Sarawak

This article covers the state of Malaysia. For the Singaporean entertainer see Anita Sarawak .

Sarawak

flag coat of arms
Bersatu, Berusaha, Berbakti ( Malay : United, Hardworking, Dedicated)
Capital	Kuching
governor	Abdul Taib Mahmud
Prime Minister	Abang Johari Tun Openg
surface	124,450 km 2
population	2,420,000 inhabitants (2010)
languages	Iban , Malay and more
Highest elevation	Gunung Murud (2423 m)
Longest river	Rajang (563 km)

The previous 5 administrative divisions of Sarawak

Today's 11 administrative divisions of Sarawak

Sarawak ( Jawi :سراوق, Pronunciation: [saˈrawaʔ] ) is a state of Malaysia . It is located in the northwest of the island of Borneo and borders the Sultanate of Brunei , Indonesia and the neighboring state of Sabah , with which it forms the eastern part of Malaysia. Sarawak is the largest state in Malaysia in terms of area. It is home to numerous different ethnic groups who, unlike the Malays , who dominate the rest of the country politically and culturally, neither belong to Islam nor speak the Malaysian language as their first language. Sarawak is known as Bumi Kenyalang ("land of hornbills "), the rhinoceros bird is also the heraldic animal of the state. It plays a major role in the ethnic religions of some of Sarawak's ethnic groups.

Sarawak is named after the river Sarawak that flows through the capital Kuching .

geography

Sarawak is located on the South China Sea on the island of Borneo and, together with Sabah, which it borders in the northeast, forms the east of Malaysia. The capital is Kuching. In the north, Sarawak completely encloses the small sultanate of Brunei, while in the south and east it has a long border with Indonesia.

Topographically, Sarawak can be divided into three regions: the coastal region, the mountainous interior and a hilly area between the coast and mountains. Sarawak largely consists of rainforest mountains rising up to almost 2500 m, which merge into marshland on the coast. The Gunung Mulu National Park was established around the second highest mountain in Sarawak, the 2377 m high Gunung Mulu in the north with its important cave system . The National Park Loagan Bunut founded 1991st

The tropical, hot and humid climate has an annual average temperature of 27 ° C.

population

Sarawak has about 2,357,000 inhabitants (as of 2006). It is characterized by a very strong ethnic heterogeneity. The largest ethnic group in terms of numbers is the indigenous Iban people , who with almost 680,000 members make up about 29% of the population of Sarawak. Other larger groups are the Chinese (23%), Malay (23%) and two other indigenous peoples, the Bidayuh (8%) and the Melanau (5%). Unlike in West Malaysia, Indians make up only a very small part of the population. The rest of the population in Sarawak is made up of smaller indigenous peoples (6%), apart from foreign immigrants. A total of 21 ethnic groups are named in Article 161A 3 (7) of the Malaysian Constitution, some of them with several subgroups, who are considered to be native Sarawaks (malay .: anak negeri , literally "children of the country"). Many of these groups have only a few thousand or even a few hundred members. Overall, the following are mentioned:

Bukitan · Bisayah · Dusun · Dayak · Iban · Bidayuh · Kedayan · Kelabit · Kayan · Kenyah (incl. Sabup & Sipeng ) · Kajang (incl. Sekapan , Kejaman , Lahanan , Punan , Tanjong & Kanowit ) · Lugat · LISUM · Malay · Melanau · Lun Bawang · Penan · Sihan · Tagalog · Tabun · Ukit

The most widely practiced religion is Christianity with a share of 42.6% of the total population. However, due to conversions, immigration and the Bumiputra policy, 32.2% of the population are now Muslim . Furthermore, 13.5% of the population are Buddhists and a total of 6.0% followers of Daoism , Confucianism and Chinese folk religions . Only 1.0% are officially followers of an indigenous ethnic religion . 0.2% are Hindu and 2.6% are non-denominational.

history

Sarawak 1 cent from 1885, portrait C. Brookes

Value side, Sarawak 1 cent from 1885

Flag of the Kingdom of Sarawak (around 1870)

Flag of the Crown Colony of Sarawak (1946–1963)

In the 15th century, Islam reached the coasts of Borneo via Sumatra , Java and the Malay Peninsula. The Sultanate of Brunei came into being, which previously claimed what is now Sarawak.

In 1838 the English adventurer James Brooke toured the north coast of Borneo, at a time when the Sultan of Brunei was having serious problems with the Dayak people of the Bidayuh . Brooke helped the sultan pacify the disputes. The Sultan made him a feudal man in 1841, and three generations of the Brookes independently administered the vast area of ​​today's Sarawak for a century, first as a personal fiefdom, then as the Kingdom of Sarawak , even after it had been a British protectorate since 1888 . The Brookes were called the White Rajas of Borneo . Charles Vyner Brooke , the third white Raja, was displaced by the Japanese invasion of Borneo in World War II in 1942. He returned to Sarawak in 1945, but officially ceded rule to the British in 1946, making Sarawak a crown colony of the United Kingdom .

