Zapatista Week of National and International Solidarity

More information about the Liberated Communities protected by the EZLN [link]


"Zapatista Support Bases Under Attack: Call for a Week of National and International Solidarity"
2014-02-14 by Jessica Davies from "Upside Down World" [http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/4700-zapatista-support-bases-under-attack-call-for-a-week-of-national-and-international-solidarity-]:
Following recent events in Chiapas, the Network for Solidarity and against Repression has urged “adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, and every organization, collective, and honest person in Mexico and the world who, from your own places, extend your embrace to the dignified rage of the Zapatistas,”  to participate in the

This call results from great concerns about recent events, denounced by the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center as: “the Chiapas government’s failure to prevent attacks on the support bases of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) from the 10 de Abril community,” leading to “an imminent possibility of new attacks and an intensification of the violence, which would be a risk to life and personal integrity, in addition to the violations of the right to territory and autonomy of the Zapatista peoples.”

These events came to light on January 31, when the Zapatista Good Government Junta, Heart of the Rainbow of Hope, from Caracol IV, and Whirlwind of our Words (based in Morelia, Chiapas) denounced new aggressions suffered by Zapatista support bases (BAZ). The attacks were made on the iconic Zapatista community of 10 de Abril in the autonomous rebel municipality 17 de Noviembre, by groups of government supporters belonging to the group Independent Center of Agricultural and Campesino Workers (CIOAC) Democratic, from the nearby Tojolabal community of 20 de Noviembre. Six BAZ members were injured, three of them seriously, and one is in danger of losing his sight. Furthermore, a shocking attack also took place on staff from the San Carlos Hospital in Altimirano who came to give assistance, but were attacked and prevented from attending to the injured.


Background to Events in 10 de Abril -

One of the most remarkable achievements of the Zapatistas following the historic uprising of January 1, 1994, one which transformed the lives of tens of thousands of indigenous people, was the reclamation, or recuperation, of huge areas of land and territory. As in many cases prior to 1994, the BAZ of what is now the ejido (communal landholding) of 10 de Abril worked their ancestral lands, taken from them after the Spanish conquest, as paeons or servants of the landowners who used the lands for cattle ranching, and treated their workers with abuse and contempt. Following the uprising, the serfs descended from the rocky hillsides to the fertile valley and reclaimed their heritage. In March 1995 they set up the community of 10 de Abril (named in honor of Emiliano Zapata, assassinated on April 10, 1919), and worked their own land again in community as free men and women. They now use their land to grow crops including coffee, corn, beans, vegetables and bananas, and have declared the rest, which is forest and mountain and rich in unusual species, to be an ecological reserve.

The CIOAC Democratic was founded in 1975, and is known for its close links with the three levels of the Mexican government and for its support of political parties. It actively promotes government social welfare programs and receives finances from the state for activities designed to deactivate resistance and dissent. According to the Morelia Junta, this organization has been threatening and provoking the Zapatistas in this area since 2007 with the aim of dispossessing the BAZ from the lands which they have recuperated since 1994 “because they wanted to become the owners.”

Last October and November 2013, according to an earlier denunciation by the Junta, members of a related organization, also from 20 de Noviembre, known as CIOAC historic, invaded the lands of the ejido 10 de Abril, committing aggressions and issuing death threats. The invaders “claimed as their own more than 20 hectares of coffee, corn, beans and bananas” planted by the BAZ. Groups from Europe denounced the attack: “Those who seek to take away their land now are campesinos (small farmers) who did not receive land when the ejido to which they belong, 20 de Noviembre, divided up their ejidal lands following the dictates of the bad government; and now, supported by the organization CIOAC historic, they are trying to take by force the land of the Zapatista compañeros.”


The Recent Attacks -

The Junta tells how, on January 27, “250 people from the organization CIOAC democratic, from the ejido 20 de Noviembre, official municipality of Las Margaritas, came to provoke us.” The aggressors cut down and destroyed the signs at the entrance to the ejido, and then proceeded to the ecological reserve, where “they began to work with 5 chainsaws chopping down 9 pine trees, 40 oak trees, 35 coffee trees, and three banana trees.” Altogether they took away “a total of 41 pickup trucks” full of timber to sell, leaving with threats to return. “We assessed the cost of what they stole from us, it comes to 40,530 pesos.”

