Women’s Candidacy Initiative | WCI demands for women’s rights to be represented in the Batang Ai By-Elections

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WCI demands for women’s rights to be represented in the Batang Ai By-Elections

By admin ⋅ April 2, 2009 ⋅

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Letter to the Editor
April 2, 2009

The recent political campaigns of the upcoming Batang Ai by-elections had generated much attention to the socio-political problems faced by the communities in Sarawak. It was reported that the State Land and Survey Department of Sarawak is currently conducting a census in Batang Ai resettlement area to resolve the long-standing issue of land titles.

Obviously, this census had come in too late. The communities in Batang Ai were displaced by the construction of the Batang Ai hydro-electric dam in 1982. It is only after 27 years the Sarawak government started to pay attention to this long-standing problem. Such action is likely to have mooted by the interest of the BN government to garner more votes in the 8 April Batang Ai by-elections.

Sex disaggregated data is needed. What of many situations that make women in Sarawak more vulnerable to poverty, conflict, displacement, abuse and rape? For the last few decades, the livelihood and social status of women in Sarawak have been largely affected or even threatened by logging, oil palm plantations, and hydroelectric dam construction. Their struggle to gain control of the non-timber forest products had often been ignored in the mainstream politics.

Among the problems they face, dispute over native customary land ownership is of paramount importance. Many tribal women have lost their ownership to their land because their customary rights to land were not recognized by the authorities. Even if land titles were given to the communities in resettlement area, often men were identified as the sole owner of the land.

With the 12 newly proposed hydro-electric dams project in Sarawak, the anticipated concerns of women would probably be the destruction to the environment, displacement of thousands of native people and its impact on the livelihood of the native women. Again, no proper consultancy with the communities has been carried out prior to the approval of these projects, this has rendered the whole planning and development process undemocratic and unaccountable to the affected communities especially the native women. At the same time, native women in Sarawak are also challenged by the problems in the area of registration of birth certificate, sexual assault, rape and violence.

Wong Yuen Mei and Angela Kuga Thas
Women’s Candidacy Initiative (WCI)