The UK’s most respected and established Environmental magazine, The Ecologist, has this week turned its attention to Chief Minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, with a major investigative article about his record in Sarawak.
In a devastating analysis it outlines Taib’s corruption and his lies about what has happened to the Borneo jungle and its people. Even more significantly, on the eve of the MoCS Red March, it writes about a discernible change in the mood in Sarawak and speaks of real hope of reform. This is not least because Taib’s decades of self-interested destruction and plunder have been well and truly exposed.
“Three decades of government land seizures, rampant logging and oil palm expansion has decimated Sarawak’s rainforest and disenfranchised its native population. Yet a seismic political shift is occurring, which represents real hope for Sarawak’s people and its beleaguered forests. Through the work of tireless activists, a reform movement is rapidly gaining ground and exposing the duplicity of the existing government, and its ‘Godfather’, the Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud”. [Ecologist Magazine]
International reputation in tatters
Taib is the man who earlier this year commissioned the discredited FBC Media to come in and do something for his international reputation. The $5 million dollar contract was supposed to get the Chief Minister and his policies positive publicity across global TV stations, international forums and blogs.
Amongst other things FBC Media launched a new site Sarawak Report(s) and placed articles in New Ledger, an online right-wing site in the US, which focused on undermining the investigations about corruption in our own blog, the real Sarawak Report. These articles attempted to paint Sarawak Report as being run by ’wild left-wingers’, instead of professional journalists, purely because of the Editor’s family connection with the former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
So, it will be doubly disheartening for Taib that not only has his dirty contract with FBC Media been exposed and shown to have entailed a large number of illegal activities on the part of that company, but that his latest critics in the Ecologist are distinctly linked to the Conservative Party instead.
Zac Goldsmith - the Conservative Party's foremost environment campaigner is the man behind The Ecologist
The Ecologist is owned and run by the long-time environmental campaigner Zac Goldsmith. Zac is an ex-Etonian, Conservative MP and belongs to an extremely wealthy family of businessmen. So no chance of using wild lefty accusations this time!
The truth is that all independent, onlookers, whatever their political connections, can only be appalled at the greed and theft that has been perpetrated by Taib upon his own land and his own people.
Taib was handed one of the world’s last remaining gems of nature and traditional culture and he couldn’t wait to cash it in – for himself. He may hang on to power by buying supporters, imprisoning critics and rigging elections, but Taib must now know that reputation is one of the things that cannot be bought. His will follow him to the grave and beyond as the man who put greed before responsibility, compassion and concern for the people he was entrusted to govern.
The Red March
The world is waking up to the fact that one of the worst environmental criminals of the past century is living and ruling in Sarawak. The world is also becoming aware of the growing volume of protest as brave people within Sarawak find the courage to challenge the old dictator over his corruption.
Tomorrow the world will also be watching as some of those protesters seek to exercise their right to freedom of speech and expression and march through Kuching. As usual the authorities are abusing their power by refusing permission and banning the Red Marchers. MoCS President Francis Siah, was arrested on arrival at the airport yesterday and told to present himself at the police station today. He is bravely determined to go ahead and urges everyone in Sarawak to find something red to wear tomorrow.
Taib should be careful what he does to these innocent people, who have such justified cause to protest. Because now the world is on to him – his reputation goes before him.
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