TITULO VIGESIMO TERCERO

The earlier work of other anthropologists at the Bakun Resettlement Scheme noted high levels of grief and economic struggle throughout large sections of the communities studied, the Lahanan and Kenyah Badeng. For the majority of families, compensation was paid after displacement. While in the early stages, the price of the new door in the new longhouse was charged at RM52,000 to the families and deducted off their compensation packages, the Land Development Minister, Dr. James Jemut Masing, announced in 2012 that the cost of the longhouse would not be in fact, deducted from the compensation amounts.

The compensation amount itself however was and is a point of contention among some of the members of the community, with a number of residents even bringing the State to court over this matter. Some others, while they acquiesced to their offered amounts, revealed their unhappiness regarding the way the compensation amount was reached, especially regarding the valuation of one of their main means of production – cash cropping. Two years prior to Operation Exodus, a valuation was done of all the assets of the communities to be displaced, and each household was told of the valuation of their own assets. As the community members knew that they were about to be displaced, they reduced the maintenance of their gardens. Species of cash crops that were more susceptible to diseases such as cacao did not maintain their health very well under such circumstances. Closer to Operation Exodus, a new valuation was done, and the depreciation of these trees were accounted for. As a result, these households received a final valuation that was about half of what was originally offered. A few other informants, on the other hand, claimed that their lands were never surveyed. There are yet others who had been surveyed, and often because of longhouse hierarchy, have amassed large areas of cultivated land and viable cash crops. These families obtained large compensation pay-outs.

84 Each community is often called a longhouse, even though they can in actuality exist as different, separate blocks. Each apartment within the longhouse is called a ‘room’ or ‘door’ or amin. In theory, each nuclear family lives in its own amin. However, along with the Balui, extended families often live in the same amin. As told by informants and noted previously by Welyne (2008) and Tan (1995), a rapid expansion of longhouses occurred after news arrived that they may be displaced. This was because it was believed that compensation would be paid to each amin, therefore extended families would be at a severe economic disadvantage. Uma Belor expanded from 13 rooms to form a long block along the river’s edge and a new block that housed the family of the then maren uma (headman) Saging Bit and his extended family. There is some inconsistency of how the compensation was paid in the end. In the case of Uma Belor, a new longhouse was built containing six blocks of 15 doors and one of eleven, a total of 101 doors. However, the compensation cash was still paid through the original ‘core’ 13 doors. In other longhouses such as Uma Badeng, it did not appear so and each door during valuation received a compensation sum.

Included in the compensation package was also the promise of cultivable land. This was also noted by earlier workers. Prior to the move, Sungai Penyuan was the designated land for resettlement, with 10 acres of land promised to each door for cultivation. This area was then reduced to three acres at Sungai Asap. The Penyuan site was turned over to local timber conglomerate Shin Yang, which turned the area into a plantation for fast growing, introduced timber species such as Paraserianthes falcataria (endemic to New Guinea) and Acacia mangium (endemic to New Guinea and Northern Australia) (Shin Yang, 2016). Clearly, this area could support the growth of large amounts of biomass. Also, this area covers over 22,000 hectares, as opposed to the 4,000 hectares of the eventual Bakun Resettlement Scheme. The problems the resettlers faced were compounded when they arrived to see that their assigned farming lots were either inaccessible or uncultivable (rocky land, for example). This sparked further unhappiness with the government, as well as some resentment towards their headmen as they were supposed to have been part of the process to decide where their longhouses would be located. One informant, whose mother was assigned one such inaccessible lot, exclaimed in a mixture of Malay and English, “Macam these people take map and draw like this. Nah macam ‘ni! You go here, you go here. Mana ada survey!” This translates

85 to, “It’s as if these people grabbed the map and drew a circle in a random area of land and assigned it to people without first surveying.”

Figure 5.1: Map of the timber plantation concession area that was initially meant for the resettlement of the Bakun communities.

Most longhouses dealt with their compensations by dividing them up among individual families or persons and left each entity to do whatever they wished with the compensation money. Three Kayan longhouses stand in stark contrast to the rest – Uma Belor, Uma Balui Liko and Uma Juman. Uma Juman is considered a prestige longhouse. Their recorded history is long and they have various locally powerful members of local politics within their ranks, as well as some astute and savvy businessmen, including the youngest headman from the Balui. Interviews with various influential longhouse members revealed that this longhouse received in total more than RM16 million in compensation. Most of the compensation was divided, like the other longhouses, while over a million was placed in an account in a bank for emergencies and the occasional dividend pay-out. Uma Belor is a much smaller longhouse but still collected a sizeable amount of compensation in total. This longhouse invested a much larger proportion of their compensation and this investment is in unit trusts. Every year in the week leading up to Christmas, the longhouse gathers for hari keluarga (family day), and the headman

86 announces the dividends from investment to be distributed to each household, which usually ranges from one to three thousand ringgit. Uma Balui Liko took a different approach, which was to invest in property. Local area 1 town centre (Figure 4.2) is made up of two rows of shops. One row is only open to resettlers to own, and the back row was for open tender. Uma Balui Liko used their compensation collectively to buy one of the shop lots in the market centre, which they then rented out. The shop has been housing coffeeshops since the beginning. The second level was renovated in 2015 and is now rented out as office space.

Some other longhouses did not have the same foresight. One commonly told story describes how one particular headman spent all his compensation money on cars, and lavish spending in the city. However, not all were spendthrifts, as there are also frequent recounts of some who spent on capital-intensive businesses (such as starting a fleet of transport buses) that eventually closed down due to insufficient demand or financial mismanagement. What is clear is that for the overall longhouse financial health, the headmen play extremely critical roles. The more successful longhouses post- displacement were the same ones that were doing better than average even before relocation (such as Uma Belor; Chapter 3), in both finance and education (further discussed below). Displacement had the knock-on effect of providing well-run longhouses even more capital with invest and grow with, further widening the inequality between these longhouses and the others.