Beware nature’s displeasure

Many projects have been proposed for the seafront along the Portuguese Settlement in Melaka but they never took off.

SOMETIME in the mid-1990s, I was assigned to Pulau Besar, an island off the coast of Melaka, to cover the ground-breaking ceremony of a golf club.

I vividly remember my boss at The Star then — the late Datuk Wong Sai Wan — telling me to behave while on the island and to respect Pulau Besar, which is considered sacred by some locals.

Fast forward to 2011, when I was transferred from the Terengganu to Melaka bureau, I wanted to do an article on the progress of the golf club.

I was told the project had hit a snag and that the planned development on the island never materialised.

Locals attributed it to a “curse” by their ancestors that the site should remain a divine sanctuary.

A similar story was shared with me on a proposed multi- storey mall in the heart of the historic city of Melaka.

The mall was supposed to be built on a piece of land belonging to a particular community in 1995.

But the procurement of the land was apparently not done properly.

Although this remained anecdotal, grim stories were shared about the deaths of those involved in developing the site.

The structure was left abandoned for almost two decades.

A new developer managed to rehabilitate the site in 2018 after offering prayers for a month to appease its “guardian”.

My curiousity piqued, I checked whether any other projects in traditional villages in Melaka have shared the same fate.

A conversation with an activist from the Portuguese Settlement unveiled intriguing stories of similar occurrences.

Michael Singho shared how he helped stop a reclamation project in the 1990s.

The project, which was supposed to transform the settlement, would have been detrimental to the environment and affected the livelihood of fishing folk from the area.

Luckily, an Environmental Impact Assessment report strongly recommended that such a development not be allowed there.

Villagers sighed in relief, believing that divine intervention had helped stop those responsible from developing the area.

Then came the Pulau Melaka project that was close to the Portuguese Settlement.

It eventually turned into a ‘‘white elephant’’ due to the accumulation of mud and silt along the project site.

A few years later, another mega project was also proposed and villagers were fearful of losing their seafront.

But that project too faced numerous obstacles and never reached its completion as scheduled.

Settlement residents believe that divine intervention again saved the beachfront, especially since the sea is synonymous with the community.

Part of the mega project site seems to have been abandoned and the structures left empty.

However, Singho and another activist Martin Theseira believe that it is not the end of the story.

Another company is poised to venture into a mega reclamation project.

But locals continue to believe that projects that could negatively affect the area’s ecosystem will face “difficulties” in proceeding.

They feel that those involved in destroying nature will have to pay for their actions, sooner or later.