Word: sarawak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last hunter-gatherers in Asia. Once masters of a seemingly endless rain forest that covers Borneo, almost all of the 9,000 Penan have given up the struggle against what must once have seemed a ludicrous impossibility: that loggers would sweep through all but a tiny fraction of Sarawak's forests, polluting rivers, driving animals away and bulldozing the trees and plants that for centuries have served as the Penan's medicine cabinet, toolbox and larder. There are barely 200 fully nomadic Penan left: small groups of two or three families who refuse to build permanent settlements, cultivate crops...
...swirl of mystery surrounding his disappearance. Manser was, after all, a man who would do almost anything to get publicity for his cause. In 1996, he slid almost 3 km down a half-frozen funicular railway cable in Switzerland; three years later, he buzzed the capital of Malaysia's Sarawak province in a motorized hang glider. According to Roger Graf, who joined Manser in the mid-1980s to try to stop logging in Sarawak, where the tribe is based, all that's really certain is that Manser was very close to giving up on Sarawak and his Penan friends...
...Along is the last of his kind in the Penan community living near the confluence of the Limbang and Adang rivers near Sarawak's eastern border with Indonesia. Along has remained in the same area for more than a year, an eon for a nomadic Penan, but stubbornly refuses to move into one of the new villages inhabited by his tribesmen. His hope is that Manser will appear: this is the rendezvous spot mentioned in one of the Swiss friend's last messages...
...recognized at the border and turned back. The two men considered trying to swim across the Johor Straits, says his companion Jacques Christinet, but abandoned the plan when they realized the journey would involve a 25-km swim and passage through a swamp. A subsequent attempt to get into Sarawak by rowing a dingy from an Indonesian island had to be abandoned when Manser's campaign office, the Basel-based Bruno Manser Foundation, received a call from the Malaysian embassy warning him not to try. "Somehow they already knew exactly what we were planning," says Christinet, who now works...
...night. Christinet was almost crushed by floating logs and gashed his leg deeply on a branch. "You could see the muscle and there was a lot of blood," Christinet comments, "but Bruno sewed it for me with a needle and thread." The two men spent three weeks in Sarawak, most of it hiding from police. They also pursued an abortive attempt to order four tons of 25-cm nails for the Penan to hammer into tree trunks, Christinet says. Similar tactics were employed by antilogging groups in the U.S. during the 1990s, sometimes resulting in severe injuries to loggers when...