In Fight for Malaysian Forest, Can Activists Replicate a Win?
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25 December 2021 20:42 WIB
The Game Plan
The PHSKLU coalition doesn’t only include environmentalists and indigenous rights groups; it also comprises the performing arts collective Five Arts Centre, the youth activist group MISI Solidariti and rights group SUARAM, with a total of 17 organisations. This diversity, according to June Tan, a producer affiliated with the Five Arts Centre, has enabled the coalition to pursue a “multi-pronged strategy”.
“The conversations [at our meetings] are very rich because the different groups have different audiences and different access to resources,” Tan says.
In a typical coalition meeting, members discuss the media, policy, politics, and tactics to access powerful people and institutions, she adds.
The groups within PHSKLU are also diverse in age range. Older members gather facts and figures, while younger members devise creative campaigns. MISI Solidariti created an interactive campaign called “Postcards From Tomorrow”, which encouraged people to send digital and physical postcards voicing opposition to the degazettement to the Selangor chief minister.
An aide for Selangor chief minister Amirudin Shari (left) meets Klima Action Malaysia campaigner Nicole Fong outside the Selangor State Secretariat in September 2021. PHSKLU
Back in Shah Alam, the SACF Society has taken note of these tactics. “In the KLNFR, we saw community groups of various interests—not just environment—supporting the cause,” Teoh says. “I believe it’s because climate change concerns have made more people aware of the urgent need to protect our remaining forests to mitigate the impacts of global temperature rise.”
The mainstreaming of the climate crisis in Malaysia is a factor the PHSKLU coalition also recognise as a factor in their success. “A lot more people care about environmental issues,” says Nicole Fong, a 26-year-old campaigner with Klima Action Malaysia, a youth-led climate justice group. “It’s become normal to bring it up and to talk about it with your friends or community or network.”
The growing popularity of environmental issues was evident in the immediate backlash generated by news of KLNFR’s first proposal for degazettement in February 2020. That month, the Coalition for the Protection of Selangor’s Forests gathered 14,422 individual objection letters and 29,080 signatures through an online petition in just 20 days.
Public sentiment remained in favour of saving the forest, with over 100,000 people signing a Change.org petition to scrap the development plan. Tan, the producer and activist, says supporters of the campaign sent about a thousand emails to Selangor state lawmakers demanding to know if they supported or rejected the degazettement.
The following November, several state assembly members pledged their support for the campaign, after which the state legislature voted unanimously to preserve the forest.
This massive support gives Teoh hope that the Shah Alam Community Forest can be defended: “We have learned [from KLFNR] that when the public rallies together in a concerted effort to protect a forest, it can be saved.”
Deborah Germaine Augustin, Newnaratif.com
(This article is produced as a part of the SEAFORE ASEAN Masterclass project, with support from IWPR)
