One of the arguments used to justify the move to deny Chin Huat entry to Sarawak is that the state has a degree of autonomy to make such decisions – but autonomy for whom? This is a comment left by a blog reader in response to another commenter who had said the state has autonomy to make such decisions: The reason for change is very, very simple. Sarawak’s current autonomy is the autonomy of one man and his band of cronies, not the autonomy of its people.
More on deforestation in Sarawak. View Larger Map Taken from a comment on the Aliran website: While Sean’s warning about Google Earth’s images is useful, what it means in practice is that the extent of deforestation it shows is an under-estimate of the actual situation on the ground. For Sarawak, it is mostly about five years out of date.
Those travelling for the first time to Sarawak might be shocked to discover the poor condition of roads, even in urban areas. And if you venture further away from the cities and towns, you might find folks without proper piped water and regular electricity supply and people still using pit latrines. And all the while, some of the political elites and their business cronies in Kuching enjoy ostentatious life-styles, their families having accumulated millions.
Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud hopes to hold on to the BN’s two-thirds majority in the state assembly in elections on 16 April. But as he observes his 30th anniversary as chief minister today, his political future has never looked so uncertain. A piece that appears in Asia Times today: Bellwether poll for Malaysia By Anil Netto Taib Mahmud, the flamboyant chief minister of the Malaysian state of Sarawak in north Borneo, marked 30 consecutive years in power on Monday. But any celebrations were subdued by a demanding electoral test on April 16, when close to one million Sarawak voters are eligible to vote in hotly contested state polls.
One of the biggest issues in the forthcoming Sarawak election is the level of income distribution, inequality and poverty in the state, or more specifically how many people have been left behind or totally left out in this resource-rich state. BN propaganda inevitably touches on how the official poverty rate in Sarawak has purportedly plunged during the Taib years to only around 5 per cent now. Take for example this piece in the BN’s SarawakReports.org: In the mid-1980s, Chief Minister Taib faced a Sarawak where nearly 32% of its population lived in poverty, a shocking statistic to anyone living in the Western world. In three decades of democratic leadership, Taib has helped pull his citizens out of the depths of destitution. Now only 5.3% of Sarawakians live in poverty. For comparison, that is less then half the amount of Americans who live below the poverty line, a startling feat. Less [Read more]