Fearing for her safety after receiving death threats, Clare Rewcastle Brown reveals she founded the hard-hitting anti-Taib website.
A British daily revealed that former British prime minister Gordon Brown's sister-in-law, Clare Rewcastle Brown, is the figure behind the anonymous website Sarawak Report, and independent radio station Radio Free Sarawak.
The website is focused on exposing Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud's alleged corruption and global business empire.
Clare Rewcastle Brown and colleague Peter John Jaban, a Sarawak Dayak who does the radio broadcasts, decided to go public as they fear for their personal safety after the Sarawak Report received death threats and a former employee of Taib, who turned whistleblower, was found dead last October.
According to the evening tabloid London Evening Standard, Rewcastle Brown set up the radio station four months ago and roped in Jaban to handle broadcasts from London under the pseudonym Papa Orang Utan.
Rewcastle Brown, 51, a former investigative journalist who started with the BBC World Service in 1983, is married to Brown's younger brother Andrew, also a former journalist and now a media strategist.
She was born in Sarawak to British parents in the days before the former British colony was handed over to Malaysia, lived in the region until the age of eight, reported the daily.
"English is still the unifying language in Sarawak and I use my blog and broadcasts to expose the outrageous deforestation which has seen 95 percent of Sarawak's rainforest cut down and replaced by logging and palm oil plantations which have enriched Taib and his family," she said in the report.
"What's more, my investigations indicate some of the Taib family money is right here in London and includes a lucrative property portfolio in the heart of our capital."
Radio Free Sarawak is an independent station that started its daily broadcasts on Nov 16 last year and sources its news from Sarawak Report as well as from Sarawak activists and communities defending land rights and against abuses by Taib.
The daily quoted Rewcastle Brown as saying that her work is also about "giving the 2.5 million oppressed people of Sarawak a choice".
"The leader of the opposition party, a charismatic human rights lawyer called Baru Bian, inspires hope of real change in the upcoming election, but scandalously only one-third of the electorate are registered to vote and the corrupt Malaysian government turn a blind eye because Taib always delivers them Sarawak, their richest state."
Baru is the Sawarak PKR chief who is currently busy preparing the party machinery to face the Sarawak state election, speculated for April.
Come out fighting
According to the daily, Rewcastle Brown and Peter's decision to go public was prompted by death threats posted to the Sarawak Report website and by the mysterious fatality of her chief whistleblower in America.
"Before Christmas, Taib's disaffected US aide Ross Boyert was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room with a plastic bag around his head. The inquest is still pending but there was a sense that Peter and I could be in danger. Rather than hide, we've decided to come out fighting," she told the daily.
"The irony is that Taib and his people think we're a huge operation but there are just five of us with a couple of laptops and a mixer. Advances in MP3 technology mean that these days shortwave radio is cheap and easy to do. We've been so effective that Taib's people believe we're funded by George Soros, whose foundation funds Radio Free Burma."
Initially she funded the project herself before roping in some "better-off friends" who help out "anonymously", but Brown was not one of them, she told the daily.
"My investigations have indicated that Taib and his family have a property empire in Canada, the US and the UK. Funds have been generated by Taib selling off rainforests with some of the money going through the British Virgin Islands.
"He never saw me coming. When he set up his property companies in 1982, he could never have imagined that some mad woman sitting in her kitchen in London would unravel his property empire simply by scrutinising company reports online," she said.
Last year she invited Jaban to become the voice of Radio Free Sarawak in London. It was a drastic step because it meant that while Taib stays in power, Peter can never go back.
"I miss my four children, I miss my home," he says, tears streaming down his face.
"I am prepared to die for this cause," he added. "In the days of my grandfather, you had to bring a decent clutch of heads as a sign of your masculinity when you got married. Today things have changed but you still have to be a man."
Peter was a radio deejay with popular local radio station Cats Radio before he left for London. |
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