Airing woes in defiance of S’wak authorities

COMMENT

 

The team from Radio Free Sarawak have had their first week back on air after their break from broadcasting and the general feedback is that although it has been exhausting the comeback was also fun.

RFS is a small outfit, broadcasting out of the United Kingdom in defiance of Sarawak’s licencing authorities. The station aims to pack a big punch.

The experienced journalists behind the show are managing a double workload, but loving the freedom of being able to chase real stories on merit, instead of churning out boring propaganda.

The existing state-approved Sarawak media only allows programmes which fawn over the elderly Chief Minister Taib Mahmud and his cronies and deny their opponents a fair platform.

So, RFS makes sure that the station covers all the issues that the Taib stations have been busy suppressing all these years and speaks frequently to the other political parties.

Land grabs, corruption and the many forms of oppression in Sarawak form a large part of the story.

These issues never get a hearing elsewhere and they are the daily concern of the poor people of the interior.

Grievances from people

But with RFS, its different. The most important part of the station’s remit is its commitment to airing the voices of the people themselves.

There are, of course, the interviews and debates with politicians and experts, but each day the show takes care to try and reach out to locals facing the issues on the ground.

It is important that these people feel empowered to speak out and become part of the national debate.
And it is important too for listeners to realise that people like them also have a voice that ought to be listened to.

This first week the show aired some of the villagers who are being pushed out of their homes by the Bengoh Dam and palmed off with compensation packages that turn out to be far less attractive than they were made to sound.

It is a story repeated all over the state.

Greedy Taib family

Another group of villagers who are being evicted from their lands to make way for a plantation which Taib has handed to his sister Raziah Mahmud were also given the chance to publicize their plight.

Greedy Raziah has acquired native land areas greater than the size of Singapore over the past few years.
One huge plantation has even been given out by Taib in the name of her (Raziah’s) socialite daughter, a girl in her early 20s.

In the week of yet another federal budget that took huge sums from Sarawak and handed little back, local people were also featured talking about their frustration over the failure to produce decent roads and development projects promised by their local elected representatives.

One such BN assemblyman had taken RM500,000 of public money to build a bridge (there is much mixing of contracting and politics in Sarawak), yet some eight years on not a stone has been turned.

No accountability

There is a shocking dearth of public accountability in Sarawak, of course.

But at least such people can now get named and shamed on Radio Free Sarawak!

Also, the outrageous dilapidation of the state’s medical service and the failure to produce enough decent public hospitals; the pernicious use of the Emergency Ordinance to arrest and banish ‘trouble-makers’ (i.e people who have been protesting about the seizure of their lands by Taib’s cronies) and the persistent failure to provide identity cards (MyKads) and voting rights to the people of the interior are all subjects that RFS has visited over the week and will continue to visit over coming months.

Of course a two hour daily show that tries to give a voice to the dispossessed can hardly redress the balance in a state where so much money and so many resources have been sucked into the pockets of a handful of people.

But, it is better than nothing and good fun, as I said before.

[Radio Free Sarawak can be heard daily from 6-8pm on 17560kHz (shortwave) and also via podcast available online on www.radiofreesarawak.org from about the same time.

Clare Rewcastle Brown is the editor/founder of Sarawak Report. She is also a FMT columnist.