On January 30, 300 people arrived in 18 pickup trucks, “ready to do violence,” with machetes, rocks, sticks and clubs. The CIOAC Democratic leaders, Miguel Vázquez Hernández and Jaime Luna González, carried and used firearms, as did the leader of another group, ORCAO (Organisation of Coffee Growers of Ocosingo,) Francisco Hernández Aguilar from El Nanze village, who joined them, “carrying high-powered firearms.” Verbal aggressions were quickly followed by physical ones, as the group from 20 de Noviembre “where some people have for a long time tried to appropriate the lands of 10 de Abril, over which they have no rights,” began to beat the BAZ. Very significantly, the Junta says, as it also said in its denunciation last November, “the people were paid 100 pesos each as a wage for the violence with which they attacked us.”

“When we saw our compañeros fall we sought emergency help from the San Carlos hospital, in Altamirano…. but the CIOAC Democratic aggressors did not let them through because they were blocking the crossroads.” The ambulance, along with the driver, a doctor and a nun, “were taken hostage by them to their ejido.” Once at 20 de Noviembre, the three hospital personnel were beaten.

Two other nuns were following the ambulance in a pickup truck. Sister Patricia Moysén Márquez relates how they were stopped by a large number of people carrying sticks and machetes, who threatened to burn the vehicle, and pulled the nuns out. She refused to give them the keys. She describes how women from the same group “started to defile us, trying to take the keys away from me. As I resisted, they began to undress us. They put their hands wherever they wanted and held both of our arms. They hurt us, tore my jacket and took out the keys and my purse where I have all my documents. I asked them to return it to me but they flatly refused.” The aggressors took the vehicle, and the nuns managed to escape. The other staff were released later that night.

Sister Patricia states in her testimony: “We identified ourselves as being from San Carlos Hospital and said that we were going because of a call for help due to the fact that there were wounded. Their reaction was that they were going to burn the truck because we were from the government. We said that we were not from the government, but rather from the church. They said that we were Zapatistas who were going to help our group. We said that we were going to see the wounded from whichever religion or party. The problem that they had was not our affair, nor were we going to solve that, only to help the wounded.” As has been pointed out in a letter from the La Karakola Social and Cultural Space in Mexico City denouncing the attack, it was in clear violation of international law, as the Geneva Convention guarantees “the rights of people in times of war, specifically the right of medical personnel to be considered neutral, in order to treat the wounded.”


The Context: Low Intensity Warfare -

It is now over 20 years since the Zapatista uprising, and since then, says the Network for Solidarity and against Repression in their call to solidarity, “the BAZ have built and nurtured another way of doing politics in key areas such as health, education, women’s participation, housing, communication, culture, trading, to name a few. Their…. significant progress in the process of autonomy has been the starting point for this new world which is emerging.”

However, “Today, as 20 years ago, the counterinsurgency strategy against the Zapatista indigenous peoples continues: military forces, paramilitaries, ‘democratic campesino organizations,’ commercial media, ‘social programs,’ and the whole political class are part of this war of extermination, a war which is headed by the bad governments, both federal and state, who only serve the interests of a system which needs dispossession, exploitation, neglect and repression in order to survive.”

One of the main tactics of counterinsurgency is funding, training, arming and promoting the development of “shock” groups of local indigenous, lured by the promise of land, guns, money, status and material possessions, who are ordered to attack, threaten, harass, provoke, undermine and ultimately destroy the BAZ communities. Disguised as social and agricultural organizations (such as CIOAC and ORCAO,) or in some cases as evangelical churches (like the Army of God) some are fully paramilitary, while others are less well-armed. These groups are made up of supporters of the government and the political parties, and actively promote the government “social” and “welfare” programs, which are used as another means of undermining the resistance.

Faced with all this provocation over the last 20 years, the BAZ have, with great dignity, continually resisted the temptation to respond with violence. “They again tried to provoke us and to take from us our recovered land which was paid for by the blood of our fallen compañeros,” they say in the most recent denunciation, but yet again they resisted the provocation. As Hermann Bellinghausen wrote recently, “Without the peaceful but active and uncompromising attitude of the Zapatistas, the conflict would be very much more serious.”

