Much of the logging carried out in 2000 was through community cooperatives.^[16] Many communities along the northern periphery of the national park belong to a cooperative with several others, often outside desa (administrative village) boundaries, while a few communities are independent, such as those dealing with the oil palm company in the Badau district. The alleged aim of these cooperatives has been to facilitate joint development projects among the member communities, but so far the only activity that cooperatives have engaged in has been logging. However, in the future, when all the marketable timber is gone, they may shift to plantation crops.

Cooperatives appear to vary in organisation between two general types: ‘directly liaised’ and ‘indirectly liaised’ with timber companies and/or their contractors.^[17] The ‘directly liaised’ cooperatives have included several communities organised by educated residents, often the kepala desa (administrative village head) and kepala dusun (administrative sub-village head) or other resident leaders. These people negotiate and work with timber company representatives and their contractors when the logging begins. They receive modest commissions and honoraria (the latter being something carried over from the earlier concession system). They work with close relatives in the government to ease the process of obtaining certain permits, and these civil servants also receive modest commissions.^[18] These cooperative leaders have said that, under the new system, they can shop around and look for the best deal for their communities.

The ‘indirectly liaised’ cooperatives have been organised by local educated élites. These liaisons are not resident in the cooperative communities, even though they have kin ties. Some of them have prior ties to the timber industry and all have good connections in local, regional and provincial government; some even have close, pre-existing kin and business ties to timber company bosses in Malaysia. These liaisons have served as gatekeepers, even more so than their counterparts in the ‘directly liaised’ cooperatives. They control cooperative members’ access to information and to the timber company representatives and contractors. The process has thus been less open, and their fees and commissions much higher.^[19] Some have also received salaries from the timber companies — in one case to the value of Rp1.5 million (US$180).

The forests being logged have been mainly along the northern periphery of the national park, and in some cases into the northern buffer zone. Timber cutting has also occurred within the park. Most of the logging crews come from Sambas on two-month contracts; the workers are Malay and their overseers are Sambas Chinese who have their own business and family connections with the Malaysian tukei. For the most part, locals have not been hired, although in one case local Iban women were being trained as scalers, while some men have worked as truck drivers or tractor operators. One of the main reasons for the lack of locals in the work force is not because the tukei have refused to hire them, but rather that the locals were used (even before krismon) to getting much higher pay in Malaysia, often working at the same jobs. Sambas crews have been cheaper for the tukei.

The main method of logging in 2000 may be an excellent example of low-impact timber harvesting, with the heaviest machinery being chainsaws and bicycles. Sawyers fell selected trees and cut them into balok.^[20] These beams are then loaded onto bicycles that are heavily reinforced, each having two front forks made and welded by the bike owners themselves. The bicycles, carrying one or two beams on either side, are pushed along a track from the cutting site to the main road (in the north of the park) or waterway (in the eastern part). The track is made of a small-diameter roundwood frame about a metre and a half wide, on which are laid two tracks of end-to-end planks (each 10–13 cm wide). The worker walks along one track while pushing the laden bicycle along the other. After the beams have been unloaded, the worker pedals the bicycle back to the cutting site, skilfully balancing along a single track without putting his feet down.^[21] The balok are transported by truck along the government road and across the border into Sarawak along the very same route used for centuries. (This was before sawmills along the road were fully operational — now rough-milled lumber is being carried instead of balok.)

Cooperatives receive commissions for the wood cut in their forests. The commission promised to one cooperative was Rp25 000 per ton (US$2.52 per cubic metre), while another was given 20 Malaysian ringgit per ton (US$4.46 per cubic metre).^[22] The difference here was due to the distance to the border, and thus higher transport costs from the first cooperative. In the first case they were paid Rp1.5 million (US$180) for about 70 cubic metres. Four men who worked as community representatives with the outside liaison received Rp850 000 (US$100) to divide among themselves. The principal community representative was given an under-the-table fee for his continued good service — a practice reminiscent of the honoraria given to community leaders under the old concession system.

