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| Friday, 3 December 2004 |
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In Indonesia, a fighter for the people of the forest by Ian Timberlake
AFP - The sound of an insect can make Tumenggung Tarib weep. It happened once after he traded his customary loincloth for a shirt and trousers to fly the "big bird" from his Sumatran jungle home to the alien world of Jakarta. On a rare trip to the city to attend a traditional people's conference, a homesick Tarib went to a park, and that's when he heard it, the call of the Selengging, a thumbnail-sized bug found in Bukit Duabelas National Park, the home of Tarib's Rimba people. "I cried," Tarib said. "It was as if I was here." Millions of people all around Asia, from the northern edges of the Gobi desert to the depths of the Indonesian rainforest, live close to nature, like Tarib. But the traditions they follow, and their survival as a people, are under growing pressure from the competition for land as the continent's population expands. However, a few, like Tarib, are hanging on and trying to fight back. A lean, jovial man with only one front tooth, Tarib, aged "about 50," is a Rimba shaman anchored in the traditions of his home and the ways of the land, a place where many trees contain gods. So do some birds, snakes, elephants and tigers. He lives with his wife, Pelayang Sanggul, and one of his 12 children in a three-room raised wooden shack among the rubber and palm oil trees that are his weapons in the fight to preserve his people and their forest home. Across Indonesia, an area of forest at least the size of Israel or El Salvador is chopped down every year, according to the Centre for International Forestry Research. Legal and unauthorised logging, the opening of the land for farming, rubber and palm oil plantations, and the development of settlements are all to blame. The Rimba, who number in the few thousand, are one of several Indonesian forest communities, a drop in this vast country's 212 million population.
But now Tarib is using the same commercial weapons that have threatened his people to defend them. He earns money from the sale of rubber and palm oil products to buy land around his home on the edge of Bukit Duabelas, and so protect at least part of the Rimba's traditional land. Around 1996 - the Rimba have no concept of years - Tarib took his first steps as a commercial farmer, planting a forest of rubber trees between his home and the park itself to deter incursions into the jungle by people seeking to expand their fields. Money from the sale of his rubber and other forest products has since allowed Tarib to buy more land in a continuing effort to expand this protective shield around part of the forest that is home to him and the people he leads. "This is the rubber barrier," he says as he sweeps his arm around outside his shack, under which his grandchildren and several dogs seek shelter from the midday heat. "It is preventing people from going inside, but where there is no barrier, they can still go in," he says. "If there is no forest, what are we?" Tarib feels most at east in the forest, where bushes brush his bare legs as he moves through the rubber plantation. He wears only a green ring on his left hand and a loincloth as he shows off his jungle home, a five-hour journey over cratered roads from the south-central Sumatran city of Jambi. He lives in the forest but dons a shirt and pants when he travels into town to conduct the business that helps fund his struggle. Most of his income comes from the sale of rubber and palm oil products. With those earnings he buys more land - including palm oil plants owned by villagers adjacent to his rubber plantation - to further fortify his barrier. Tarib now has three hectares (7.4 acres) of oil palms and about 20 hectares of rubber, almost half of which are productive. Sale of the rubber and palm oil products earns Tarib about 3.5 million rupiah, or 380 dollars a month, a sum which would be the envy of many in a country where most people survive on one or two dollars a day. He seems to have nothing to show for his money except a pair of motorcycles for himself and his son. The rest of his earnings he ploughs back into the vegetation, buying more land, not just for himself but for his people. "What's important is cigarettes, food, and with what's left over I buy land," he says before heading home for a lunch of boiled porcupine and tuber soup. Tarib has twice traveled to other parts of the archipelago to represent his tribe at a conference of Indonesian indigenous peoples. In recognition of his efforts to protect the forest as head of the Rimba, the Indonesian environmental group Yayasan Kehati in 2000 presented him with its prestigious Kehati award. Tarib was born one of eight children to parents who died long ago and whose names, according to tradition, cannot be mentioned after death. His closeness to the land is at the core of his being. Ask about his home and Tarib talks long into the night, his face illuminated by an oil lamp casting a pinpoint glow in his eyes, his hair wavy black, lightly speckled grey, with a wisp of goatee and a moustache below. He chain-smokes Indonesian clove-scented cigarettes surrounded by his four grandsons in their loincloths and his son Ngangkuy, 25, who dozes beside him. "Every night he is hunting wild boar, so he hasn't been sleeping," Tarib explained, serenaded by chirping insects. Four of Tarib's 12 children have lived and died here. Seven others are grown and married while one still lives with him and his wife. "I love nature the same as a I love my own children," he says. "If there is no forest, what are we?" A towering green-topped trunk that stands out majestically among others just beyond Tarib's rubber plantation symbolizes what he is trying to save. The distant buzzing of a chainsaw used by migrant farmers symbolizes the threat. "That very tall tree. That's the jungle. That's the protected area. That's what we're protecting."
He names 10 trees which Rimba tradition says must not be felled. Pieces of bark from one tree known by the Rimba as Sengoriy are used during ceremonies to name the tribe's people. "So the name and soul are united with that tree." Chopping down the Sengoriy invokes a traditional penalty among the Rimba: a payment of 500 cloths, which are collected by Rimba women and highly prized. Wounding a tree requires the payment of 60 cloths. Today, however, the environment is under threat. The elephants are all gone from Bukit Duabelas because of the pressure on the land, explains Tarib, who leads 27 Rimba families. There are fewer sacred trees and fewer fish, pigs and flowers that can be used for their marriage ceremonies, he adds. "If these flowers aren't there, the gods won't come." That is why protecting the forest is so important to him, and why he will fight to protect it. The cultural laws were passed down from the ancestors, Tarib explains, his loud voice shattering the darkness. "You cannot change from the laws ... You absolutely cannot." |
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