The Surau

I waited until Shaq started the motor. It took quite a few kicks. The bike sputtered and coughed. The fumes and smoke, having choked us, writhed up into the trees to add to the polluted Malaysian air choking the small kampung of Orang Asli in a pallid haze. I clambered on the pillion seat of the small bike. It had seen better days. We bumped off along a track.

Into the forest: to an outlying hamlet where the tribespeople had a couple of huts for their hunters and gatherers. I gave up fighting the bike and rolled with it as it lurched, bumped and spluttered along. I was going to stay with the hunters: all relatives of Shaq.

The Orang Asli in Malaysia: an almost devastated society; what has been done to them by the Malay people is on a par with what was done to the Indian tribes of North America, the Australian aboriginal people and billions of native peoples across the world. The remnants surviving in the Malayan area number less than100,000 face. The problems they face stem from the failure of the government to recognise their rights as a unique culture and race.

“No one, not even the government, has stopped to ask what do the Orang Asli really need,” Shaq says. “The first mistake is to assume that they are a homogenous group with the same needs.”

For instance, the erosion of their land rights is a bigger manifestation of the non-recognition of their status as a unique community.”

According to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, aboriginal communities are arguably among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups of people in the world today. Throughout history, their rights have been violated.

Yet, they are powerless to fight back. They are unable to stop encroachment into their ancestral land, nor even refuse the government’s misguided plans for them. In short, they are unable to determine their own paths or their own lives.

As indigenous peoples of the land, one would expect them to be given priority in education quotas, healthcare, development and politics, just like the Malays. However, that is not the case. Instead, they are slowly losing their livelihood as encroachment into their traditional habitat continue with logging and agricultural expansion.

Two years ago, a visit to an Orang Asli settlement in Tasik Chini in Pahang revealed a community resigned to its fate. The community leader said at that time that fish in the lake – in a Unesco heritage area  – had died and the famed lotuses had been choked to death by cat’s tails, a weed that thrives on warm, polluted waters. Small-scale tourism and fishing had been—and remain—badly affected and food sources ruined by mining and logging activities less than 2 km away from the lake. What was once a natural wonder is now a dirty brown pool of water.

When action is taken, it is mostly ad hoc and not well thought out.

In an Orang Asli settlement in Gombak, near Kuala Lumpur, the government built a fancy new community hall, complete with electric lights and ceiling fans. But there is no power supply because it would cost “too much” to link the village to the main power lines.

There is a mismatch between what is needed and what is delivered.

“The Orang Asli do not reject modernisation. They also want education, healthcare, infrastructure, like the rest of the Malaysians, but they want it on their own terms,” he says.

And therein lies the problem.

The government argues that the community has been given access to education and healthcare. In Gombak, there is an Orang Asli hospital.  There are teachers to teach their children. But what is available is of little relevance to them. Many Orang Asli settlements are so remote that their access to healthcare remains limited at best.

In education, there is no syllabus to which they can easily relate. In fact, the education system pays little regard to the Orang Asli community beyond a small chapter in the one of the textbooks provided. Infrastructure facilities are static and not suitable for nomadic tribes.

There are many other violations to their culture and way of life, not least being the thorny issue of forced conversions – whether to Islam, Christianity or any other religion.

“Their own beliefs are not recognised nor respected although they have a right to practise their own beliefs,” Nicholas says.

The point is that the Orang Asli neither need nor want the government’s sympathy or election year hand-outs by some visiting politician. They do not want houses they cannot live in nor education that is not relevant to their way of life. All they want is to be recognised for their culture, beliefs and way of life.

Now? They are trying to fight back. They have stood up to the logging companies and the miners raping their land. The government’s response? Arrest and violent detention. One looks at the Rohingya in Myanmar and wonders if things will ever get that far. It does not bear thinking about.

But if Shaq’s people don’t tread carefully they might—indeed will—suffer even more. In one village, the government constructed a suria: a Muslim prayer room, like a mini mosque. Did the people use it?

If course they did. They used it to shelter their pigs at night. Now that is confrontational.