Mystery Cloaks Disappearance of Rain Forest Crusader

PA' TIK, Malaysia —  Deep in the Borneo rain forest, fingers of sunlight poke through the thick canopy of towering hardwood trees, glinting off moisture on the leaves of undergrowth ferns and diffusing into cool gray in the early morning mist.

Somewhere in this vast, leech-infested jungle, one of the world’s most prominent rain-forest crusaders has been missing for more than a year, and there is no official search for him.

The trees may be steadily falling to commercial loggers, but they still blanket tens of thousands of square miles. The embassy of Switzerland, the missing Bruno Manser’s country, says searching such a huge, tangled land would be fruitless.

Malaysia’s government shows no interest in mounting a search, since Manser is barred from entering the country, and it has no record showing that he is in it.

Only the indigenous Penan have looked for the man who long championed their efforts to halt the relentless logging of the forest, and they’ve found no sign of him.

“With every day that passes, the likelihood is fading that Bruno Manser will return to us,” officials from the Bruno Manser Fund said in a statement issued May 23, the first anniversary of the last day he was seen.

The former shepherd and bricklayer was last seen hiking into Sarawak to continue his activities on behalf of the Penan--a campaign that has been denounced as “the height of arrogance” by Malaysia’s long-ruling prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad.

Malaysia’s leaders are testy about criticism from Westerners over how the country is striving to build its economy. Rejecting accusations that logging is spoiling the environment, government officials and lumber companies say the industry produces $1.5 billion a year in revenues and supports 100,000 families.

They say they are willing to set aside some land for the small forest tribes like the Penan, but insist logging will go on as a benefit to far more Malaysians.

The Penan are among the world’s most isolated people. About 9,000 live in tiny settlements in the mountains of northeastern Sarawak, Malaysia’s largest chunk of Borneo, which it shares with Indonesia.

They hunt wild pigs and deer with spears and blowguns, and pick wild fruit. Some 300 live still more primitively, keeping on the move as forest nomads.

From Pa’ Tik, a base for several families when they are not in the forest, brown scars on surrounding mountains are evidence of landslides caused by logging. The Nelah river, which once provided the village with drinking water and fish, runs a murky red-brown from topsoil loosened by loggers.

Bruno Manser first saw this environment 15 years ago when he came to learn how to live off the land. He planned to stay three years. He stayed six.

“Bruno lived with the Penan inside the jungle,” said Melai Nah, Pa’ Tik’s head man. “He wanted to study and learn to live like the Penan. He followed the star of the Penan. He was not like other white men--he did not do bad things to the Penan.”

The Penan asked him to go back to the outside world and publicize their plight. “He was teaching us how to save the forest,” Melai said. “Bruno knows how to write and tell people to save the forest.”

When Manser walked out of the forest in 1990, he began campaigning to stop what he called irresponsible and illegal logging of land reserved for the Penan. He held news conferences in Europe, wrote a book about the tribe, founded a lobbying group and helped organize blockades of logging roads.

Some of the world’s largest logging companies operate in Sarawak, among them Limbang Trading Ltd., which is owned by Sarawak’s environment minister, James Wong.

Manser’s campaign rankled leaders in Sarawak, and he was banned from returning to Malaysia. But he defied the order in 1999 by walking more than 150 miles from the border of Kalimantan in neighboring Indonesia to reach the Penan region.

In March 1999 he tried to fly a motorized paraglider into the grounds of Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s mansion as a publicity stunt. He missed, but was detained and deported.

A year later, Manser again walked into Sarawak from Kalimantan. He got as far as the tiny settlement of Long Semirang. That was the last time he was seen, says the Bruno Manser Fund, the organization he founded in Basel, Switzerland.

Used to long periods without contact, Manser’s family waited six months before reporting him missing last November. Since then, the Penan have sent search parties looking for him, and a helicopter scanned an area around Batu Lawi, a mountain that Manser had said he wanted to climb.

Searchers have found no trace of Manser--no backpack or other equipment, and no remains.

John Kuenzli, a fund spokesman, said it was possible but unlikely that Manser had become lost or had an accident and, unable to reach help, had died. Manser knew the Penan’s pathways and his survival skills were well-honed--he could hunt with a blowgun and said once that he spoke the Penan language so fluently that he could think in it.

Some in Malaysian have speculated that Manser staged his disappearance and is being hidden by Penan friends so he can more easily organize anti-logging protests and document the lives of the tribe.

In Pa’ Tik, the Penan say they don’t know where Manser is.

“Maybe he is lost inside the jungle; maybe someone killed him,” said Ibrahim Nak, a Penan who took part in a search organized by the Bruno Manser Fund in December. “But Bruno already lived inside the jungle--for him it should not be dangerous.”

No official search has been made. “We have no information on him,” said Yusuf Nok, Sarawak’s acting police chief. “There is no request to search for him.”

Bernard Pillonel, charge d’affaires at the Swiss Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, said that if Manser was in Sarawak at all, he entered of his own free will and against the wishes of the Malaysian government. The Swiss government has not organized a search and will not ask Malaysia to help find him, he said.

“It is not reality to try to find him,” Pillonel said. “The area is as big as Switzerland. How can we find one guy? It is like searching for someone lost in the ocean. Nobody knows if he is alive--if he is even there in the bush.”

The fight that Manser made his cause continues.

A forest tribe won a court victory in May that its lawyers say could greatly enhance the rights of all Sarawak’s indigenous people in the more than 57,000 square miles of land covered by logging licenses.

Ruling on a case challenging a license, High Court Justice Ian Chin found that the Iban people of Rumah Nor had customary rights to a patch of virgin forest near their village in southeastern Sarawak.

The ruling for the first time gives common-law recognition to customary rights over primary rain forest, which under state laws have been strictly limited.

Baru Bian, the villagers’ lawyer, said the case sets a precedent that could apply to the Penan and other tribes, giving the indigenous peoples new powers to negotiate, and possibly veto, logging licenses.

The Sarawak government is appealing, and Baru predicts a hard fight because of the ruling’s potential consequences.

“It means that native customary rights existed prior to Sarawak law and survived all the rajahs and still exist today,” Baru said.