Penan slam French hotel group’s cooperation with Borneo loggers

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Members of the Penan tribe in Borneo have written to the CEO of Europe’s foremost hotel chain, ACCOR, asking him to end his company’s cooperation with the loggers who are destroying their forests.

ACCOR is building a 388-room hotel complex in Kuching, Sarawak, with Malaysian logging company Interhill. The Penan have been protesting since the late 1980s against Interhill’s destruction of their land.

Seventy-seven Penan have signed the letter to ACCOR CEO Gilles Pélisson. ‘Interhill is extracting timber from our forests against our declared will and without our consent,’ says the letter. ‘Without our forest, we, the Penan, cannot survive.’

Swiss organization Bruno Manser Fund is campaigning for ACCOR to withdraw from its project with Interhill.

The Penan’s letter continues, ‘Despite our repeated protests, Interhill does not respect our boundaries, continues to encroach on our traditional land and disregards our native customary rights. This is why we have started to map our land and will soon file a court case against Interhill.’

‘We depend on the clean water from our rivers, the wild boar we hunt in the forest and the fruits and jungle produce we collect from the old trees, the sago palms and the rattan vines. Many of us are affected by severe health problems caused by logging and have suffered because we lost our fishing grounds and hunting has become much more difficult.’

Sign the petition against ACCOR’s cooperation with Interhill