The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  Now, as they hiked in the dripping night, Bruno and the Penan were laughing, telling jokes as they moved with speed and ease under the enormous loads. “I was good in the mountains, really fit, and I felt so small next to them—they and Bruno had no limits.” After four hours they reached a camp and it all “just felt so real. They had monkeys and huts and fires burning and we ate a meal of black meat, and the next day we started spiking the trees.”

  They drove fifteen nails into each tree. It was one of the most basic antilogging techniques; the long nails were largely invisible, but destroyed a chain saw—and sometimes injured its operator—on contact. They spiked the biggest, oldest trees and the ones close to a logging roadhead that would soon push deeper. One day a Penan missed and struck his hand, cutting it to the bone. “I saw the blood squirting out—he was really injured—and he turned around and they all just laughed. He just put some plant on it and continued to spike and Bruno said, ‘They laugh to cut the pain,’ and I thought, ‘Where am I? What is this place?’ They felt no pain, had no fears. They were aliens to me.”

  Bruno had now been coming in and out of Sarawak illegally for five years, in between ever more extreme direct actions in Switzerland. In 1993 he and the physician Martin Vosseler staged a sixty-day hunger strike in front of the Swiss parliament. They ate nothing and drank only water and unsweetened tea and knitted sweaters to give to every member of parliament to warm their hearts. “I got a very light and clear state of mind, a higher state of consciousness,” said Vosseler. “It was beautiful, the most prime time of my life. To do something one hundred percent, and to do it together with Bruno, was so fantastic.” After forty-two days Vosseler resumed eating, but after fifty-five days Bruno stopped drinking too. He’d lost thirty pounds, was barely conscious, and was dying. Vosseler tried to get him to go the hospital. “No,” he said. “I can’t. No, no, no.”

  “‘Bruno,’” Vosseler said, “‘you can die for the Penan, but not for your mother.’ Ida was his hero. He loved her, and that was the turning point. On the sixtieth day he relented. The body is amazing; he recovered very quickly.”

  Bruno traveled to the Congo to meet the pygmies of the Ituri forest and to investigate Belgian logging there, but he hated Africa, its corruption, its dysfunction. He traveled to Mexico and went rafting in Chiapas, but machine gun–wielding bandits attacked the group and shot his friend. On a train in Switzerland he met and fell madly in love with Petra Bolick, but she was married and had a child with her husband. They carried on together for a while, but the love triangle was unsustainable, and she committed to her husband and broke Bruno’s heart, a wound that festered. He wrote a letter to Georges Rüegg, confessed that he was a child who didn’t know how much his parents did for them, and the two made up, “found each other again,” in the words of Rüegg. Roger Graf returned from South America and went to work half-time, on a salary this time, directing the now more or less functioning NGO that Bruno had created, the Bruno Manser Fund, operating out of an office in the old town of Basel. But “functioning” was a relative term—it remained a seat-of-the-pants organization whose nucleus was Bruno and his one-man charisma and uncontrollable idiosyncrasies.

  He was a vortex pulling in new acolytes who would do anything, new girlfriends, people who would appear at the office full of his crazy ideas. “It was his character,” said Graf. “When he came back from Borneo the first time there were three different women who believed Bruno wanted her as his girlfriend. They misunderstood him. For him, man or woman, he would give you his last T-shirt. He never said no. But when you tried to confront him and say, ‘Bruno, we have to talk about the students having parties in the office,’ he was a master of avoidance. He’d say, ‘Tomorrow we will do it,’ and then show up with wine and a huge wheel of cheese! And people would say, ‘Oh, Bruno is so nice!’ And nothing would get discussed.

  “For a few years we were quite a good team,” Graf said, “but people in power made so many promises and few were ever fulfilled. Bruno had this hope that something would change. He always believed in the goodness of humans, and he’d have a meeting with someone important and he’d come back and say, ‘He was touched by our issue,’ and I would say, ‘But Bruno, what is he going to do?’”

  One day Jacques Christinet had an idea. He worked for the company that operated Zermatt’s cable car, and he wondered if he might construct a kind of heavy-duty zip line to ride the cable from its peak of over twelve thousand feet. He played around, developed a system, and it worked. He sent a video to Bruno, who glommed onto the idea immediately. “Bruno was totally fascinated by the idea of hanging a huge banner from the cable,” said Graf. “He said, ‘Let’s do an action against Japan because they’re using tropical wood and a lot of Japanese tourists are in Zermatt.’ But I said, ‘What have tourists to do with logging in Japan? What’s the point? Who will be able to react and solve the problem?’

