivation, hunting, collecting plants for our own consumption and trees for building our own huts and kampung houses.
“We do not over-harvest nor exploit the jungle as it is our traditional source of livelihood. This (exploiting) is not our practice. At the heart of our way of living is the practice of sustainable land use,” they said.
However, they said that the FMU operator and now private company had adversely affected their traditional livelihoods by over-exploiting their jungles.
“They have not only taken away our ancestral land but over-exploited our jungles. They took away the logs, causing severe damage to our water catchments and our rivers and destroying wildlife habitats,” the villagers said.
They said the decision to earmark their ancestral land under the FMU in 1997 was done arbitrarily without any consultation with them.
“It is not fair to us. Now, after decades of exploitation of our home and resources, we want justice to be restored.
“Our hope is that a constructive consultation with all the affected parties be organised and a decision be made to return what is rightfully ours,” they said.
The villagers said they hope the Sabah government would take steps to transit away from the current system of forest exploitation and return to a policy of restoring the culture of indigenous people.
“The indigenous lifestyle is about respect of nature and of sharing natural resources for the sustainable benefit of the family,” they said, adding that the principles of Malaysia Madani should be implemented.
