The King is dead; long live the Sultan

The region has lost one ruler but gained another. On the day after the worlds longest reigning monarch, King Bhumibol of Thailand passed away, here in neighbouring Malaysia a new Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Supreme Lord) was elected.
Following the mysterious assassination of his elder brother 70 years ago, Bhumibol Adulyadej became the King of Siam; but his resemblance to Yul Brynner was not easy to spot.

In Malaysia we have a new Agong but isn't an elected monarchy an oxymoron? not when you have a superabundance of rulers. The nine sultans who preside over most (but not all) of peninsular Malaysia take it in turns to sit on the big throne and rotate every 5 years. As it is not seemly for any of them to lose an election, they go in a set order and Muhammad V of Kelantan is the country's new ruler.

Kelantan is to the east of Perak, where we live, and has its northern border with the part of Thailand where Muslim separatists set off bombs on a daily basis. But the fighting in kelantan which has been in the news recently is a stand off between loggers and orang asli, the indigenous peoples.
On any journey along the expressway we overtake lorries lugging giant trunks of hardwood and wonder where yet more rainforest has been cleared to make way for the ubiquitous palm oil plantations. For us it is a saddening sight; for the orang asli it is the destruction of their way of life, as they have lived in and lived off the forests before even the Malays arrived in the country.

So in Gua Musang the orang asli took matters into their own hands and built a barricade to block the loggers from taking the timber out of the forest which they describe as their ancestral land.

It is estimated that 40% of the nations timber is cut down illegally, either poached or through corrupt officials. Last year 8 Kelantan Forestry Department officers were arrested for taking large bribes from a logging contractor, but the current operators have a legal concession to harvest the trees. In a bizarre twist the villagers have been hoist with their own petard. While their own barricade has been cut down by loggers with chainsaws, they have now been

blockaded in themselves with Forestry personnel preventing outsiders, such as a lawyer who is trying to represent them, from having access to the track that leads to their village.

The root of the problem is the actions of the Kelantan state government in awarding logging concessions with little regard to the environment or to the needs of the indigenous people. The Federal Government has a committee on indigenous land rights but, while other states have followed its suggestions, its leader has said that they have hit a wall with Kelantan. The wonderfully named Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (abbreviated to C4) found that logging activities are the main source of income for the state and that this is unsustainable, as well as lacking transparency and being prone to corruption.

So now that Muhammad V has become the the country's ruler as well as the Sultan of Kelantan will the 9,800 hectares of land approved to be gazetted as orang asli reserves actually happen? I wouldn't hold your breath.