In response to the attacks, pronouncements have been made from countries including Italy, Germany, Spain, the UK, France and the US as well as from groups in various parts of Mexico. One group from France relates in their pronouncement how some of their members were students of the Escuelita, the Little School of Freedom according to the Zapatistas, in the community of 10 de Abril, already emblematic following the long-term presence of an Irish group of human rights observers and accompaniers from 1997 to 2000. The French group describe how carefully the community cared for the trees in their now-ravaged ecological reserve.

The campaign emphasizes that, as the activists from La Karakola said in their letter, communities like 10 de Abril, and the staff from the San Carlos Hospital, “are an example and a hope for a different world, one in which what happens to others concerns and moves us. Community systems of healthcare, education and culture are the hope that a new world is being born, and are an example which needs to be cared for by every one of us.”

Week of National and International Solidarity, “If they touch the Zapatistas, they touch all of us”, to be held from February 16 to 23, to “denounce the counterinsurgency war” and express that “the Zapatista communities are not alone.”

United Micronations Organization / Organización de las Micronaciones Unidas (OMU)

[http://es.omu.wikia.com/wiki/Organización_de_las_Micronaciones_Unidas]
[http://omu-foro.foroactivo.net/forum]

"Liberal democracy vs organic nationalism"

2010-12-10 by Dr Michael Hill, president of the League of the South, posted to "Southern Nationalist News Network" [http://southernnationalist.com/blog/2013/12/10/liberal-democracy-vs-organic-nationalism/]:
Since the 18th century Enlightenment, the West has made an idol of liberal democracy. It has in effect become the political default position of most Westerners, including most Americans. We accept it as ‘right’ without critical examination. In fact, I don’t think it incorrect to say that liberal democracy has become our civic religion. From it has sprung most of the cultural, social, and political issues that plague the West today: multiculturalism, tolerance, and diversity; floodtide Third World immigration; moral relativism; the feminist and homosexual agendas; the anti-Christian movement; the decline of the Church; public education; gross materialism; the ‘racism’ industry; and a hatred and distrust of the Western canon and tradition in general.
In American politics, voting majorities marshaled every two or four years have become our gods. They dictate to us how we shall live and die. Most say they wouldn’t have it any other way; that would be un-American. To be patriotic, they say, we must live with the results of majority rule, whether a general election, a Supreme Court ruling, or a Congressional vote. They will allow that we can grouse and complain about it as long as we know ourselves bound by it. Otherwise, how could we claim to be ‘good Americans’?
But a verdict is not sacrosanct just because it was reached through the democratic process.
Our classroom civics books did not tell us that majority rule only works where there is already a consensus of sorts on the fundamental issues within a particular society. For instance, in a Christian country with a high degree of racial and ethnic homogeneity, common language, institutions, and inherited culture, most matters up for a vote are superficial policy issues. They don’t tamper with the agreed-upon foundations of society.
However, in a multicultural and multiracial Empire such as ours, majority rule does tamper with the agreed-upon foundations. It is often fraught with dire and even deadly consequences for the losers, especially if the winners bear a grudge. The fifty-one percent can dispossess the other forty-nine. This is obviously not conducive to civic peace and prosperity.
But the most important question of all is this: can liberal democracy as it exists today uphold civilization? If it cannot, it must be replaced with something that can.
Projections are that the USA—and our beloved Southland—will have a White minority by 2040 or even earlier, depending on immigration policy and minority birth rates. That will mean the end of things as we know them—the end of our civilization. Our ancestors bequeathed us, their acknowledged ‘posterity,’ a society based on Christian moral principles, the English language, racial (and some degree of ethnic) homogeneity, and British legal and political institutions. All this—the foundations of our civilization–will be lost.
Perhaps Americans in regions outside the South are happy with the idea of giving way to minorities and their White leftist enablers. But if the rest of the country is determined to jump off the cliff, is the South obliged to follow along so ‘democracy’ can be upheld?
It is time that Southerners—the descendants of European, Christian peoples who settled the Southern regions of North America—make a fundamental decision to break with the Enlightenment idea of liberal democracy and to embrace the concept of Southern nationalism. Southern nationalism is nothing less than the acknowledgement that Southerners’ (see above definition) survival, well-being, and independence should be the primary considerations for the here-and-now as well as for the future. If current political arrangements do not promote our survival, well-being, and independence, then they should be cast aside for new arrangements that do promote these ends. This includes democracy in all its forms.

