2/12/05 KUCHING, Malaysia (AFP) - Some 50 protesters representing indigenous communities all over Malaysia's Sarawak state, which is famous for its forests, called for an end to palm oil plantations and logging on their native lands.

Filing into an environmental conference being held here this week, the demonstrators brandished placards saying forests were being destroyed and indigenous communities were being stripped of their traditional livelihoods.

"Oil palm plantation and logging activities destroy communal forest," read one. "Our water resources are polluted by logging and oil palm plantations!" said another.

The demonstrators, some wearing orangutan face masks -- green groups say the animals habitats are being destroyed by logging and palm oil -- represented indigenous groups including the Iban, Penan and Kayan people.

"My land has been bulldozed, my land has been taken by oil palm companies," said Augustine Bagat, the president of Tahabat or the Sarawak Native Customary Land Rights Network which organised the protest.

Bagat, from a village north of the states capital Kuching which is in Malaysia's part of Borneo island, said he used to farm on his land, planting fruit trees and rice, but was forced to stop after plantations moved in in 2000.

Logging has caused silt runoff, polluting rivers, killing fish and sullying fertile land traditionally used for rice farming, Tahabat said in a statement.

"Those lands that have been removed of timber by the loggers are reiussed to companies for them to plant oil palm. To us this is yet another scourge," it said.

The demonstration was a slap in the face to the Sarawak government, which has tried this week to send a message that it is ensuring logging and palm oil cultivation is sustainable and benefits communities.

The states Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud has dismissed calls from the Sarawak Penan Association, which represents Penan tribal chiefs, for native customary rights to be recognized for the indigenous Penans.

He said those protesting for land rights were in the minority, and that most Penans wanted economic development and to be resettled into society.

"They are renegades. They are outcast by Penans themselves," Abdul Taib said of the association.

Indigenous groups say the state government is granting 60-year provisional licenses to log or cultivate palm oil on their native customary land without any consultation.

"The first thing they try to clear is their native traditional burial grounds," said Dominique Ho, a lawyer representing several Tahabat members in cases against palm oil companies.

"This is destruction of the proof necessary to prove their native customary rights," he said.