These fees and commissions were certainly much more than communities had ever received from logging companies in the past — locals are still bitter about their lack of profit from past logging. Once taken across the border, however, the balok are milled and exported to Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the cooperative’s commissions amount to about one per cent of the prices realised by Malaysian lumber exporters (US$340 per cubic metre on average).^[23]

There are some curious features about these community cooperatives: all appeared to have proper permits issued through the regional office for development cooperatives, but there was no indication that logging profits were divided among the member communities — rather, each community appeared to be acting independently and receiving independent commissions. Additionally, in at least one case of heated disputes between communities over forest land, the disputing communities belonged to the same cooperative! This evidence suggests that timber companies and their local liaisons have been using the cooperative permitting system and ‘politically correct’ rhetoric about community cooperatives to gain access to forest now in the hands of communities.

In the past, communities located within the concessions had little power over their forests. Since 1998 even Indonesian timber companies with concessions elsewhere in the province have hired community negotiators and public relations officers to deal with local community demands for more compensation. In the national park area, one community negotiated 11 times with the oil palm company (involved in timber cutting) to improve the conditions of their agreement (personal communication, R. Dennis, October 1999). With all but one concession having been terminated, both foreign and domestic timber companies have had to cooperate more publicly with local communities, and cooperatives have been the way in which to do this. Locals see cooperatives as a means to derive some benefit from the forests that have in the past, and might again, become alienated from their control (McCarthy 2000: 9).

Each cooperative has had a permit for establishing itself, and those engaged in logging claimed to have permits from the Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops, but few permits conformed to existing regulations for legal timber cutting. Those building sawmills (some very small operations, others very large) have claimed to have permits from the Department of Industry. I have only seen cooperative permits, although some cooperatives may indeed have had forestry and industry licences as well. Local businessmen said it was the lack of permits from the Ministry of Trade to export the wood across the border into Malaysia that made the logging ‘illegal’. They said it was not illegal logging per se, but illegal export, and the reasons for this lay with the de facto regional autonomy.

The power vacuum created since the fall of Suharto has led to a de facto regional autonomy, with regional and local officials being reluctant or unwilling to implement and enforce existing regulations.^[24] This has resulted in what local people (and especially local businessmen) have seen as greatly increased corruption (Indonesian Observer, 26 November 2000). One businessman claimed that his cooperative lacked a trade permit because he and his tukei refused to pay a bribe of Rp15 million (US$1 775) to the Pontianak trade office issuing the permit.

The tukei and their liaisons were said to regularly pay off local police, military, camat (sub-district heads) and even officials in the bupati’s office. In exchange these civil servants turned a blind eye to the logging and daily export of wood across the border and would act surprised whenever a reporter arrived to ask them about the logging. Some local residents unconnected to logging have been increasingly bitter about this corruption. Again they see the wealth of their forests (and in some cases the land itself) going to outsiders, despite increased community involvement in the process. Some have also been angry over what they saw as duplicity on the part of the oil palm company, which promised plantations but was only contracting out for logging.

A local businessman described the situation this way: in the past, under the old concession system, it was your connections to power — to Jakarta — that determined the granting of a concession. Since krismon, with government in disarray, it has been the bold and the berani who have been favoured, those willing to ignore the rules and pay off local officials. In the past, logging that was unauthorised by the central state would have been shut down quickly. However, there now is evidence to the contrary, with local and foreign businessmen taking advantage of government disorganisation and increased corruption, and in at least some cases, the currently popular cooperatives.

In 2000, local residents and businessmen were looking forward to formal regional autonomy, but they said the cost of doing business would increase with even greater corruption. The potential for severe environmental degradation also appeared to be a consistent worry associated with formal autonomy, as was the potential conflict over its implementation and meaning.^[25] Logging has continued at its current accelerated pace, with operations expanding into areas further from the border, and particularly along the main government road. In 2000, some ‘indirectly liaised’ cooperatives were looking to expand to communities beyond the Embaloh River and into the Kapuas. Once most of the marketable timber has been cut (and most agree there is currently enough for five years), conversion to oil palm plantations would likely follow.

