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, Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud said the state was unable to achieve independence on its own in 1960s due to the political and security situation in the region at the time.
Taib said the plan on the formation of Malaysia was conveyed to him by the late Tunku Abdul Rahman (first prime minister), who did not want the people of Sabah and Sarawak to continue under a colonial government.
“We also wanted progress as we did not want to continue to be left behind, and it was only by joining Malaysia we could change the fate of our people,” he said
| Thousands are set to lose their homes, as a controversial hydro power scheme gets underway. In the Malaysian state of Sarawak, the Bakun Dam has already flooded an area the size of Singapore. Some of those displaced say they’ve never received the full compensation they were promised. The state government, working with Australian company Hydro Tasmania, is embarking on an ambitious plan to build a further 12 dams - flooding vast tracts of river valley land - and displacing tens of thousands of indigenous people. Both businesses are linked through Hamed Sepawi, who is the chairman of Sarawak Energy Board and Ta Ann. He is also a cousin and close business associate of the state’s Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud.Hydro Tasmania, an Australian state-owned energy company is involved with dam construction projects in Sarawak by the Sarawak Energy Board while Malaysian timber giant Ta Ann has received major timber harvesting contracts in Tasmania. Clare Rewcastle Brown, the sister-in-law of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, say there is a lack of accountability and transparency over the hydropower projects. Environmentalists and political activists in Malaysia and Australia are calling for the ‘unhealthy’ business ties between Tasmania and Sarawak to be investigated and audited by an independent body. The Malaysian government says the 20gigawatt project capacity can change the economic face of Sarawak and says its links with Hydro Tasmania are legitimate, while the companies involved deny any wrongdoing. Certain states are lagging behind other states as they are not working in tandem with the federal government, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak. The prime minister said the leaders of these states placed politics uppermost in their minds rather than the prosperity of the people. He said a good working relationship and understanding with the federal government were the hallmarks of Sabah and Sarawak's significant progress since gaining independence through the establishment of Malaysia 49 years ago. The decision made by the leaders of yesteryear in both states to join 11 other states in the Malay Peninsula to form Malaysia on September 16, 1963 became the foundation for today's success, he said at the Malaysia Day celebration at the old Bintulu airport site here tonight. "I think none of the people of Sarawak and Sabah today will say they have made a big mistake by joining Malaysia," he said. Najib said since the successful establishment of Malaysia, the people of the three regions had fought together to defend the country’s sovereignty. “There were people from Peninsula Malaysia who had shed blood to defend Sabah and Sarawak and not least the people from Sabah and Sarawak who died defending Peninsula Malaysia,” he said. He said the nation’s leaders in the early stages of independence had successfully kept their promises to ensure that Malaysia would persevere and remain sovereign, followed by post-independence leaders who fulfilled their promises to bring development to every corner of the country. “As for today’s leaders, our promise is that by the dawn of 2020, Malaysia will be declared a developed nation,” he said. Meanwhile Anderson’s firm has “recently identified 10 ready-to-go projects worth $90 billion, which would create nearly 1.5 million direct jobs.” So what are we waiting for, a good logo for these projects? Taib Mahmud’s $5million dollar a year ‘Cyber-war Campaign’ has conceded a humiliating defeat, with the final demise of the site ‘Sarawak Reports’. Sarawak Reports was part of a vicious network of internet sites, set up by the crooked UK-based production FBC Media, in a hired attempt to undermine this blog and to attack the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. By adopting a virtually identical name to our own, FBC clearly hoped they could confuse web-surfers into reading their pro-Taib propaganda, instead of our research into Taib’s 30 years of corrupt government. However, there is little evidence that readers were in fact fooled but this costly exercise. The site never dared to publish the handful of comments it received for its stories, which were little more than dreary ‘puff pieces’ praising Taib’s ‘progress and development’ policies. The site also carried a permanent section devoted to attacking the Editor of Sarawak Report and family members.
