Baru Bian a Dayak leader in the making....

The delay, albeit brief, in BN's naming a candidate for theBa'Kelalan seat is being viewed in some quarters as confirmation that the PKR state chief and contestant for the seat, Baru Bian, is now endowed with the stature to which a Dayak leader has not ascended in more than two decades.

The conferment of this stature is vital to enabling this Native Customary Rights exponent to arrive at the level where the Dayak majority in the state would readily regard him as their leader, despite the disadvantage of him hailing from a small segment – Lun Bawang – of that majority's vast ethnic mosaic. Sarawak's Dayak community makes up 49 percent of the state's 2.3 million people. The Iban are the most numerous in this mosaic, followed by the Bidayuh, with the Orang Ulu, the cluster that groups the Lun Bawang, the smallest segment.

Intra-ethnic rivalry among the Dayak groups makes difficult the task of finding a leader of trans-ethnic appeal and unifying capability. The Dayaks have not had one since Stephen Kalong Ningkan was chief minister for the first three years of Sarawak's merger with the federation in the 1960s. Since his ouster in 1966, the community has struggled to find a leader with the stature and capability to lead them to a position of political primacy in the state's complex racial equation.

When the Sarawak Progressive Democratic Party, a BN component, named Willie Liaw as their candidate for Ba'Kelalan, a day after the full BN list was unveiled last Sunday, the delay reflected their caution over fielding a candidate with 'winnable' attributes.

Reputedly, the BN had been mulling a list of three candidates which included a lawyer, Libat Langub, who it is said was reckoned as having more 'winnable' form than the eventual pick. But Libat, apparently, was reluctant to take on Baru because both enjoy ties of kinship and mutual help that would be unnecessarily affected by a political contest between the two.

To be sure, clan and family ties cut a broad and complicated swath across the small Lun Bawang community in the northern corner of Sarawak.

The common thread that binds them is membership in the Sidang Injil Borneo (Borneo Evangelical Mission), a fervent Christian denomination that is said to be pervasive in its hold on the Lun Bawang.

Top land lawyer

But politics is one of life's necessities and not even the fervour of Christian evangelism can be expected to obviate the need for people to own up to a political affiliation.

So once the BN decided that Nelson Balan Rining, the incumbent state assemblyperson for Ba'Kelalan, was not suitable because he has fallen down on the 'winnable' attributes, the coalition were faced with a tough task finding someone with the heft to dent the nimbus that has accumulated around Baru Bian.

Baru, 53, had in the last decade steadily risen to the status of top lawyer espousing the community's NCR cases which has become the foremost issue among the Dayaks. He has appeared in something like 200 cases over the years, a fact that has given him prominence in the community and in a state that has been held in some kind of hypnotic thrall by Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, whose political longevity is unparalleled and whose rumoured wealth is legendary.

In these circumstances, it is an unlikely scenario that a lawyer from a segment of the smallest ethnicity in the Dayak mosaic could rise to challenge Taib's suzerainty over Sarawak politics. Hence the delay in announcing the BN candidate is being viewed as a tell-tale sign among evangelical Christians of how great a matter a little fire can kindle, as biblical language goes.- terence netto

source:malaysiakini







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