Word: dayaks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...used to come to these parts in search of untouched rainforest and unadulterated indigenous life. His Into the Heart of Borneo recounts a 1983 attempt, with poet pal James Fenton, to "rediscover" the Borneo rhinoceros near Sarawak's mountainous border with Indonesia. O'Hanlon describes wild dance parties at Dayak longhouses, fueled by gallons of tuak, a potent milky rice wine, and enthuses about jaw-dropping tangles of tropical growth along the Rajang and its watery veins, some walled in by lush, 200-ft.-high (60 m) tree canopies...
...Dayak customs are disappearing fast as younger generations leave longhouses for logging jobs or work in the cities, growing accustomed to the comforts of an industrialized world - you'll see a thousand gray Astro satellite dishes around Belaga before marking a wild hornbill along the turbid Rajang. I sip limeades with Calvin at a riverfront café on my last night in town. He points to a weathered chieftain's tomb on the opposite bank, a wooden blur amid ferns and rubber and durian trees. The family hasn't maintained it for years, and restoration is unlikely. It's getting...
...assigned for logging whenever the government so decides. Logging generated almost $1 billion in revenue last year in a state with only 2 million inhabitants. With such huge sums at stake, bitter disputes?and occasional bloodshed?are inevitable. In 1997, police shot and killed a member of the Dayak tribe and wounded 15 others who were protesting the allocation of traditional land to a palm oil company. In 1999, enraged villagers massacred four heavies employed by a plantation company...
...pickup driver, a native Dayak called Jake, says the two-ton logging trucks, each loaded with four or five huge logs, make a combined total of 168 trips a day. Each time a truck passes them, the open bed of the pickup is enveloped in a choking cloud of yellow dust. Along buries his head in his wife's white T shirt. He keeps his head pressed down long after the truck has passed, and several others have taken its place, refusing to watch, clinging onto Iot's shoulders. Perhaps it is better that Bruno Manser disappeared: the logging trucks...
Meanwhile, in the far-flung islands of the archipelago, Indonesians are starting to thumb their noses at Jakarta. Squatters invade mines and plantations, nobody pays taxes, smuggling is rampant, and murders go unpunished. Since February, some Dayak tribesmen in central Kalimantan have kept the heads they cut off Madurese migrants as trophies of magic power. Indonesia has more than 1.2 million refugees from ethnic violence. Says sociologist Paulus Wirutomo: "There's a hate being kept alive in our culture. We have to get rid of this." Wahid tried but failed. And Megawati...