Taib’s alleged empire was the focus of the London duo’s operations. — file pic
The tabloid revealed yesterday that Claire Rewcastle Brown is also the author of Sarawak Report, until now an anonymous blog that targets the Barisan Nasional (BN) government in the state and receives 18,000 hits a day.
The daily said that Rewcastle Brown and Peter John Jaban, known as Papa Orang Utan by his listeners, have decided to reveal their identities ahead of state polls that are expected to be held in April.
Her work, she said, is about “giving the 2.5 million oppressed people of Sarawak a choice.”
Rewcastle Brown, 51, was born in Sarawak to British parents before the former British colony was handed over to Malaysia, lived in the region until the age of eight, said the paper.
The unlikely duo broadcast from a flat above a restaurant in Covent Garden, located in the heart of London, to Sarawak, over 10,000km away.
Their aim is no less outlandish: To expose the alleged corruption of Abdul Taib, who has ruled over Sarawak for 30 years.
The London Evening Standard visited their studio where the tattooed tribesman Jaban was interviewing a village headman who has been forcibly removed from his land and was speaking to them on a mobile phone from the edge of the Borneo rainforest.
Rewcastle Brown briefed Jaban: “Make sure you ask if he knows that it’s chief minister Taib who has stolen their land? And get who he’ll be voting for!”
The paper said that the two had kept their identities secret over fears that Taib, 74, said to be one of the world’s most ruthless and wealthiest men — richer allegedly than the Sultan of Brunei, whose independent country lies alongside — would seek them out with “the full force of his retribution.”
“English is still the unifying language in Sarawak and I use my blog and broadcasts to expose the outrageous deforestation which has seen 95 per cent of Sarawak’s rainforest cut down and replaced by logging and palm oil plantations which have enriched Taib and his family,” Rewcastle Brown said.
“What’s more, my investigations indicate some of the Taib family money is right here in London and includes a lucrative property portfolio in the heart of our capital.“The leader of the opposition party, a charismatic human rights lawyer called Baru Bian, inspires hope of real change in the upcoming election, but scandalously only one-third of the electorate are registered to vote and the corrupt Malaysian government turn a blind eye because Taib always delivers them Sarawak, their richest state,” she said of the Sarawak PKR chief.
She said their decision to go public was prompted by death threats posted to Sarawak Report and by the mysterious fatality of her chief whistleblower in the US.
“Before Christmas, Taib’s disaffected US aide Ross Boyert was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room with a plastic bag around his head. The inquest is still pending but there was a sense that Peter and I could be in danger. Rather than hide, we’ve decided to come out fighting,” she told the London Evening Standard.
“The irony is that Taib and his people think we’re a huge operation but there are just five of us with a couple of laptops and a mixer. Advances in MP3 technology mean that these days shortwave radio is cheap and easy to do.
“We’ve been so effective that Taib’s people believe we’re funded by George Soros, whose foundation funds Radio Free Burma,” she said, referring to the billionaire US financier.
Her outfit — started in October from the dining room of her loft in Victoria where she lives “in shabby dilapidation” with her husband Andrew and their two teenage children — costs less than £10,000 (RM49,000) a month, she said.
Initially she funded it herself but she has since roped in some “better-off friends” who help out “anonymously”.
“Not Gordon,” she said, referring to the former British PM. “His support is strictly moral!”
Her passionate dedication to a cause 99 per cent of Londoners have never heard of sometimes creates strains, she admitted, with friends and family.
“But I honestly believe that Taib is probably one of the worst environmental criminals on the planet and that he has taken huge amounts from the country of my birth,” she said.
“He never saw me coming. When he set up his property companies in 1982, he could never have imagined that some mad woman sitting in her kitchen in London would unravel his property empire simply by scrutinising company reports online,” she added.
As an investigative journalist who started with the BBC World Service in 1983, she is better equipped than most to uncover the wealth of the Mahmud family, wrote the LES.
“My investigations have indicated that Taib and his family have a property empire in Canada, the US and the UK. Funds have been generated by Taib selling off rainforests with some of the money going through the British Virgin Islands,” she said.
The London Evening Standard put these allegations to those who are behind the companies and they were denied.
Rewcastle Brown’s passion for the rainforests of Sarawak was kindled as a child when she accompanied her mother, Karis, a midwife, into the jungle. Back then, Sarawak had the most diverse rainforest in the world with 3,000 species of trees, 15,000 plants, 420 birds and 221 mammals, said the report.
“My mother would drag me to remote clinics to show the indigenous Dayaks what a healthy baby should look like.
“Everyone in those villages sleeps in one long-house and my mother frequently saved the lives of their sick babies. As a kid, my first friends were the local children and we used to climb trees and run barefoot, dodging the odd scorpion,” she recalled.
The article added that her family came to the UK when Rewcastle Brown was eight and she attended a private boarding school and later finished her masters in international relations at the LSE.
It would be 38 years before she returned to Sarawak on a media trip where the degradation of the rainforest — so evident from the air — shocked her to the core.
In 2008, she went back to report on a by-election and secretly filmed companies clearing rainforest for oil palm.
That was when she “fell into a peat bog and nearly died”, and it was also when she met Jaban, 46, an election monitor fired from Taib’s state-controlled radio for allowing callers to criticise the chief minister.
Last year, she invited Jaban to become the voice of Radio Free Sarawak in London. It was a drastic step because it meant that while Taib stayed in power, Jaban can never go back, the LES said.
“I miss my four children, I miss my home,” Jaban said, tears streaming.
“I am prepared to die for this cause,” he added. “In the days of my grandfather, you had to bring a decent clutch of heads as a sign of your masculinity when you got married. Today things have changed but you still have to be a man.”
What are their chances of success?
“People say our man hasn’t got a prayer in the election and that Taib will intimidate voters as he always does but I think our reports are having a huge effect and that there’s a groundswell for change.
“You’ve got to take heart from what is happening in the Middle East to rulers who seemed equally immovable until just a few weeks ago,” she responded.
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