Penan nomad Pajak Beto and his six family members trekked for two weeks through the Baram forests before arriving at Batu Bungan village in the Mulu National Park late that evening.
Pajak had heard that a National Registration Department (NRD) team was carrying out a special exercise to register the Penan to enable them to be issued birth certificates and identity cards.
Despite his fear that the government would arrest him because of the series of anti-logging Penan blockades, he took his chances and was rewarded when his family members were eventually recognised as Malaysian citizens after a long process.
That was the story I wrote in the NST 25 years ago when I interviewed the illiterate chief at Batu Bungan at a time when there were at least 2,000 Penan who were without ICs and birth certificates.
So it was interesting to read recently in the New Sarawak Tribune that Sarawak’s Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development Minister Datuk Seri Fatimah Abdullah saying that she was happy the Home Affairs Ministry was giving special attention to Sarawakians when it came to processing these important documents.
She even praised the special task force handling citizenship, which was set up by former Deputy Prime Minister Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, who in 2017 shot down the Opposition party’s allegations there were 200,000 stateless people in the country and the actual figure was 2,500.
Now, is this figure of 2,500 stateless people correct? I believe that this figure is grossly deflated.
My guess is based on the fact that the NRD has done a reasonably good job registering the Penan. But even so, there could still be at least 1,000 people waiting for their ICs.
And what about the stateless Sabah natives and, Orang Asli, Indians, Chinese in the peninsular?
Add them up and the figure of stateless Malaysians could be in the thousands.
As a frequent traveller to Baram, I have discovered that obtaining these important documents continue to be an issue with the Penan because of government red-tape.
As a result, some native children can attend school up till Form Five and then find that they are not eligible to sit for end-of-the-year exams because at least one of the parents is stateless.
A Penan friend told me: “It’s like this. If the father has a blue IC but the mother is stateless, the child suffers.
“If the mother wants to ensure that her son or daughter completes his or her education, she has to travel all the way to Batu Bungan or go by MASwings flight to Marudi to the district office.
“She has to pay for her ticket and on arrival in Marudi, has to find accommodation. If she has no relatives to stay with, she can stay at the Rumah Sakai Penan rest house, which is in an appalling condition – no beds and if there were mattresses, it would be infected with bed bugs.”
Even when I visited Marudi 18 months ago, I found the Rumah Sakai in bad shape. I did not check out one discoloured thin foam mattress rolled up in a corner.
Another problem is the “red tape” where applicants have to show proof that they were born in the jungles of Sarawak and not Indonesia.
If the applicant cannot show proof of her birth place, she has to contact the village chief – if he is available – and get him to verify she was born in Sarawak.
This means, she has to fly back to Long Seridan and search “high and low” for the chief hoping to find him before returning to Marudi!
Last year during my last visit to Long Seridan, west of Mulu and the homeland of nomadic Penan like Pajak Bato, I found there were at least 100 men, women and children urgently seeking identification papers.
In 2017, Sarawak decided to venture out of the Penan realm and to reach out to suburban schools to register non-Penan stateless children.
Fatimah said the special task force outreach programme went to the schools as the headmasters felt the number of stateless including natives, Melanau and Malay was “quite substantial”.
Back to the Penan, I wonder if the task force has ever visited the dozens of primary schools in the isolated regions in recent times.
Mind you, the Penan population has grown from 16,000 in the 2000s to almost 20,000 out of which 40 per cent are people under the age of 18.
I also wonder if there is a plan to do non-religious “outreach work” among the other tribal communities such as the Iban, Orang Ulu, Melanau and Bidayuh who have a similar problem?
In the meantime in the pandemonium to solve the rabies outbreak, the councils around Kuching division have come up with a novel scheme to provide dogs with ICs.
Yes, owners of dogs have to photograph their pets – face and body length – and give details of the canine such as where it was neutered, whether it had its anti-rabies jabs and the relevant vaccinations.
Maybe, short of what the tribal peoples have to go through, I wonder if the next phase would be to identify the breed – stray or pedigree – and ancestry of the canine?
What if the “pet” was a stray you rescued? How would you know if its father was the Indonesian stray that started the rabies outbreak in Balai Ringin two years ago?
In any case, it’s a noble effort but I wonder how many poor people would pay RM200 to register their quota of the three starving strays?
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