WHAT IS ORGANIC NATIONALISM?
What the South must embrace for its survival is organic nationalism, a form of nationalism in which the political state (the government) receives its legitimacy from the organic unity of those whom it serves. In other words, it is a true nation-state such as historic France, Germany, or England. Hallmarks of that organic unity are race/ethnicity, language, culture and folk customs, and religion. It is therefore a ‘nation’—a distinct people, a Folk—in the primal and fundamental sense. By nature it is conservative in that its main function is to conserve a society that will defend the lives, liberty, and property of the people who comprise it. Their survival, well being, and independence are paramount. Conversely, they reject the top-down universal hegemony of the elites.
What would a South that embraced organic nationalism look like? It would be a South that returned to its European roots but with plenty of leeway given for those cultural attributes that are uniquely Southern. We could listen to Beethoven as well as Hank Williams. We could read Sir Walter Scott as well as William Faulkner. It would embrace and celebrate as good and wholesome all its peculiarities without apology and without embarrassment—its literature, language and dialect, religious faith, folkways, songs, cuisine, myths, and overall worldview. It would also draw from that deep cultural well that is Europe, taking the best of that and calling it our own as well.
That the organic South is both European and extra-European should be no problem for us to accept. After all, we have been in Dixie for four hundred years, and that experience has turned various European ethnicities into a loose but cohesive unity known as ‘Southern.’ Thus we have one foot in Europe and the other in Dixie, and that makes us a distinct people, a real nation unlike any other in the world.
Unlike the South, the USA is not a ‘nation;’ rather, it is a failed leftist multicultural experiment that is morally, spiritually, and financially bankrupt. I do not believe our Founders intended it to be such, but nonetheless it has become that. And as such, it should have no appeal to true Southerners. Indeed, it should have no moral purchase on our loyalty. The USA had become the “rat” that Patrick Henry smelled all those years ago.
The USA has bound its identity to the Enlightenment idea of Liberal Democracy and all that it entails. Moreover, it has compounded the problem by willingly and wittingly committing itself to becoming a multicultural Empire in which democratic institutions are manipulated by the ruling elite for the benefit of favored groups. We Southerners are not one of those groups.
As I look at my precious children and grandchildren, I shudder to think what will happen to them and their descendants when they become the numerical political (and actual demographic) minority. Revenge—’getting even’—will be a commonplace occurrence as our Folk are attacked and robbed of life, liberty, and property with impunity in the name of Social Justice or some other fabricated universal right. Will the long-established rights of our children and grandchildren be protected by the new regnant majority who are not products of Western Christian civilization? Or will a majority of wolves vote to devour a minority of sheep? I think you know the answer.
We Southerners must embrace a new paradigm. We must think ‘outside the box’ in which our enemies have placed us. We must have a new organizing principal: organic nationalism. It is the answer for the South if we are serious about the survival, well being, and independence of the Southern people. That means the rejection of the status quo of living in a multicultural empire that sucks our lifeblood.
For our self-preservation dare we cast aside voting and the idea of the ‘consent of the governed’ for a monarchy or dictatorship? No. We must simply re-define along the lines of organic nationalism the political and social entity to which we belong—the Southern nation. In that entity, our interests and moral principles will hold sway, and we can determine who gets to be called ‘citizen’ and who exercises the right to vote and to participate in other civic matters. No more being ruled by alien, universalist elites. No more kowtowing to the interests of Massachusetts, New York, and California or those of the globalists. The Southern nation will be run by Southerners in the interest of Southerners. Will that dawning not be a glorious and blessed day?

[signed] Michael Hill, in Killen, Alabama

Indigenous Rights Delegation to Nicaragua -- March 15 - 25, 2014

Join Nicaragua Network National Co-Coordinator Katherine Hoyt and Alliance for Global Justice board chair Charlie Delaney-Megeso, a member of the Nulhegan-Coosuk tribe of the Abenaki Nation, who has represented the Nicaraguan Miskito in the United States, on this important delegation.

