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White Rajah lives on

AFP, Kuching, Malaysia
When news filtered from the Borneo rainforest that some of the last nomadic hunter-gatherers on earth had set up new blockades against logging companies, the rumours rose like morning mist: another 'White Rajah' was at work.
He is French, said some in this sultry riverside state capital. A Swede, said others, or even a Swiss like the last White Rajah, activist Bruno Manser, who loathed the title bestowed on him by his detractors.
Manser, also dubbed Tarzan, Robin Hood, the Lone Wolf and, of course, the Wild Man of Borneo, disappeared in his beloved rainforest two years ago on May 25.
His friends and family fear he is dead. His body has never been found. How he died - if he died - remains a mystery in this land of myth and legend, which has one of the strangest histories in Asia.
Was he eliminated because he cost loggers millions of dollars? Did he succumb to one of the myriad perils of the rainforest? Was he murdered by robbers in a country once famed for its head-hunters?
The slightly-built Swiss pacifist, who would now be 47, padded about the rainforest for six years in a loincloth and "John Lennon" glasses, carrying a blowpipe and a burning desire to save a disappearing way of life.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he led protests that brought the nomadic Penan hunter-gatherers and the destruction of the rainforest in Malaysia's largest state, Sarawak, to world attention.
Among the early protests were barricades on logging roads. Last week, the environmental agency Friends of the Earth said that after a break of 10 years, barricades had gone up again.
"The latest blockades could be a sign that a fresh attempt may have started to take up Bruno Manser's cause," said James Ritchie, a Kuching-
based researcher and author of "Bruno Manser, the inside story".
"I know for sure a European accompanied Bruno across into Sarawak from Kalimantan in Indonesia (which shares Borneo island with Malaysia and Brunei) in May 2000, about two weeks before he went missing.
"Apart from that, I have heard about a European man - everyone calls him Bruno - who is living in the forest with the Penan. But I showed a chief who told me the story a picture of Bruno, and it is not the same man."
The new 'White Rajah' is just a rumour, but Bruno Manser was just a rumour in 1985, before he went on to be feted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and saw his cause taken up by the international media.
Ritchie, a former government official and local newspaper reporter who first opposed Manser as a misguided idealist but later came to regard him as a friend, is certain the real Bruno is dead.
Why hasn't his body been found? "Maybe it has, but people want to keep the myth alive, to keep the cause alive."
Or, maybe, because it is not easy to find bodies in the vast rainforest, which is bigger than Manser's home country of Switzerland.
The Manser mystery slots neatly into Sarawak's strange and colourful history. The first "White Rajah" was James Brooke, a wealthy young English adventurer who sailed up the Sarawak River in his armed yacht "Royalist" in 1839.
In return for helping the Sultan of Brunei put down a rebellion, he was made Rajah of Sarawak in 1841, and he and his descendants ruled the vast country for 100 years until the Japanese invasion of World War II.
After the war, it became a British colony and then part of Malaysia at independence in 1963.
James Brooke's legacy is everywhere in Kuching; in picturesque miniature castles, in the "Brookes Bistro" and the "Brookes Dockyard", and in the very English Lipton Tea advertisements on the sampans plying the fat brown river between gilt-domed mosques and fishing villages on stilts.
Unlike many former colonies, Sarawak has made no effort to expunge its foreign history, and pictures of the young Brooke are common, hand-on-hip and devil-may-care light in his eyes.
The image of Manser is very different, shown in a frontispiece cartoon in Ritchie's book as a little owlish figure in a loincloth perched in a tree.
The Penan people, whose cause Manser championed, number just 10,000 out of Sarawak's population of some 1.8 million people, and only 400 of them continue to lead a completely nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The Bruno Manser Fund, based in Switzerland, continues to raise money and concern for their plight, through their website www.bmf.ch, but the Penan have dropped from the world spotlight Manser focused on them.
His last trip back to the rainforest in May 2000 was preceded by a publicity stunt in which he flew a para-glider over the town of Kuching to land outside the chief minister's residence.
He was deported, but returned illegally, apparently intent on organising a last stand by the Penan against illegal logging. Then he disappeared.
Now, the first blockades of logging roads in 10 years are seen as a sign that Manser's ghost is still active in the forest. Or, perhaps, that a new "White Rajah" has stepped into his loincloth.