Was Jawah's bravado naive?

A few weeks ago, Jawah Gerang swung sceptical PKR officials over to his side at the party headquarters in Petaling Jaya by telling them he would slit his throat if he lost the Batang Ai by-election.

The bravado tipped the scales in his favour over the claims of the more polished Nicholas Bawin as PKR candidate for the state seat made vacant by the death of BN’s Dublin Unting in early March.

A candidate with Jawah’s name and face recognition, honed over five terms (1987-2008) as MP for Lubok Antu - under which Batang Ai falls - counts for much among a rustic populace for whom regular presence and practical assistance in the mundane tasks of daily survival are de rigueur.

Jawah would have visited all the longhouses in the area several times while fitting his favourite pastime of hunting on a Friday with attention to constituents’ needs on weekends.

A five-term MP who does not move up to, at least, parliamentary secretary or deputy minister in that span is obviously someone not much liked by the powers-that-be.

In Jawah’s case, his lack of upward mobility was due to his unwavering fidelity to Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak that was in the opposition in Sarawak (though always a member of the federal BN) in the first phase of his parliamentary career. PBDS rejoined the Sarawak BN in 1996.

An economics graduate of Universiti Malaya, Jawah put the time he would otherwise have had to devote to ministerial work to good use in commercially viable pursuits on his land - native customary rights (NCR) land, of course - and became well off.

But this scion of a longhouse in Sayat in Batang Ai was careful not to flaunt his wealth and he was generous. Invariably after a hunt, he would wind up as guest of a longhouse where there would be the usual wining and dining, without which any bonding with the Iban is superficial. The soirees were partly financed by Jawah.

In the years of his parliamentary stewardship, though he was not favoured by the Abdul Taib Mahmud government in Kuching, he made sure the development allocations available for his constituency were utilised to maximum effect.

That explained his defeat of the independent William Nyallau in the 2004 parliamentary election despite Nyallau, a former district officer in Lubok Antu, having the backing of Alfred Jabu, the top Dayak in Parti Bumiputera Bersatu, which dominates the state BN.

Nyallau is also a native of the same Sayat longhouse as Jawah, a mere three doors adrift.

His willingness to be a pawn in Jabu’s effort to convert Iban domains into a personal fiefdom reflects one side of the Dayak conundrum in Sarawak’s politics of which Jawah and Bawin are the resistant other.

True enough, Nyallau was the BN candidate for Lubok Antu in the parliamentary election in March last year - Jawah’s position as the incumbent having become tenuous by late 2004 when PBDS was deregistered and he was left party-less.

In the year-long futile struggle to overturn the Registrar of Societies’ decision, Jawah did not scuttle to join other BN component parties. He stayed loose but resolute against the divide-and-rule machinations of Taib, with Jabu as toadying instrument, in their long-running plan to dilute Dayak political strength by fragmenting its representation.

Why Jawah was picked

Thus when the Batang Ai seat fell vacant, after months of increasingly rapturous crowds for Anwar Ibrahim as he came campaigning to Sarawak flushed with the success of the political tsunami a year earlier on the peninsula, much hinged on the choice of who would be the PKR standard bearer.

Who had the best chance to win against the might of the BN, given that the Iban of Batang Ai, in their poverty and in disputes with dam builders and rapacious plantation companies over NCR land, were tinder just waiting for the match to ignite a state-wide conflagration that would sweep a PKR-led coalition to power in elections to come?

At first, it was Bawin (left), a highly regarded figure among the Dayak for his work in the Majlis Adat Istiadat (Council of Native Customary Rights and Customs).

But Bawin’s several defeats in previous elections had tagged him a loser who would not be able to conjure up, among a defeat-straitened people, the confidence that he could be a giant slayer.

The idea of a new and fresh candidate, untainted by past connections to the Taib-Jabu regime, was mulled and rejected because he would be unable to best the vaunted Malcolm Mussen Lamoh of BN, regarded as formidable on account of his high education and clean record.

This was when Jawah came strongly into the picture. He never lost an election, he did not sell out to Jabu, and he stayed loyal to PBDS, a party of still potent sentiment to the Dayak.

Aided by a dash of bragadaccio (“I’ll cut my throat if I lose”), Jawah was chosen and wasted no time doing what he does best - making contact, even before nomination day on March 29, with all the longhouses he could reach in the deep interior, by 4-wheel drive or by boat.

The response he got was so encouraging that Jawah’s circle of aides did not think it necessary to coordinate too closely with some 200 Dayak non-governmental activists who showed up to help foment a victory that was supposed to make Batang Ai the curtain-raiser to Dayak political resurgence in Sarawak.

Many mistakes made

For days after the nominations, only Jawah’s general whereabouts in the deep interior was known but specific contact could not be made, such that exigent alterations to campaign content and themes could not be easily made.

There was some confusion as to who was doing what. But in the heady spirit of what looked like a resurgence of the Dayak sentiment that had fired previous failed campaigns for political power in 1987 and 1991, mistakes in coordination and wasted opportunities were ignored as minor hiccups in overall irresistible flow to victory.

Even the announcement that the Election Commission was to move, unaccompanied by monitors, 14 ballot boxes by boat and helicopter, from polling stations in the interior to the counting centre at Lubok Antu was not regarded as an ominous portent.

Jawah, veteran of five parliamentary campaigns including the one in 1999 when a convenient 30-minute statewide blackout occurred just when the ballot boxes arrived at counting centres, did not feel forewarned and thus forearmed.

But then, in 1999, PBDS was fully in the BN, at both state and federal levels, and so Jawah was cocooned from electoral skullduggery.

So confident was he that he only returned to Lubok Antu from the interior two days before polling to be greeted by prominent billboards trumpeting his past endorsement of the BN, a shriveling reminder that even for one as attenuated from the Taib-Jabu web, Jawah was not all that pristine.

In the event, those 14 ballot boxes, the majority from areas regarded as his strongholds in the interior, swayed the result in Malcolm Mussen’s favour by 1,854 votes, a result about as authentic as the power blackout in 1999.

In the end, Jawah was left groping by the result, like someone without a torchlight in pitch darkness, much like the opposition candidates in 1999 who - had they been prescient enough to pack torchlights - would have prevented Taib from being able to check in all 28 parliamentary seats from Sarawak for the federal BN before 9.30 on election night.

It was a clean sweep which ensured that Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad maintained a two-thirds majority in Parliament in the teeth of an opposition surge.

This time the Batang Ai result in favour of the BN helped check a clean sweep of by-elections elsewhere in the country, affording new premier Najib Abdul Razak a crumb of comfort on an otherwise dispiriting night.

There was no such consolation, however, for Jawah as he reverted to his previous incommunicado state, wondering perhaps in the fastness of Sayat, if at 55 years of age it was not too late to learn yet another lesson on the convoluted nature of Sarawak politics.