Write now to [nicanet@AFGJ.org] to put your name on a list to receive information and an application!
Fee: $1,150 which includes all lodging, food, translation, and all in-country travel, including the plane flight to Bilwi, Puerto Cabezas. It does not include international travel.

The delegation will include:
* Meetings in Managua with government and other representatives involved with indigenous property demarcation and titling as well as environmental preservation;
* Meeting with representatives of the indigenous of the “Pacific” side of Nicaragua;
* Plane flight to Bilwi, Puerto Cabezas, in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region;
* Meetings with governmental officials involved in indigenous land titling and the environment;
* Meetings with Miskito leaders and leaders of human rights and environmental groups; and
* Trip by land to the Bosawas, the UNESCO Biosphere Nature Reserve to observe deforestation and meet with Mayangna leaders to learn about their way of life and the problems of land invasion.

Mi’kmaq

"Mi’kmaq Blockade"

2013-10-16 from "SubMedia.tv" [http://www.submedia.tv/stimulator/2013/10/16/mikmaq_blockade/]:
Download [https://archive.org/download/MikmaqBlockade/Bloackde_Report_1_HD.mp4]

For over two weeks now, a coalition of people including local Mi’kmaq residents, and anglophone and Acadian settlers, have blockaded the road leading to an equipment compound leased to South Western Energy or SWN [http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/fr/story/cop-block-turns-road-block/19084].
SWN is a Texas based energy company, that has been attempting to conduct natural gas exploration in the area’s shale formations. It is believed that if significant deposits of gas are found, SWN would then employ the controversial extraction method of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. But since this past summer, protests, direct actions and sabotage have thwarted their work, and have turned public opinion on the side of the protesters.
Throughout the summer, police arrested dozens of people conducting non-violent civil disobedience. But since the arrival of members of the Mi’kmaq warrior society, the police have not been as keen to come near protesters.
The blockade is preventing SWN from operating thumper trucks, massive vehicles that gather seismic data to determine the location of natural gas.
During my short stay here I’ve witnessed the co-operation between natives and settlers, a partnership that has kept this blockade fully stocked and operational. Food, wood, hot coffee, tents and other supplies keep streaming all the while SWN berates the police in the media for not arresting the protesters.
In two days time, several people named in a court injuction are due to appear before a judge. In the meantime supporters keep arriving, but the warriors have also issued a callout for further support.

Wet’suet’en

"The Action Camp", 2012, 9min [http://www.submedia.tv/action-camp/]:

Download the video [http://archive.org/download/TheActionCamp/Action_Camp.mp4].
The Unis’tot’en, a clan of the Wet’suet’en Nation have built a protection camp to bock PTP, in so called British Columbia in Canada. This is the third time the Unis’tot’en have called for a convergence in their territories. This year’s camp attracted over 150 people who came from as far east as Montreal and as far south as Florida. The camp organizers opted not to tap large environmental ngo’s for material support, and instead reached out to grassroots, community based allies.


"Stopping Tar Sands in the East"
2013-09-23 message from "SubMedia.tv":

From time to time, subMedia produces videos that focus on a specific struggle. These are pro bono pieces where sometimes subMedia doesn’t even appear on the credits. So far this year subMedia has done two such projects. One (in French) for the struggle against oil fracking in the Gaspésie peninsula in Quebec, and a second one for the Justice for Deepan support group. subMedia has also been providing support to the Unist’ot’en blockade, through the creation of informational videos, and by providing workshops to members of the community so that they can produce their own media. Actually, it was the work subMedia did with the Unist’ot’en, that made us step back and evaluate the emphasis of our videos. While the global focus of projects like “it’s the end of the world…” and “END:CIV” is valuable, focusing our efforts on local and regional struggles made us realize that we need to do both.
Last week we embarked on another such project. This time the focus is Indigenous resistance to tar sands pipelines in the east of so called Kanada. The “Line 9″ and “Energy East” pipelines threaten to bring tar sands “crude” from Alberta for export through ports in the Atlantic. These pipelines will traverse through many Indigenous communities and natural areas, threatening not only the health of the land but the sovereignty of these territories and their peoples. We have teamed up with Indigenous organizer Amanda Lickers to produce a video resource. This video will focus on Indigenous resistance and seeks to build capacity in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities by providing an educational and accessible resource to build awareness across communities. Featuring stories and perspectives from land defenders in Athabasca Chipewyan, Aamjiwnaang, Six Nations of the Grand River, Kanehsatà:ke, and Elsipogtog First Nations, this video will not only educate the public on the issues being faced by pipeline construction and expansion, but will showcase Indigenous resistance and provide an anti-colonial lens for understanding environmental destruction.
So far we have raised nearly $2,000 for this effort, but need an additional $2,000 to help cover transportation, fuel and other production expenses. So if you value the work we do at subMedia and would like to support this project, please donate to this project. For $10 or more we will send you a DVD copy of the completed project.