  “He said, ‘Well, let’s do it against the village of Zermatt because they’re using tropical timber in their schools.’

  “And I said, ‘Did you write to the government of Zermatt and ask if they’ll bar the use of tropical timber?’ Of course, he hadn’t, so I wrote a letter and the town government said that was a great idea and they’d put it on their agenda. Boom!”

  “But Bruno said, ‘Let’s do it anyway!’”

  Which he did; a TV channel sent a helicopter and filmed the whole action but didn’t say a single word about tropical logging. “The TV only talked about these stupid Swiss guys doing this crazy thing!” Graf said. “Bruno was just becoming more and more frustrated. He was losing the battle and I had a bad feeling about his psychological strength. ‘How is he going to find a way out?’ I wondered. ‘How is he going to get free?’”

  Bruno’s ideas grew grander, more fanciful and absurd, built around his belief that all people were brothers, had kind hearts that just had to be touched. Although he had corresponded with Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed, had even sat down alone with him in Rio, he had never broken through to his number one antagonist, Abdul Taib Mahmud, the chief minister of Sarawak and the country’s largest timber baron. It was Taib more than anyone else who was responsible for the destruction of the Penan’s forest and it was Taib’s heart he needed to touch. Which got him thinking: the chief minister’s sixty-second birthday was approaching; why not give him a white lamb, symbolizing peace and friendship, as a birthday present? And even better, in 1998 Eid al-Adha, known as the Hari Raya Haji in Malaysia, the festival of sacrifice, the holiest Muslim holiday of the year, a time when sheep are sacrificed in remembrance of the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son as an act of submission to God’s command, corresponded with Taib’s birthday. Yes, Bruno thought, he would give a lamb to Taib. And why not deliver that lamb by parachute?

  In typical fashion, he soon met an ex-member of the Swiss Special Forces, and the man who had gone to prison rather than serve in the military seduced him as surely as if he was seducing a tree-hugging college student. Free of charge, over months and hundreds of hours of expensive flight time, Ruedi Isenschmid, by then a 747 captain at Swissair, taught Bruno not just the rudiments of parachuting and free fall, but doing so with oxygen above twenty-five thousand feet and at night.

  In April, Bruno filmed himself and the lamb, named Gumperli, jumping out of a plane over Switzerland, said he wanted to do the same in Kuching and present the lamb to Taib, and shipped a note and video to the chief minister in Kuching. He heard nothing back. He went anyway, but as he checked in to his flight at the Zurich airport, two security agents appeared and he and the lamb were prevented from boarding the plane. He tried again a month later. “Honored Chief Minister. Congratulation for your 62nd birthday!” he wrote on May 19 from Basel. “For your birthday-celebration in Kuching on May 21, I like to offer to your Excellency and to the public, a parachute-jump with the flags of Malaysia and of Sarawak.

  “I reiterate my apology from Hari Raya Haji for my illegal stay in the state during the 198
0s. Rather than staged protest, I am looking forwards for constructive dialogue with your Excellency. This can lead into concrete projects to help protect remaining virgin forests . . . and to help improve the living conditions of the Penan, if your Excellency wishes to do so.” As proof of his sincerity, he offered to bring a check for $10,000 to start a mobile dental clinic for the Penan and Kelabit, and he hoped to “visit the Penan in the Ulu together with your Excellency as a friend.

  “The white lamb Gumperli, symbol for peace, is in good health and remains a gift for you and your wife.

  “My humble person can just offer a chance where all parties can win and smile—the decisions rest fully with you. Sincerely Yours, Bruno Manser. P.S.: My scheduled flight to Kuching is SQ 186 on May 20th, arrival-time 5:10 p.m.”

  It was a mind-boggling letter, utterly tone-deaf to a Southeast Asian timber baron, the most powerful man in Sarawak and one of the richest men in the world. It seemed mocking.

  Taib didn’t reply, so Bruno tried again, this time flying to Singapore without incident, where he telegrammed Taib again two days later. “Dear Chiefminister: Congratulations for your 62nd Birthday! Looking forwards for positive steps with each other. Please leave your instructions with the Malaysian High Commissioner here. Terima Kasih, yours, B.M.” Once again, Taib didn’t reply, and once again Bruno was prevented from boarding his flight.

