Communities downstream of the Baleh Dam project have now been warned of the deadly danger facing them by the latest killer log-jam that has surged down the Rajang River towards the latest dam project to cause environmental havoc in the state.

This from Sarawak Energy who are behind the construction but claim the logging responsible for this death and destruction is nothing to do with them:

“If the situation continues, it will pose a significant risk to the project’s construction and the safety of downstream communities,” it said, adding that it has informed the relevant stakeholders including the authorities on the situation [Suluk Tawie, Yahoo News]

SEB goes on to claim that the Baleh Dam is a vitally needed infrastructure project to provide Sarawak sufficient energy for the future, which a plain untruth, since the state is over-provided with hydro-electric power it cannot use.

Back in 2010 it was the world’s worst ever log-jam on the Rajang River that focused Sarawak Report on its mission to explain who and what is to blame for the on-going destruction of a paradise on earth – the world’s oldest tropical jungle and the most bio-diverse reservoir of remaining life on the planet… until just recently.

The reason is simple: corruption and greed by the old men who seized power in the 70s and granted the licences to destroy to their business cronies, the Sibu logging family mafias.

Those family mafias have now extended their corrupt tentacles across the planet and are destroying Africa, South America, Siberia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and anywhere else where trees are growing, plantations can be started or oil extracted.

From Paradise On Earth to Hell On Earth

Their excuse is a political ‘vision’ to replace paradise on earth with hell on earth – a churning industrial landscape to create more cash, driven by rivers fed by dams. The consequences for plant, animal and human life have been appalling.

Sensitive development, education and modern medicine have been neglected in favour of heavily outdated, inappropriate ‘industrial progress’.

Taib Mahmud explained his own psychological sickness in driving such a ‘vision’ when he boasted to voters that he had acquired more money than he could ever spend – yet this mountain of useless, stolen cash is simply is not enough for him to rest or give up on stealing more.

Thus we are, twelve years on, with yet another appalling environmental catastrophe mauling the once pristine Rajang River and all the animals and plant life struggling to survive within it – yet another vast log-jam created by negligent licenced logging in the name of ‘progress’.

The Baleh Dam was always a sham. Sarawak is already over-loaded with over-sized and largely underused dams, Bakun, Murum and the others. The primary objective behind these projects, created in the name of ‘industrial progress’ in one of the most underpopulated wildernesses on the planet, was always valuable timber extraction.

Sarawak Report has documented the corruption behind the destruction many times over the past decade (search dam) whilst most of Malaysia has turned a blind eye. The profiteers were the country’s top politicians and their families and the indigenous people gained only poverty and hardship.

Ludicrous projections turning sleepy Sarawak into a hub of international manufacturing were put forward to justify the rape and plunder. Now these under-utilised and poorly built mega-projects have themselves become a hazard of immense proportions to those who live down river, a horrendous threat to the coming generation given that the best of dams are only built to last a hundred years.

And in the meantime this latest grotesque crisis caused by the exact same people for the exact same reasons now, according to the ageing deputy chief minister, threatens even great danger and damage than the previous disaster in the same place.

James Masing wants to see the anonymous loggers taken to task – everyone knows they are controlled by the Big Six timber mafia companies, but he doesn’t speak their names. The fact of the matter is that his government hired these wreckers to create the exact same conditions that have created all the other log-jams and mud slides in the name of building mega-dams that nobody in Sarawak needs.

This outcome was entirely predictable. It was licensed by his government. He must blame himself for joining the troupe of native leaders who abandoned their duty, abandoned their people and abandoned their country to join the greedy plunderers who have created this and every other disaster in Sarawak.

The people of Malaysia cannot continue to stand by and sanction these disasters across the nation which are without exception the product of policies designed to make the super-rich heads of states and politicians even richer, whilst ordinary folk lose their homes, are drowned out, lose their livelihoods and find themselves in the path of disastrous environmental catastrophes such as this latest horror now unfolding on the Rajang River.