Leader

NST Leader: Uplifting the lot of indigenous people

In nations that accommodate sizeable indigenous populations, the narrative is almost always bleak: oppressive, unforgiving and tragic.

What is it about the plights of Native Americans, the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, some of the more familiar tribes, and even our own Orang Asli, that begs for attention beyond the pale? Evenly, indigenous peoples are confronted with poverty, incarceration, illness and other terrible abuses.

Worst, their homelands are invaded, thrashed and robbed despite heroics to stave greedy corporations, backed by political collaborators.

Indigenous people are unique: their socio-cultural tribe ancestral identities are tightly connected to the land and natural resources where they live, but now are steadily evicted from. Even ancestral burial grounds are ignominiously invaded and thrashed, mostly by loggers, evident in many reports published over the decades.

Our Orang Asli, which stands at 170,000-strong, have faced acute pressures in their social-economic and socio-cultural lives. Customary lands and heritage sites are under the risk of seizure.

Incursions into their land, unlike their counterparts in Sarawak and Sabah, do not need their official assent. Even ancient animist beliefs are being forcibly phased out.

Occasionally, an Orang Asli will make good: joining the ranks of the political class, international sports triumphs, military prowess and notch up the corporate ladder.

Ramli Nor won a Cameron Highlands seat as an Umno member in 2019, Now, his agenda of Orang Asli rights includes lobbying hard for the next director-general of the Department of Orang Asli Development (Jakoa) to be, well, an Orang Asli.

Sarawak and Sabah have fared much, much better than their distant cousins in the peninsula.

Why, some even ascent to become chief ministers and yet, their overall lives, while much improved over decades of government aid and assimilation, are still in peril, especially traditionalists who wish to retain the old ways.

Which comes to this latest government initiative: the Rural and Regional Development Ministry has approved a RM200 million road upgrading project in Orang Asli settlements in Kelantan, involving the Kuala Betis-Pos Balar and Pos Belatim-Kuala Betis-Pos Bihai routes in Gua Musang.

If this project is designed to uplift the community, neglected for eons, then it's well and good. Better roads, especially access to far interiors where many Orang Asli settlements thrive, imply a future of heightened economic activities.

Orang Asli can send their children to mainstream schools for better exposure and soak up the latest lifestyle trends and technology.

But be wary of potential hustlers capitalising on Orang Asli naiveté to take advantage of their ignorance and snatch more of their lands.

Jakoa and the wakil rakyat for these constituencies, Ramli Nor, in his mantle of influence in particular, will have to be doubly sure of no such interloping.

The already fragile Orang Asli ecosystem must be protected: they are after all Malaysians with rights, just like the rest of us.

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