By BENJAMIN LEE Tuesday, 25 Jul 2023
PETALING JAYA: Eight years ago, seven Orang Asli students who ran away from a boarding school in Kelantan were lost in a dense forest for 47 days, and only two were found – barely alive and badly emaciated.
Five others died in the ordeal.
Yesterday, their families found closure.
The government has agreed to a RM1.41mil settlement for the case, which saw the children, from SK Tohoi in Gua Musang, run away from the school hostel in August 2015 as they feared punishment. (…) Siti, who was supposed to be the trial’s first witness, said the settlement included RM60,000 in legal costs as well as another RM160,000 from insurance companies.
Found the longer backstory from the BBC back when the story broke: The runaway children Malaysia failed to save:
They decided to leave, they say, because some older children had been beaten by one of the teachers for swimming in the river and they feared they would be next. Norieen, her seven-year-old brother Haikal, Miksudiar, and four other girls aged between seven and nine all ran into the forest on the morning of 23 August.
The children chewed leaves but couldn’t find much else to eat. The only fruit they could reach proved hard and indigestible.
Then Norieen’s brother, Haikal, fell into the river as he was trying to drink and the other children were too weak to help him. “He just floated away,” says his mother, Midah Angah. “Most likely he quickly drowned.”
Meanwhile a seven-year-old girl, Juvina, broke her leg and could no longer walk. One evening she begged for food and the next morning Norieen woke up to find her lying dead next to her. Norieen took the younger girl to one side and covered her with leaves.
“She watched what happens to a dead body over a few days,” says Midah. “Flies landing on her eyes and mouth, her hair falling out and maggots crawling out of her. She saw so many terrible things.”
Ika, a nine-year-old girl, died of her injuries after she was impaled by bamboo in a fall from a steep river bank.
Linda, aged eight, somehow ended up in the water and it was this that eventually helped searchers find the survivors.
Just off the muddy track that leads from the school to the village, overlooking the Sungai Perias river, is one of those rare spots in the rainforest where you can get a mobile phone signal, and here, on 7 October - 45 days after the children disappeared - a logging truck driver pulled up to make a call.
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Those poor children.
There were allegations that the parents were made to hand their children over to the school without obtaining proper consent.
Our treatment of OA is truly horrendous.
And it really bothers me, specifically also as a Malay because the political rhetoric of past oppression provides no empathy or insight. I mean, I know why, and it’s not uncommon. (So common in fact I’m just nodding along to this paper: Postcolonial nationalism and the global right
Quoting a part of the abstract:
First, postcolonial nationalism is a prevalent strategy employed by authoritarian and conservative actors who mobilize subaltern identity in a US/Western dominated world to legitimate reactionary politics.
Secondly, while illiberal movements that appropriate the anti-colonial rhetoric purport to challenge the moral geography underpinning the liberal international order, they reproduce its essentializing, hierarchical, and racialized logics in reversing its value judgement.
Thirdly, the rise of the digital far right in the Global Easts and South provides a particularly productive lens through which to explore the transnationality of contemporary formulations of racism, anti-feminism, Islamophobia, and the “culture war” discourses.
“At least” Borneo indigenous is a significant enough political group to occasionally challenge the rhetoric but semenanjung OA? Haih.
The only OA tribe that is treated decently is the Mah Meri, that’s also due to the exposure.
I recently took the wrong road to Sg Pisang and ended up on a OA “settlement” that was next to the highway. Good lord, it was a depressing sight. There were no maintenance, rubbish were piled high, and one guy was sitting outside and staring blankly into space.
I remember this case, so glad that their families have finally gotten some closure. The treatment of Orang Asal in this country is just shameful.
Agree (btw TLDR of their various political discourse, but the agreement/practice now is Asal for Borneo, and Asli for Peninsula).
I can try to un-TLDR it but I’m not actually in the space so my recollection may be jank. What I do remember is that Asal was new and was pushed as a non-derogatory way to say indigenous instead of “aboriginal” that is implied to be negative here, but semenanjung OA really pushed back because they’ve claimed this as their identity. Kinda like what happened with Orang Ulu in Sarawak.
