By Mandy Leong, Hasnoor Hussein and Rozanna Latiff
SEMPORNA, Malaysia (Reuters) – Patches of palm thatch intertwined with a few abandoned piles jutting out of the emerald waters in a Malaysian marine park off the island of Borneo are the only remaining traces of the homes of hundreds of nomads marine.
Robin, one of those left homeless in a community that inspired the fictional ‘Metkayina’ tribe in the 2022 film ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’, boarded a boat with his children to flee Malay officials who destroyed his house.
“I don’t know where to go now,” he told Reuters from the deck of a wooden houseboat adorned with dry clothes, where he lives with a cousin and his eight children after the demolition campaign razed structures deemed illegal.
Its indigenous seafaring community, known as Bajau Laut, is famous for its ability to dive underwater for long periods without the aid of equipment.
They have lived in the area for centuries, but authorities still consider them immigrants, as most of them lack basic documentation to prove their names, ages and nationality.
Sometimes known as Sama Bajau in other parts of Southeast Asia, many face impoverished and precarious lives and are denied access to health, education or financial services without such documents.
“We can’t buy food because our gold pawn tickets were damaged during the demolition,” said Robin’s cousin Indasaini. “We don’t have money. The children are sick and we don’t have money to buy medicine.”
Malaysian authorities should take a more compassionate approach and consult the community before evictions or resettlements, said Vilashini Somiah, an anthropologist at the University of Malaya.
“These programs do not work because there is no consultation with them in which the community is recognized as people,” he said, referring to previous efforts.
Many sea nomads settled around islands in the Tun Sakaran Marine Park, popular with divers and tourists off the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah, but a crackdown on cross-border crime since June has demolished hundreds of houses.
Another reason for the campaign was national security concerns, as the waters of the Sulu archipelago, between Sabah and the southern Philippines, are a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf, a militant group known for piracy and state-linked kidnapping. Islamic.
Like many undocumented Bajau Laut, Robin has only one name and does not know his exact age. But he said he can trace his family’s history to the area, with his grandparents buried on an islet in the government-protected park.
To make a living, Robin said he used to fish and collect wood from the islands to sell on the mainland, but has not been able to do so since he was evicted.
GROWING SCRUTINY
Reuters was unable to verify Robin’s account, but state officials confirmed the campaign to expel trespassers from protected park areas in the Semporna district.
“The Sabah government will take all necessary measures to help,” Hajiji Noor, the state’s chief minister, told Reuters, adding that authorities had found another coastal area in Semporna to resettle the community.
A fifth of the approximately 28,000 Bajau Laut identified by the government in Sabah are Malaysian citizens, although analysts believe the figure could be higher.
The state is estimated to have one million undocumented residents, including stateless indigenous communities and economic migrants from the neighboring Philippines and Indonesia.
The Bajau Laut evictions come amid growing scrutiny over Malaysia’s treatment of migrants. In March, New York-based Human Rights Watch said authorities had detained about 45,000 undocumented people since May 2020.
The move has sparked outrage and debate in Malaysia, where some activists called for citizenship for the community to ensure better protection, although some expressed concern about national security.
Bilkuin Jimi Salih, 20, a Bajau Laut youth born in Sabah, said a Malaysian ID card was key to ensuring better education and job opportunities.
“I had a lot of ambitions… to become a police officer, a soldier, but I can’t because I don’t have documents,” said Bilkuin, who now teaches at Iskul Sama DiLaut, a non-governmental organization that educates stateless children. .
His efforts to build a career were hampered by the lack of a birth certificate and identity card, he added.
“It’s expensive to take a pregnant woman to the hospital and that’s how I realized why I wasn’t born in a hospital,” she added. “My family was too poor to afford it.”
However, obtaining citizenship can be difficult, Vilashini said, given the community’s disputed origins and a long history of disputes over resources between undocumented people and residents of one of Malaysia’s poorest states.
He urged authorities to better collaborate with the community to solve the problem, adding: “It has to be consensual, it has to be respectable.”
Without documents, life feels truly unfair, Bilkuin said. “We want to have documents so that… our children do not experience what we have gone through.”