BRUNO MANSER: Swiss “Robin Hood” back from the dead
Posted on 17. Oct, 2020 by Paul Sochaczewski in Environment, Environment EarthLove
This short article is inspired by EarthLove. The book is fiction, the issues are real.
BRUNO MANSER
Swiss “Robin Hood” back from the dead
Bruno Manser is a minor character in EarthLove, but his real-life story is the stuff of legend.
He disappeared in the Borneo rainforest in May 2000 and has been declared dead.
Manser was last seen in in the isolated village of Bario in the Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak. The Swiss had illegally entered Sarawak to rejoin his tribal friends the Penans, with whom Manser had spent some six years on-and-off fighting the timber operators that natives claim are destroying their forest home.
I met Manser several times. We were not close, but we had good conversations. More important, I respected his combination of undying idealism with Swiss practicality.
He lived as the few hundred remaining semi-nomadic Penans lived, wearing a loincloth, learning what plants to treat what illnesses and how to hunt with a blowpipe and poison-tipped dart, and speaking their poorly studied language. He encouraged the Penans to set up blockades to deter government-endorsed timber companies from cutting their forest home.
Malaysian officials saw him as a fugitive and a provocateur and called him “enemy of the state number one.” Manser constantly avoided arrest with the panache of a Swiss Robin Hood, zigging and zagging through the forest when police were on his trail, even once escaping after he had been captured.
Bruno Manser, like other campaigners, said ultimate responsibility for the poor treatment the state’s indigenous people receive was largely due to Sarawak Chief minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud’s Taib Mahmud’s arrogance, greed, and links to timber companies. Bruno Manser offered Taib Mahmud a truce in exchange for the government creating a biosphere reserve for the Penans. The Swiss man with the impish grin and John Lennon glasses was quickly deported.
Manser had arguably been the most potent catalyst for media coverage of the fight by the Penans, and other Sarawak natives, to protect their forests against what they say are insensitive governments and greedy timber barons.
Defensive Sarawak government officials argue that 95% of the state’s substantial oil revenue goes to federal coffers, leaving the state little choice but to earn money from natural products, of which timber is by far the most profitable.
Malaysia is the world’s leading exporter, by far, of tropical logs, tropical sawn wood, and tropical veneer, and second, after Indonesia, a far larger country, of tropical plywood. Once the forests are cut, they are often converted to oil palm plantations.
According to the Bruno Manser Foundation, more than 70% of Sarawak’s rainforest has been cut during the past 20 years.
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What might have happened to Manser after he separated from two Penan friends and wandered off on his own for a few days? He told his companions he wanted to climb Bukit Lawi, a limestone pinnacle sacred to the Penans. He had failed to climb the spire years earlier and he realized this might be his last chance. He was never seen again.
I have four theories about his disappearance.
Bruno had an accident. Snakebite, perhaps? Or had he fallen to his death while attempting one last time to climb Bukit Lawi? Either way, his body would have been swallowed by the triffid-like vegetation within days, while forest scavengers hungrily removed the evidence.
Perhaps, Bruno had been seen in the village of Bario and someone told the police. The police followed Bruno and his Penan friends, and when Bruno was alone, they tried to capture him. Bruno tried to escape. They shot him and accidentally killed him. They realized that it would be embarrassing (and cumbersome) to carry the corpse of a famous white man back to the capital, so they buried him in a shallow, unmarked grave in the forest.
Or similarly, Bruno had been seen in Bario and someone told one of the timber companies working in the region. The manager of the timber company gave a couple of thugs a few hundred dollars to murder him. Same shallow, unmarked grave.
And a fourth possibility. He killed himself. As one character in EarthLove speculates:
“Bruno was depressed. Back in Switzerland he had told friends his efforts in getting the Penans to fight for their homeland amounted to ‘less than zero.’ He tried to get a European boycott of rainforest timber, based on humanitarian grounds. He failed. He tried to get the authorities to establish a biosphere reserve for the Penans. He failed. He publicly embarrassed the chief minister by paragliding into his garden party, carrying a baby lamb as a peace offering. He climbed the parliament building in Bern, and he handcuffed himself to a flagpole in London during a multinational environmental conference. He made films. He mobilized the press. He failed, he failed, he failed. Bruno wanted to start a revolution, but he knew that as a foreigner he couldn’t lead the fight. He had hoped his Penan friends and other tribes would take over the battle. They didn’t.”
And there is circumstantial evidence, the character continued. “We know that when Bruno arrived in Borneo he sent two dozen postcards—this was a man who never sent postcards—to friends and family in Europe telling them that ‘if anything happens to me, continue the fight.’ That sounds like a suicidal man if you ask me.”
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Was Manser successful?
From a public awareness point of view he certainly directed considerable media attention to the plight of the Penan and other tribal groups.
But he failed at his major objective: getting the Malaysian government to declare a biosphere reserve to protect the Penan and their forest. In an article in the newsletter of his eponymous Bruno Manser Foundation, the activist admitted, “success in Sarawak is less than zero.”
So, how will the Swiss be judged by history? As an obstinate fighter for a lost cause or a romantic visionary seeking an historic change in policy?
What motivated this man from rich Switzerland to live six years in the forest of Borneo with virtually nothing that most people would consider essential?
While jailed in Switzerland for refusing to go into the army, Manser had an epiphany: “Everyone of us is nothing and simultaneously the most important creature in its space and place. So when people say: ‘don’t be active, it’s just a waste of time, it won’t help anyway,’ then you already know that they’re scared of losing profit and would even sell their own grandmother. Does it have to be the children today who dare say out loud to the politicians and the economists: support what is real and true, avoid what is bad!”
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In Earthlove, a fictional Bruno Manser declares his death is “fake news” and returns to Borneo to try, one last time, to save the rainforests.
EarthLove is available at Amazon.com, or on order from any bookstore.
978-2-940573-34-9 Paperback KDP (Amazon)
978-2-940573-35-6 Paperback IngramSpark
978-2-940573-36-3 E-Book
You might enjoy watching the two-minute EarthLove video trailer. I wrote the script; it was produced and directed by Marton Varo, brandefy.com
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For more on the life and impact of Bruno Manser you might enjoy the chapter “Bruno and the Blowpipes” in Paul Sochaczewski’s Curious encounters of the Human Kind-Borneo.
A fictional character loosely based on Manser features in Sochaczewski’s comic novel Redheads.