Pena: Rope in NGOs to assist in Penan birth cert, IC registrations

Elia Bit

MIRI (July 20): The Penan Empowerment Association (Pena) has urged the state government to work with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to assist in registering undocumented Penans in Sarawak.

The association’s chairwoman Elia Bit said Pena for example, can assist the state government and the National Registration Department (NRD) on an ad-hoc basis to help register the stateless Penan people to be issued with birth certificates or identity cards (ICs).

“The NRD can appoint Pena on an ad-hoc basis to facilitate in the registration of birth certificates and identity cards for the Penans,” she suggested.

Prior to the movement control orders and travel restrictions by the authorities since 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, she said Pena had been involved in field trips to the interior of Belaga and Baram to record the details of unimmunised Penans, and share the information with the relevant authorities and helping the community with their citizenship registration issues.

Elia, who is a Penan from Tinjar, said bureaucracy must be changed to overcome the hurdles faced by the community to rightfully enjoy the benefits as registered Malaysians.

Many indigenous people remained stateless, especially the Penans, who have been waiting for decades to be accorded citizenship, she added.

“Long delays and excessive bureaucracy on the part of the NRD has left many applicants in the lurch and their citizenship woes run into three generations.

“The issue has been made difficult by their nomadic culture and compounded by rural poverty and illiteracy as most Penans cannot read nor write in Bahasa Malaysia, and almost all cannot afford the luxury of travel,” she said.

According to statistics in 2019, there are 21,367 Penans in Sarawak , residing mostly in Baram, Belaga and Ulu Limbang.

An estimated 77 per cent of the last nomadic tribe have settled permanently, while 20 percent are semi-nomadic and hte remaining three percent still nomadic.

Elia said to the Penan community from the interior, they faced problems at every level of bureaucracy which makes it even more difficult to get themselves registered, and this must change.

Currently, she said, applications collected by NRD’s special mobile units (UKB) had been submitted for approval by the head of department.

She said the three months waiting period for approval by the NRD director could be reduced if the approval procedure could be delegated to the heads of the UKB teams who have the data and have been involved personally on the verification process on the ground.

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