The Sarawak Rainforest World Music Festival is a Sarawak government vehicle perpetuating a fairyland of a vast, ancient green cover with thriving biodiversity under the canopies.
And within the virgin forests, Sarawak natives are supposedly able to continue their traditional ways of live and play their rainforest-inspired music.
The TRUTH is, in the last quarter century, almost all the ancient forested land were not spared the chainsaw.
Commercial logging has impoverished the forest-dependent aborigines and caused UNRESOLVED land conflict with the loggers and authorities. Sadly, the natives invariably end up the losers.
Although timber resources are diminishing, greedy logging companies are not loosening their grip on the natives’ land. They are now converting the land into all sorts of plantation.
And guess what? These same perpetrators of forest crime are getting government loans to re-plant the degraded forests.
But the biggest headache is the aggressive advancement of oil palm plantation.
Millions of hectares are earmarked for oil palm expansion. Of the nearly 200 land dispute cases registered with the Sarawak High Court today, majority is related to oil palm development.
These constitute a systemic way of displacing and destroying indigenous culture celebrated by the RWMF.
RWMF is the epitomy of state hypocrisy!
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