Penan

"Malaysia tribe end protest as mega-dam floods their homes"
2013-12-03 from "AFP" newswire:
Kuala Lumpur -About 100 Malaysian tribespeople were forced to end a three-month blockade of a dam after rising waters threatened to flood their homes in Borneo, activists said Tuesday.
The state-linked Sarawak Energy company began filling the reservoir in late September, a week after some 100 Penan natives from seven villages began a protest on the only road to the remote, $1.3 billion Murum dam in Sarawak state, located in the northwest of Borneo.
"They have no choice, the water is rising fast so they have to get their belongings," Peter Kallang, chairman of the NGO Save Sarawak's Rivers Network, told AFP.
He said their homes were already being flooded before promised resettlement houses had even been completed.
Malaysian police last month arrested eight tribespeople blocking access to a dam which they say will displace them from their lands, amid increasing protests on Borneo island.
The Murum dam is one of a series of hydroelectric facilities planned by the Sarawak government as it pushes economic development in one of Malaysia's poorest states.
The Penans set up the blockade in September to demand 500,000 ringgit ($155,000) for the loss of their land, property and livelihood.
The 944-megawatt dam is expected to flood 245 square kilometres (95 square miles), and cause 1,500 Penan and 80 Kenyah natives to lose their homes.
Sarawak Energy had said relocation of affected natives was set to be completed by year-end and insisted that displaced villagers were being compensated fairly.
An initial sum of 15,000 ringgit per family was reportedly raised to 23,000, with Sarawak's chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud calling Penan demands "outrageous".
Kallang said the protestors would continue with legal action against authorities despite being forced to abandon their blockade.
The building spree in the resource-rich state along the powerful jungle rivers has been dogged by controversy as activists allege massive corruption, while natives complain it has flooded rainforests and uprooted tens of thousands of people.
Hundreds of Malaysian tribespeople have also blockaded the construction site of the nearby Baram dam.
While Baram is expected to generate 1,200 megawatts of power, activists claim it will flood 400 square kilometres of rainforest (154 square miles) and displace 20,000 tribespeople.
Taib, who has ruled Sarawak for over three decades, has faced mounting accusations of enriching himself and cronies through a stranglehold on the state's economy, charges which he denies.


"In Borneo jungle, natives stand up against Malaysian dams"
2013-11-26 from "AFP" newswire:
Long Keseh, Malaysia - With a grimace on his sun-bronzed face, Borneo tribal chieftain Lenjau Tusau glares down a dirt road that vanishes into a rainforest mist, on alert for what he views as a mortal enemy.
Evoking their past as feared headhunters, Malaysian indigenous men and women in traditional longboats knifed down the Baram river in Sarawak state on October 23 to chase off surveyors and road-builders at the site of a proposed dam.
They now man two blockades on roads into the remote region, the latest front in a battle against a colossal plan to convert Malaysia's largest, wildest state into an industrial powerhouse.
"We will not leave. Our life is here, our culture. The land, rivers, and rocks belong to us," said Lenjau, 70, whose ear lobes droop from tribal piercing.
Occupying northern Borneo island, much of Sarawak is a jungled landscape crossed by untamed rivers.
State authorities are pushing plans to build as many as a dozen hydroelectric dams -- Sarawak already has three -- hoping that cheap electricity will lure foreign industrial investment to the underdeveloped state.
Billions of dollars in such investment have been committed, the authorities say.
"The state has not only the right, but the duty to develop the state's resources for the benefit of present and future generations," state-linked Sarawak Energy, which is spearheading the dam campaign, said in a statement to AFP.
But environmentalists believe the project threatens one of the world's last great rainforests at the heart of Borneo, an island shared by Muslim-majority Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.
To members of Sarawak's mostly Christian tribes, their culture is in peril.
"We don't want the dam and will do whatever we have to do. If they bring a dam, I bring a spear," said Daniel Jalong Manok, 49, one of dozens of Kenyah, Kayan and Penan people manning the Baram blockades.
Scores of Penan, upset with relocation terms, have blocked access to the newly completed Murum Dam 120 kilometres (74 miles) away since authorities began filling it in late September. Eight were briefly arrested in early November and dozens remain defiantly in their homes, despite rising waters.