  Instead, he flew to Sumatra, where he and Christinet almost died floating down a jungle river on inner tubes—“Holy fuck,” said Christinet of that trip, “Bruno was crazy and that river was like a washing machine”—and then Bruno flew on alone to Kalimantan. There he walked fourteen days across the Indonesian-Malaysian border to find Along Sega and the Penan. Despite all the actions, all the meetings, all the blockades, all the words, the forest was being gobbled up as fast as ever. Penan were splitting apart, many working for logging companies, the old ways fast disappearing. Along Sega’s own family would soon rebel, settling in the village of Long Gita when the old man needed to be hospitalized for a few weeks. Only a few hundred remained nomads. Upon Bruno’s return to Switzerland, his father died of cancer.

  The world was marching on, time passing, yet Bruno remained quixotically obsessed with giving a lamb to Taib. Getting the real lamb, Gumperli, into Malaysia was too difficult. But why not a child’s plush toy? He obtained a Swiss passport under the name Markus Bähler. Cut his hair. Replaced his glasses with contact lenses. Put on his father’s old pinstriped suit. Bought a faux leather briefcase and flew unimpeded to Kuching in May 1999. This time his plan was to fly a paraglider and land on Taib’s compound for Hari Raya Haji and present the toy lamb to the chief minister.

  As he prepared for the stunt, he went to eat at the Chinese food stalls by the river, where he encountered Michael Palmieri. He also ran into the journalist James Ritchie, who alerted authorities that Bruno was in Kuching. With the help of supporters on the edge of town, however, he assembled the paraglider and tried to take wing. The chute filled, a crosswind hit, and he fell over, one of the motor’s propellers hitting the ground and breaking. No matter. Bruno called a Royal Malaysian Air Force pilot he’d once met who agreed, unwittingly, to lend him his paraglider.

  Bruno tried again. As Ritchie raced around trying to find him, Bruno took flight, trailing a banner that read BEST WISHES, TAIB + PENAN, EID MUBARAK, along with the flags of Malaysia and Sarawak. He sailed over the city, flew by Kuching’s mosque, headed for Taib’s compound where nine Penan and Along Sega were waiting, hoping to meet with Taib upon landing. At the last minute he decided not to set down in the compound, but swept to the ground just outside. He’d barely unhitched his chute when police zoomed up, bundled him in a car, and drove him straight to the airport, where he was put in a first-class seat to Kuala Lumpur next to James Ritchie, who’d bought and paid for the ticket. Upon arrival in KL, he was immediately taken to prison, and two days later deported to Switzerland.

  Bruno had failed, the last ten years of his life a fruitless whirlwind of energy that had yielded nothing. Yes, the whole world knew of the Penan and their plight largely because of him. He’d met and had deep conversations with heads of state, diplomats, royalty, journalists, had been on television and in films. He had an army of supporters from Switzerland to Japan to Australia to South America who thought he was a saint, who would do anything he asked. He had become, along with Brazilian rubber tapper Chico Mendes in the Amazon, one of the two most famous rain forest activists of all time. But Taib didn’t even acknowledge his existence, and not one acre of traditional Penan land had been saved as a reserve. The chain saws roared as relentlessly as if he’d never uttered a word. In a way, the Malaysian government’s failure to arrest him and lock him in prison had been the lowest blow of all. He had envisioned either a life-changing meeting with Taib or a brutal incarceration and trial that would martyr him, that he and his supporters could milk for publicity purposes and use to shame the government. Instead he’d just been squished like a gnat, sent packing without comment to his affluent first-world redoubt. What could he do? Where could he go? What kind of life could he live? “Bruno and I were soul mates,” said Georges Rüegg. “He couldn’t hide from me, and I could see he had failed. Nothing worked out as expected. He was desperate. He was depressed. He was broken.”

  “Bruno was a very funny guy,” said Roger Graf. “He was always laughing, but that became rarer and rarer. He always told me that his duty was to save the forest for the Penan, so they could survive. But if the forest was gone, then it wasn’t his duty anymore. ‘There are plenty of NGOs out there,’ he said, ‘but my only job is to save the forest and its culture.’”

  On November, 28, 1999, Bruno sent Georges and his wife, Fabiola, a postcard. “Really soon I’m going back to Borneo for an uncertain amount of time.” In two decades of friendship and especially in the last ten years of Bruno’s wanderings—countless trips to the United States, Canada, Japan, Borneo, Mexico, the Congo—he’d never alerted Georges to his departures, unless it was specifically related to work they were undertaking together. Never. In two weeks, he said, he’d be in the neighborhood for a film screening. Would Georges like to get together?