In 1963, Sarawak became the state of the newly formed Malaysia. The small sultanate of Brunei in terms of area remained independent. Today Sarawak completely encloses the two small areas of the Sultanate of Brunei, separated by a river valley.

Economy and environmental degradation

Sarawak has deposits of oil and natural gas , which are mainly extracted in the area around the city of Miri in the north of the country. In addition, pepper and rubber are grown and tropical wood is exported. In addition, fishing and bauxite deposits play a role in the economy. The tropical rainforest is being destroyed for plantations that produce palm oil .

The state of Malaysia is planning to build a huge hydropower plant ( Bakun project) in Sarawak. Because there is not enough electricity on the entire island of Borneo, it is planned to bring the electricity to the Malay Peninsula over 600 km of submarine cables using cryogenic technology . Due to various financing problems of the private general contractors, two attempts have been put on hold. The first project start in 1995 had a volume of ten billion Malaysian ringgit , at the time around four billion US dollars. According to the plans, a third of this sum could have been financed from the logging of the valley to be flooded. This plan has never been completely abandoned: the valley, after the Chinese Three Gorges Dam, is to offer the second most fertile electricity generation opportunity on earth. However, the indigenous peoples oppose resettlement; the discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of this dam are sometimes heated in the Malaysian public (keyword technology ethics ). This project was also criticized internationally.

As part of the industrial development program SCORE (Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy), renewed plans for the construction of several hydroelectric dams with a total output of 28,000 megawatts have been underway since 2008. Various civil society groups warn of the consequences for the environment and the population, such as the flooding of forest and arable land or forced relocation.

The logging of the equatorial rainforests in Sarawak is also in the focus of the public: Even if the Malaysian legislation now provides for a coordinated approach to logging, it is still evident that the logging companies (dominated by Chinese-born company cartridges) cause considerable ecological damage, because often the state Surveillance is specifically influenced and out-maneuvered, and the methods of companies are generally only insufficiently described as "rough". Abdul Taib Mahmud, Prime Minister of Sarawak from 1981 to February 2014 and since then its Governor, and his family amassed billions of dollars by felling precious woods. When the Basel environmental activist Bruno Manser made the deforestation of the rainforest and the destruction of the Penan habitat public, the Sarawak government under Abdul Taib Mahmud put a bounty on him. In 2000 Bruno Manser disappeared without a trace in the forests of Sarawak. The rain forest is the habitat of endangered animals, including the Borneo Elephant , the proboscis monkey , the Bornean orangutan and the Horsfield's tarsier . Tourism is an important economic factor in Sarawak. The largest airport is the Kuching International Airport in the capital Kuching. The caves of Niah are worth seeing, where the nests of the salangans are harvested from the high ceilings in dangerous gymnastics on ladders and ropes , the most important ingredient for the famous swallow's nest soup .

Web links

Commons : Sarawak  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Provincial government of Sarawak (Engl.)
• Map of the districts (subdivisions of the 11 subdivisions)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ United Nations Treaty Registered No. 10760, Agreement relating to Malaysia between United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Federation of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore ( Memento of July 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ United Nations Treaty No. 8029, Manila Accord between Philippines, Federation of Malaya and Indonesia (31 July 1963) ( Memento from January 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ United Nations Treaty Series No. 8809, agreement relating to the implementation of the Manila Accord ( Memento of August 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
4. ^ United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories: North Borneo and Sarawak
5. ↑ United Nations Member States
6. ↑ Negeri: Sarawak: Total population by ethnic group, sub-district and state, Malaysia, 2010. (PDF; 400 kB) Statistics.gov.my, accessed on November 14, 2012 . 
7. ↑ According to the 2006 census, see here , November 27, 2008.
8. ↑ 2010 Population and Housing Census of Malaysia. (PDF; 7.1 MB) Department of Statistics, Malaysia, accessed June 17, 2012 .  P. 13.
9. ^ Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Volume CXVIII, p. 498. London 1851 (English), accessed on September 21, 2011.
10. ↑ Sarawak SCORE: What is SCORE?  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ^ Wolfgang Koydl : Modern villains. Lukas Straumann describes the Malaysian precious wood mafia: Their crimes against the world's forests exceed the worst assumptions. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. March 11, 2014, literature supplement, p. 13. (Review by: Lukas Straumann: Raubzug auf den Regenwald. Salis Verlag, Zurich 2014.)
12. ↑ telegraph.co.uk
13. ↑ telegraph.co.uk
14. ↑ telegraph.co.uk
15. ↑ theborneopost.com
16. ↑ Nasalis larvatus in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2008. Posted by: E. Meijaard, V. Nijman, J. Supriatna. Retrieved January 4, 2009.

Coordinates: 2 ° 0 '  N , 112 ° 0'  E