KUCHING: A five-year legal fight by 31 Bidayuh families against the Sarawak government’s plan to acquire their native customary land in Upper Bengoh for a national park ended yesterday when a settlement was reached.

The state government signed a consent order yesterday morning to acknowledge that all the landowners in four villages — the 31 plaintiffs in the suit and another 204 who were not party to the legal action — had native customary rights (NCR)  to the 2,592ha of land the government had planned to acquire. The area is above the site of the 63-metre-high Bengoh Dam which will flood some 10 sq km of land when impounded.

The native Bidayuh are moving to the area because their original settlements have been taken over for the dam. They had also rejected the resettlement plots offered to them by the state government, in favour of the land above the reservoir area.

The state, however, had wanted to turn the area into part of the Bungo Range National Park, which would have limited their customary rights to the land and restricted their livelihood activities. The consent order, recorded by High Court judge Datuk Rhodzariah Bujang in chambers, brought to an end a case that was filed in October 2009.

“I’m so happy this legal fight had come to this conclusion,” Simo Sekam, the headman of Kampung Rejoi and first plaintiff in the case, said at the court complex in Petrajaya.

“I’m also happy because we didn’t give up even when things got rough,” the 53-year-old pastor said. “This win is a beautiful Christmas gift for us. It gives us a good excuse to have a good celebration this year and there’s no stopping us having a big one,” he said.

The villagers are planning for a bigger thanksgiving celebration next month.

In the consent order, the superintendent of Lands and Survey Kuching division and the Sarawak government acknowledged and recognised the 31 plaintiffs and other landowners of the four villages — Rejoi, Bojong, Taba Sait and Semban — and that they had acquired native customary rights to the land covering 2,592ha.

In the order too, the Land and Survey Department said it would carry out a perimeter survey to identify the boundary of the NCR land and to declare the land as native communal reserves, for agricultural purposes.

From the same order, Taba Sait and Bojong are to have customary privileges over an area in the Bungo Range National Park which the other two villages, Semban and Rejoi, already enjoyed after they were admitted by the Bungo National Park notification in 2010.

As part of the agreement, 54 landowners — the 31 plus another 23 — also agreed to withdraw their entitlement to the RM2.14 million that had been deposited with the court for the payment of compensation. — The Malaysian Insider

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on December 19, 2014.