  Georges said no. “I knew him so well,” he said, “I knew that postcard and what he wrote wasn’t good. I knew him. I knew he wanted to show up at my house and have a whole night together. He was a master of involving you and I knew he had something in mind, but I didn’t want any part of it.”

  Bruno sent similar notes that felt strange, that seemed to telegraph something, to everyone he knew. He was going to Borneo and he didn’t know when he’d be back. They left all who received them or saw him unsettled. He straightened the BMF office, tied up loose ends in a way he had never done before. Went to say goodbye to Martin Vosseler, the doctor he’d fasted with, and they walked along the Rhine and up through the narrow streets of old Basel, to a thousand-year-old crypt in a church basement that had haunting, resonant acoustics where they liked to sing together. The crypt was closed, so they sang in the hallway, and then he said, “Goodbye, Martin. Take care.”

  “If you don’t come back, I’ll come look for you,” Vosseler said. “I don’t know why I said that to him, but I had the feeling that that might be necessary. His saying goodbye was so different from other goodbyes. It was so definitive. We both knew we’d never see each other again—it just hung in the air. I felt a deep sadness. He was so overwhelmed and so dissipated.”

  “We had a phone call,” said Jacques Christinet. “He was depressed. He said he’d been doing actions for ten years and didn’t know what to do anymore. He was hopeless.”

  The Swedish filmmakers who in the 1980s produced Tong Tana, the first major documentary about Bruno and the Penan, were making a sequel, and Bruno agreed to meet them in Kalimantan. For the past few years he’d been in a deepening relationship with Charlotte Belet; they’d even spoken of having a child. She refused to drive him to the airport. “He was tired and humanity was making him more and more pessimistic,
” she told the journalist Ruedi Suter. “I took him in my arms once more and as always had the feeling that something could happen. He used to say: When I come back, we will do this or that. But this time he didn’t say anything.”

  On February, 16, 2000, he rendezvoused with Edmund Grundner in Balikpapan. Grundner, from Hallein, Austria, had graduated from art school and apprenticed as an antique furniture restorer, skills that he soon turned to making fake fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Gothic furniture for unsuspecting buyers. A fascination with indigenous cultures and jungles led him to Borneo, where he began buying and selling Dayak art (he now specializes in Chinese ceramics), and in 1989 he tried hiking into Sarawak to find the Penan, but failed. He tried again in 1990, this time flying from Miri to Bario, near Long Napir and Long Seridan, where he met a Kelabit Dayak who took him walking in the forest for three weeks. There he met groups of Penan “and all I heard was Bruno, Bruno, Bruno.” When he returned to Austria, he contacted Bruno. The two became friends and Grundner turned messenger, bringing cassette tapes in and out of Sarawak during his annual winter journeys there over the next ten years. “Bruno would draw me a map and I would walk many weeks to different groups and Penan would come from all over to hear his voice.” They are strange, haunting tapes: Bruno playing his flute, then talking, hourlong exhortations in fluent Penan. Twice they traveled in Kalimantan together, Grundner showing Bruno the way over the mountains from Long Bawan in Kalimantan to the Penan. Edmund had traveled deeply throughout Kalimantan in search of Dayak poison arrow quivers—he has the world’s largest collection, more than three hundred line the walls of his house in Hallein—and he and Bruno agreed to scout locations together for the Swedish filmmakers.

  Edmund flew in from Bali and he and Bruno traveled for a month; for the final leg they bought a boat for the downriver return. “On the last night the moon was very bright and we could see in the dark, so we decided to keep going. The boat leaked and we had to keep bailing and we were tired and then we hit rapids. Bruno was in the front and I was in the back and he had fallen asleep”—a moment of inattention so unlike the jungle savant—“and there was a very big tree and we hit it and capsized.” They swam to shore, searched the banks, and finally found the boat upside down. Their bags were still strapped inside, but Bruno’s drawings and his cameras were destroyed. Except for one roll of exposed film in a waterproof bag, the photos would be the last of Bruno alive. They walked two days to a road and hitched a ride to Samarinda on March 13, where they said goodbye. Grundner was heading back to Bali; Bruno planned to meet the filmmakers and, when that was done, cross into Sarawak from Long Bawan.