A change of mindset -
Tribes who depend on jungles and rivers for survival say Sarawak's once-rich rainforests are already rapidly disappearing due to decades of state-backed logging and expanding plantations.
Data published in the US journal Science this month showed Malaysia lost 14.4 percent of its forests from 2000-2012, the world's highest rate.
In the 1980s, the nomadic Penan were swept aside when they tried to block timber companies by seizing roads into interior regions.
But Baram residents say a new resolve has developed as a budding native activist movement has grown, spreading the anti-dam message through visits to remote areas and word of mouth. Some key activists are also using social media to project their concerns abroad.
"We trusted the government," Lenjau said in Kenyah through an interpreter.
"But there is a change of our mindset, how we view the world, the land and the rivers."
At a road blockade on a stunning ridge-top, Baram protesters rail against authorities between joyous bursts of native song and dance.
Their ultimate target is Sarawak's all-powerful chief minister for the last 32 years, Taib Mahmud.
Opponents accuse Taib, 77, and his family of illegally running indigenous people off ancestral lands and plundering Sarawak's rich resources, charges he denies.
Swiss environmental and human rights group the Bruno Manser Fund (BMF) last year estimated his wealth at $15 billion, citing financial records, which would make him Malaysia's richest person.
Sarawak's first mega-dam -- the 2,400-megawatt Bakun facility, one of the world's largest -- went online in 2011 after decades of delays plagued by corruption and mismanagement.
Locals say it has destroyed the Balui River ecosystem, and many relocated villages accuse authorities of shabby treatment.
A joint statement by 80 leading Malaysian NGOs this month accused Taib of "cultural genocide" and "systematic and disastrous environmental destruction".
Bakun's capacity alone dwarfs Sarawak's current 1,000-megawatt consumption, but Sarawak Energy insists all Bakun and Murum output has been sold to prospective industrial investors.
Suggestions of massive oversupply are "ignorant or malicious", it added.
Taib's office did not respond to a request for comment.

'If we have to move, it will be the end of us'-
Indigenous activists say the Baram dam would flood an area half the size of Singapore and displace 20,000 people including villages like Tanjung Tepalit.
The Kenyah community is set in a verdant Baram valley several hours upstream from the blockades.
Dominated by a huge longhouse the size of a city block, it has a Catholic church, volleyball court and landscaped walkways. Residents fish and hunt game and tend paddy fields, oil palm, and other small-scale agriculture in surrounding forests.
But village chief James Nyurang Usang, 63, said logging has severely depleted the forest's bounty. The Baram, clear in his youth, runs brown due to logging-related erosion and fish are scarce.
Many villagers make ends meet by working for timber companies or in cities.
Nyurang, who travelled to Murum and Bakun to view conditions there, said many felt tricked and promised jobs at Bakun did not materialise.
"If we have to move, it will be the end of us," said Nyurang, whose longhouse quarters feature the mounted skin of a clouded leopard, wooden Kenyah war shields and a wide-screen TV.
"I don't know if I can hold the community together somewhere else."
Sarawak Energy insists no decision has been made on whether to build the Baram dam.
But activists say the company -- whose chairman is Taib's cousin -- has a history of misleading communities and shutting out dissenting voices, which Sarawak Energy fiercely denies.
Instead of dams, Nyurang wants government investment. His village has no electricity, school, or road access besides the logging roads along which huge trucks laden with giant trees thunder toward the coast.
Neither Sarawak Energy nor the government have indicated their next steps.
"Whatever millions they give, I don't want it. Money vanishes, land does not," said Jalong.