By P.K. KATHARASON and MUGUNTAN VANAR

Monday November 17, 2008: MABUL ISLAND: Native Bajau villager Fung Haji Sappari feels that outsiders are robbing his family’s right to customary land as scenic Mabul Island grows in popularity with tourists and divers.

“Not right. How can they do it? Several years ago I also applied for 15 acres around the same spot. It was not approved,” said Fung, 50, pointing to the 33ha parcel of shallows approved for the proposed oceanarium resort by a local company.

He said the area belonged to the Bajau Laut families who have the customary right over it as they have been using the area for fishing, transport and passage for hundreds of years.

Fung is the operator of the 15-room Arung Hayat longhouse homestay and his family was one of the first four Bajau families to stay put on Mabul Island since the 1970s.

“My ancestral burial ground is here,” said Fung, explaining that as Bajaus or sea gypsies, they lived in boats in the past and only set foot on land to bury their dead.


Eco-tourism benefits: Villagers on Mabul live side by side with the existing resort operators who provide them with jobs.

He said the villagers feared being moved out of Mabul once the oceanarium resort venture was completed. At present they could live side by side with the existing resort operators, who provided the villagers with jobs.

Most of the 2,000 Bajau and Suluks staying on the island are considered squatters by the Semporna land office as they moved in only in the last decade.

Fung and several older villagers said Mabul Island was unknown to the outside world, except to a few Tawau and Semporna people who came over for weekend fishing trips.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, they said a Swiss TV crew came over to Mabul to film the Survival series, which led to the opening of the Sipadan-Mabul Resort (SMART) on the island shores beside the village, before it later extended to the sea.

The April 2000 Abu Sayyaf attack on the Sipadan Island chalets and the kidnapping of 21 tourists, including Malaysians, saw more tourists opting to stay on Mabul.

In December 2004, the Govern–ment ordered the closure of all chalets operating on Sipadan Island to prevent environmental degradation of the reefs and later restricted the number of divers to Sipadan to 120 per day.

This led to other dive operators, including Borneo Divers, Water Village and Sea Adventure, moving their resort operations to Mabul, with SMART and local homestay operators increasing the number of chalets and rooms to some 300.

Fung and other homestay operators said the local people feel cheated because the Semporna land office kept rejecting their applications for TOL to build new chalets but has now approved a sea area bigger than the size of the 25ha Mabul Island to an outside company.

They also want to know how the land office could approve the tenure of the area to the company for 60 or 99 years when all other existing resorts on Mabul waters were granted TOL for only three to five years.

The bigger resort operators are also opposing the approval but are reluctant to voice their criticisms to the media, for fear that their respective TOLs, due for renewal soon, might be rejected.