Collapse of Cyber-war campaign follows exposure of FBC Media After Sarawak Report started to investigate, the whole truth behind the scandal came out. We showed how FBC Media had commissioned a team of Republican bloggers in the States to write a series of attacking articles in a supposedly non-sponsored website called New Ledger.
These articles, by unheard of Americans, were then reproduced in Sarawak Reports as if they represented influential thinking in the US. Worse, we discovered a similar campaign was being carried out by the very same people against the opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, and this time the person who commissioned the attacks was the PM himself, Najib Razak! The scurrilous articles about Anwar, written for New Ledger by non-entities in the States, were being reproduced in a separate blog called Malaysia Watcher. Just this week the PM was forced to admit that his office has spent RM 84 million on such campaigns with FBC Media in just three years! We can now report that Malaysia Watcher is likewise no longer accessible.  Who is Rachel Motte? She stopped writing for New Ledger after we exposed the FBC-lined campaign Furthermore, since our exposes in late July, New Ledger has ceased publishing any stories about Malaysia, Sarawak Report or Anwar Ibrahim. In June approximately half of all the articles written for this supposedly US-focused website had consisted of attacks on Anwar and SR, which were then being reproduced in Malaysia Watcher and Sarawak Reports! Illegal TV programmes commissioned by Taib and Najib
Of course, the most sensational part of the whole affair has been the revelation that FBC also did deals with both Najib and Taib to place promotional TV films about them and about BN’s policies on some of the world’s most respected news channels, including the BBC and CNBC. FBC held production contracts for a number of supposedly objective news shows and documentary series and the company was illegally selling the airtime as advertising space for high-spending politicians and companies, including Malaysia and the palm oil industry. Sarawak Report even gained copies of the contract between FBC’s Chairman, Alan Friedman and Taib, in which the Chief Minister was promised a series of opportunities to improve his bad reputation on human rights and the environment.  “Let’s shake hands on it” – Najib has paid Alan Friedman’s FBC Media RM 84 million to break broadcasting rules in a series of TV “puff pieces” and interviews. One of these films, aired on CNBC’s World Business (a show produced by FBC Media), claimed that 80% of Sarawak’s forests have been left undamaged and untouched by Taib’s logging and oil palm plantations! After Sarawak Report broke the scandal, both BBC World and CNBC terminated all contracts with FBC Media, pending investigations. The UK regulatory authority Ofcom is also conducting a full-scale investigation into how politicians like Taib and Najib were able to spend millions of their own taxpayers’ money on such vanity TV projects, which was against broadcasting laws. So, the FBC Media expose has meant a set-back not just for Taib’s ‘Cyber Campaign’, but for his whole ‘Global Media Strategy’, into which he has poured millions of taxpayers’ hard earned money. Najib has likewise been exposed for the same misjudgement and complicity in the corruption of respected international TV stations, all at the enormous expense of public funds! What about CNN?
Sarawak Report and other news media in the UK and US are awaiting the final reports of Ofcom, The BBC and CNBC into these scandals. Meanwhile, the position of CNN still remains highly questionable. Because this station was also carrying programmes featuring Najib and other FBC clients at a time when FBC’s President, John Defterios was anchoring the relevant CNN shows and programmes. CNN has so far claimed that it is not prepared to investigate such placement of FBC clients on their shows or the connection with Mr Defterios, because it says John Defterios had already resigned from FBC when he became a staff presenter in March of this year. In fact the records show that Mr Defterios did not resign until 4 days AFTER our expose on FBC in Sarawak Report! Indeed, just three weeks previously he had aired a much-criticised interview with Najib Razak for CNN, letting him off far too lightly over the treatment of the Bersih rally, according to many commentators. Under US broadcasting laws any such conflicts of interest should be openly declared, whether or not the interested members of the production team are on contract or staff. For this reason Sarawak Reports is reporting CNN to Ofcom for its refusal to examine the potential corruption of its content by a current senior member of its staff. — Bernama |
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