Borneo Hosts Anything-Goes Sex Club

Killing Kittens, you may have heard, is not in Borneo. It is an exclusive members-only sex club run by and targeted at women and couples, and held in opulent splendour — a business that sells itself as a playpen for “the world’s sexual elite”. The business owner had chosen to profit from women by creating an environment for them to have sex with men. Read more about Killing Kittens here.

Now, the Sarawak government is like the Killing Kitten - also an exclusive members-only club, run by politicians who have chosen to profit from raping the fragile and beautiful rainforests. Twelve dams will cut through virgin land and displace thousands of native Dayak people,threatening rare animals and plants.

Teams from the China Three Gorges Project Corporation are at work on the first of the 12 new dams at Murum, deep in the interior, from where Sarawak’s great rivers uncoil towards the South China Sea. The state government says the dams are the first stage of a “corridor of renewable energy” that will create 1.5m jobs through industries powered by safe, clean hydro-electricity.

The dams would slice across a vast sweep of Sarawak, a place where wisps of cloud cling to remote, tree-clad peaks, huge butterflies flit through the foliage and orang-utans, sun bears and leopards roam.

Critics argue that Sarawak does not need more electricity. It produces a 20% surplus and there is as yet no cable to deliver power to peninsular Malaysia – which itself generates more energy than it needs.

Company records filed with the Malaysia stock exchange show that a big beneficiary of the policy is a firm whose shareholders and directors include the wife and family of Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak’s chief minister.

Taib, 72, who drives around in a vanilla Rolls-Royce, is one of the richest and most powerful men in Malaysian politics. He also serves as Sarawak’s finance minister and planning minister.

The family-owned firm, Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS), has interests in cement, construction, quarrying and road building. It has signed a memorandum of understanding with Rio Tinto, the London-listed mining group, to build a “world class” aluminium smelter that will get its electricity from a dam at Bakun.

The Bakun dam, a separate project due to be completed by 2011, has already displaced an estimated 10,000 indigenous people, leading to bitter legal battles and a chorus of dismay from economists about cost overruns.

Malaysia’s reinvigorated opposition is now campaigning against what it calls “crony capitalism”, helping hitherto powerless tribal peoples to challenge in the courts land grabs and cheating.

Campaigners are furious but appear powerless in the face of a project they fear will compound the devastation wreaked on Dayaks and native land by previous dam projects and the felling of its forests.

For now, Sarawak government is like an anything-goes sex club - sex in the open, narcissistic sex, loving sex, drunken sex, no-strings-attached sex; no blame, no guilt, no-holds-barred sex; basic, fluorescent, animalistic sex. And Sarawak Borneo is the playpen.

Until each of us use the power in our hands to change that.