ARTÍCULOS TRANSITORIOS

The communities in the Bakun Resettlement Scheme such as the Kayan, Kenyah and Lahanan are hierarchical societies. For Kayan longhouses, the upper classes are the maren (aristocrat), and the hipuy, followed by the commoner panyin class and finally the slave dipen. In the past, the lower classes provided corvée labour to the maren. The accumulation of food and the ability to make use of community labour to harvest from larger areas of land, and collection of heirloom items, were the hallmarks of the maren. The hipuy were just below the maren, but still considered upper class, and they did not have the benefit of corvée labour. These days, corvées no longer exist, longhouses do not go to war and collect slaves, and some longhouses such as Uma Belor, Uma Kulit and

104 Uma Badeng have attempted to allow their community members to vote for their leaders, but the class differences still exist. Headmen are still clearly required to lead the longhouses and perform their native court duties according to the adat. There is, however, a difference. The contemporary headman no longer gets to accumulate wealth from contributions by his longhouse. In the state government system, the traditional longhouse leadership are in a grey zone, as they are not actually considered civil servants, but are still paid RM800 a month as an allowance. This amount is a relatively recent increase from the previous RM450 a month in from 2013.

The allowance for the headman is clearly too low to be considered a reasonable living wage. A former Penghulu and maren uma who used to work as a customs officer said that leading a longhouse in the last two decades has been difficult. He found that issues that can be dealt with by the native courts or mediation were much easier to solve, but experienced much difficulty with finances. As an ‘ordinary customs officer in Kuching’, as he described himself, he did not have a particularly large salary, even when complemented by the headman allowance; yet as a headman, he was expected to lead the organisation of community bonding events and festivals, and provide funding. He points out that now, all the headmen are running some kind of business venture and are more deeply involved with politics, and even the few in civil service, such as teachers, have left service. Indeed, of the community leaders at the BRS from maren uma to Pemanca, many are oil palm farmers, while some others, such as the maren uma of Uma Juman, are businessmen who are contractors for various infrastructure projects both in the BRS as well as in the cities. They supply not just materials, but also the labour, usually made up Indonesian transient workers. There are headmen who are not particularly prominent in local politics or in business and they tend to be rather side-lined when it comes to major events or decision-making involving the entire resettlement scheme. As powerful headmen lead powerful longhouses, this can cause educational, developmental and financial inequalities to increase. This further emphasises the power difference between the longhouses and ethnic groups.

All the headmen are also shareholders in a consortium called Wargana, which describes itself as a local co-operative. It is headed by the former federal member for the area, Datuk Billy Abit Joo, who is also a maren from Uma Belor. Penghulu Saging Bit heads the tourism division of the consortium, but there seems to be little activity on that front,

105 while he is much more involved in the other sectors of the company, such as construction and biomass removal from the Bakun and Murum reservoir areas. Therefore, in this sense, the resettlement project reflects resettlement schemes elsewhere in South-east Asia, where the elites get a better chance at not just livelihood reconstruction, but also a possibility of really thriving and accumulating significant wealth (Elmhirst, 2001). Wargana also has logging concessions as well as other smaller scale projects, such as the construction of a pavilion, a security post and the modular floating jetty at Bakun. The consortium had also tried to start an aquaculture venture but ran into difficulties and the project appeared to be abandoned.

The appointments to the positions of Penghulu and Pemanca in the BRS have a Kayan- Kenyah balance. There are two Penghulu and two Pemanca leading the resettlement communities –Pengulu Saging Bit (Uma Belor) and Pemanca Umek Jeno (Uma Daro) are Kayan while Pengulu Katan Lawai (Uma Badeng) and Pemanca Tony Kulleh (Uma Bakah) are Kenyah. Of the four, Penghulu Saging Bit and Pemanca Tony Kulleh feature prominently in local politics and government media and are the more vocal. Both are successful commercial farmers as well, in pepper and oil palm respectively. As noted previously, the headmen often reflected the situation in their longhouses. The longhouses with headmen deemed to be more successful in commerce and politics tended to be better maintained and their longhouse folk themselves tended to adapt to new livelihoods better. On the other hand, other longhouses where the headmen adjusted poorly tended to reflect the misfortunes of their headmen. In one of the smaller longhouses, the headman received a large amount of compensation, which was then squandered on cars and nightlife in Bintulu.