Under the new system, local communities have been more emboldened and empowered to deal independently with economic change. However, the way this has been done has divided some communities (for example, between those who do and do not want to participate in an oil palm scheme), and it has in some cases led to the realignment of local communities’ territorial boundaries.^[26] There have been a number of community disputes over forests since this logging boom began. In at least one case, the dispute was over forest land that had never been part of any traditional community territory. In some instances, the disputes were settled by a cockfight, with the winning community gaining possession of the disputed land and forest. Locals recognised all this as a rush to make claims on timbered land so that they would receive a portion of the logging profits.^[27]

A dispute between the Iban communities of Lanting and Kelayang^[28] on the lower Leboyan River began when men from Kelayang confiscated three chainsaws belonging to workers cutting timber on what the loggers took to be Lanting land. Kelayang residents claimed that the timber cutting went beyond Lanting boundaries and into their own land. Residents of Lanting denied these claims, saying the area being cut was well within their community territory. Subsequently, Kelayang residents used red paint to mark trees along what they claimed was their boundary, but Lanting did not agree with this. Further, Kelayang was making use of maps drawn under a conservation project’s community-mapping program, although in this instance, Lanting was not consulted about the original map-making program.

An attempt was made to settle the case in a meeting at Kelayang, where the kepala desa resides. The confiscated chainsaws were returned after being redeemed with money by the loggers, but no agreement on the boundary could be reached as Lanting felt the boundary set by Kelayang took away too much of Lanting’s land. Because this case could not be settled by the communities themselves, it was taken to the next highest level of adat adjudication; the Iban temenggong of Kecamatan Batang Lupar. If no agreement could be reached, both parties agreed to a traditional cockfight to finally settle the issue.

There has also been a heated dispute to the north of Danau Sentarum National Park between two other Iban communities. In late 1998, Sarawak tukei began working with people from one longhouse (without a written agreement) to cut forests that the community claimed as its own. The people of the other longhouse claimed otherwise, and this eventually led the two communities to settle the matter by a cockfight in April 2000. The first community lost the match and its claims on the forest. The dispute over this land (which had never really been part of the traditional territory of either community) has created a good deal of bitterness on both sides.

In another case, one community refused to cooperate with logging operations, and the tukei deliberately created trouble between this community and another more cooperative community. The tukei gave shotgun shells to people from the cooperating longhouse in order to intimidate their neighbour. People from the first longhouse became aware of this situation and fired shotguns at the sawmill camp owned by the tukei and located near the cooperating longhouse. Several people from the first community wrote a letter rejecting such foreign intrusions and submitted it to government officials with the stipulation that they would act alone if the government did not deal with the problem.^[29]

These disputes have been damaging to relations between often closely related communities. During post-harvest rituals, for example, one community normally invites related longhouses to attend, and this has important social and economic integrative functions (Dove 1988). After all this, however, people from disputing communities will be reluctant to attend each other’s rituals, and in the case of Lanting and Kelayang, people from the former community have been delayed in building a new longhouse because the present boundary problem has not yet been settled. Unsettled disputes are said to produce supernaturally hot (angat) conditions, and ritually sensitive activities such as house building must be avoided during such times. Close kin relations have been (temporarily?) attenuated over access to valuable timber, with at best mediocre compensation.

This logging activity has further challenged the exclusivity of the Indonesian–Malaysian border,^[30]yet locals were of the strong opinion that nothing would be done because local government officials, military and police are paid off by the timber bosses or their representatives. Occasional news reports of ‘illegal’ logging and smuggling of cut timber have appeared in the national and regional press, but efforts to prevent it have tended to be very meagre.^[31] Along with other cross-border activity, this ‘illegal’ logging has threatened to lead to international disputes between Indonesia and Malaysia.^[32]

There have been cooperative Indonesian–Malaysian efforts to survey the border to show whether or not cutting by Malaysians was illegal.^[33] In addition, plans to open an official border post at Nanga Badau might help to prevent illegal exports and may encourage taxing of goods going across the border; on the other hand, it might also lead to increased corruption.^[34]