Batang Ai, Sarawak: Jawah Gerang focuses on the interior

posted by din merican in Phnom Penh–April 6, 2009

Jawah focuses on the interior

Terence Netto in Lubok Antu, Sarawak
April 5, 2009

A Warrior for political liberation
As PKR’s Jawah Gerang worked the ground in the deep interior of the sprawling Batang Ai constituency bordering Indonesia’s Kalimantan, the BN was steadily eroding his stature in the main town of Lubok Antu with billboards trumpeting his past allegiance.

When BN’s big guns arrived from Kuala Lumpur yesterday, they flew by helicopter to the interior, driving home the same message of Jawah as being a recycled candidate in comparison with the novelty and high education of his opponent, Malcolm Mussen Lamoh.

Billboards carrying news report of Jawah under the headline ‘BN the only way, says Jawah’ first appeared in a prominent spot near the bridge over the Batang Ai river in Lubok Antu on Friday and by Saturday morning, another was seen on the approach to the border town.

The article and picture were from a Borneo Post edition of September 2007 that quoted Jawah as saying that only the BN could bring development to Sarawak under Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud.

“We have been trying to reach him in the interior to come to town to tell the press how things have changed between then and now,” said Paul Kadang, a PKR official helping out with the party’s election secretariat located in town.

But Jawah was unreachable. Variously reported as being in Ulu Sungai Engkari and Lemanak, areas deep in the interior where travel by boat takes several hours and risk is high that the craft may capsize from strong currents, Jawah was outside mobile phone contact.

In any case, it was debatable that if contacted, he would have seen the need to respond to the BN strategy of trying to get him to be hoist with his own petard. Disruptions to his carefully laid – and a tad secretively couched – plans to work the ground in the interior is not something this native of Sayat, one of the longhouses in Batang Ai, would apparently take kindly to.

Jawah, of course, does not have the benefit of helicopter-aided entry and exit from places in the deep interior, as all BN ministers, both federal and state, enjoyed when they descended on Batang Ai yesterday.

Jawah a ‘rethreaded’ candidate

They, especially incoming deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin when visiting Ulu Sungai Engkari by helicopter, wasted no time in describing Jawah as a ‘rethreaded’ candidate.

Jawah, 55, had been a five-term MP for Lubok Antu from 1987 to 2008, and as the Borneo Post article conveyed, a staunch supporter of the BN. He was not selected as the BN candidate in the 2008 general election, his place being taken by William Nyallau, who as an independent contested the Lubok Antu parliamentary seat against Jawah in the 2004 general election.

It’s no secret that in the 2004 election, Nyallau, a former Lubok Antu district officer, was backed by Parti Bumiputera Bersatu, dominant member of the ruling Sarawak BN coalition, with assistance from Parti Rakyat Sarawak, a splinter of the eventually deregistered Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak, to which Jawah belonged.

The twists and turns of intra-coalition politics in Sarawak have for long been known to throw up a dizzying variety of reincarnations of the same candidates over the course of several electoral contests. It is no surprise to find that in a span of at least two decades, a politician could contest in elections under the banner of three different parties, including a spot as an independent.

By comparison with this pattern of Sarawak politics, Jawah has been an oasis of conviction – through unwavering fidelity to PBDS when the party was in and out, and again, in the BN – in a desert of electoral opportunism.

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