Unholy marriage of convenience

Manila, Putrajaya and the Sulu Sultanate have come together to work out their competing interests against the people of Sabah.

COMMENT

Manila’s so-called Sabah claim is being stoked again as Putrajaya dilly-dallies on the proposed Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) on illegal immigrants in Sabah and a Sulu Sultan impersonator, an ex-jaga kereta in Kota Kinabalu, again “offered to drop” the claim. At last count, the ex-jaga kereta picked up some lucrative oil and gas contracts from Petronas.

None of these three parties including the dime-a-dozen Sulu pretenders shy away from enacting their routine wayang kulit in their sandiwara since 1963 on Sabah but for different reasons.

Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, for one, turned defiantly up last Friday in Tungku, the capital of the “Federal Territory” of Felda Sabah, and declared that “Sabah was now no longer the poorest state in Malaysia” as described by the World Bank two years ago. Ironically, he was supposed to announce the RCI – no doubt watered down to reassure his precious illegals – in Tungku and elsewhere in Sabah but didn’t.

Felda Sabah sits on 306,000 acres of native customary rights (NCR) land which, for all practical purposes, had been stolen from the natives in 1990 and now hosts hordes of what can only be described, for want of a better term, as “illegal immigrants”, mostly “Pilaks” or Filipinos.

Soon, the 306,000 acres can declare itself as Pilakstan or a state within a state. Already, Pulau Gaya off Kota Kinabalu is a mini Pilakstan.

Patently, there are competing interests in Sabah where Manila, the ghost of the Sulu Sultanate, and Putrajaya come together in an unholy marriage of convenience against the people of the state.

Both Manila and the ex-jaga kereta and fellow impersonators refuse to accept that the Sulu Sultanate, according to the Madrid Protocol of 1885, ended when the last Sultan died without leaving a male heir. The Madrid Protocol was signed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Spain and Germany. It recognises the sovereignty of Spain over the Sulu Archipelago and limits the extent of Madrid’s influence in the region.

Manila claims that a so-called Sultan of Sulu, Muhammad Esmail E Kiram 1, transferred his sovereignty over “the territory” of North Borneo (Sabah) to Manila on Sept 12, 1962, by way of a power of attorney.

In fact, what the old Sulu Sultan had in Sabah was the right to collect tolls along the waterways in the northern third and eastern third of the state. The northern third toll concession was a gift to the Sulu Sultan from the Sultan of Brunei in return for the former’s military help in resolving a power struggle in the palace in Bandar Seri Begawan.

Nine heirs

It was these toll concessions that were transferred to Alfred Dent, founder of the British North Borneo Company, and his partner Baron von Overbeck in 1878 by the then Sultan of Sulu in return for RM5,000 per annum in lease/cession monies which is being paid to this day by the Malaysian government to the nine heirs of the Sulu Sultanate.

The nine heirs were recognised by the Mackasie Declaration of Dec 13, 1939, by the High Court of Borneo in Civil Suit No. 169/39.

C F Mackasie, the then chief justice of Borneo, ruled that the nine plaintiffs were heirs of the defunct Sultanate of Sulu and were entitled to the yearly RM5,000 in cession monies from the North Borneo government.

The nine were listed as Dayang Piandao Kiram, Princess Tarhata Kiram, Princess Sakinur Kiram, Sultan Ismael Kiram, Sultan Punjungan Kiram, Sitti Rada Kiram, Sitti Jahara Kiram, Sitti Mariam Kiram and Mora Napsa. The ex-jaga kereta has claimed no link with the nine plaintiffs and has in fact, on record, rubbished the Mackasie Declaration.

Muslim sultanates in Southeast Asia, being “kerajaan sungei”, were never territorial in the western sense.

Manila has never had sovereignty, historically, over the Sulu Archipelago. The latter has never recognised the former as having any rights over its territory.

If anything, Sabah and Sulu can be one under United Nations auspices as a federation with both halves having powers of immigration into their respective territories from the other half. That would solve the illegal immigration menace in Sabah once and for all and end the controversy of the so-called Sabah claim. There’s no need for a RCI, in that case.

Manila keeps the fiction of its Sabah claim going to justify the expulsion of Muslims from their lands in the Philippines south in favour of the Christians and driving them across the waters of the Sulu Sea into Sabah.

They then refuse to take back their own citizens on the “unofficial” grounds that Sabah – at least the northern and eastern thirds – belongs to it and the illegal immigrants are merely staying on in their own country.

Deliberate mistake

The alternative and disingenuous argument, officially, is that these illegal immigrants should be considered stateless since they have been away from their country for 10 years or more without any evidence of them returning during those years.

One can be declared stateless, under international law, only if one left his or her country with valid travel papers and then did not return for 10 years or more.

The illegal immigrants in Sabah are mostly those who sneaked out the “backdoor”, that is, without valid travel papers, and cannot therefore by any stretch of the imagination be considered stateless. These are people who have been sneaking back and forth via the backdoor over the years. Legally speaking, they never left their country.

Putrajaya’s “deliberate mistake” on the illegal immigrants is to detain, process and return them by the front door so that Manila would refuse to accept them and go on to declare them as stateless. The declaration is based on the documents that Putrajaya provides the Manila government.

Such a declaration, that is, of being stateless, is greeted with whoops of joy in Putrajaya which then has an excuse to legalise the illegal immigrants at the expense of the locals and add them to the electoral rolls to create a fait accompli.

At the last count in 2005, Sabah had a population of 3.2 million of which 1.5 million were locals and 1.7 million foreigners including 1.1 million illegal immigrants, included by the World Bank among the most poverty-stricken group in the country. At present, the Sabah population is estimated at 3.5 million.

Putrajaya, like Manila and Sulu, has no leg to stand on in Sabah, according to local activists who are considering taking the considerable oil and gas resources of the state including that in the Spratly Islands, and Blocks L and M ceded to Brunei, to the UN Security Council and the nations which were members of the 24-Nation UN Decolonisation Committee.

Malaysia, according to these activists, ceased to exist in 1965 when Singapore was expelled from the federation.

As proof, they cite the subsequent definition of “Federation” in the Federal Constitution which brought back the Federation of Malaya, which ceased to exist in 1963, to masquerade from 1965 as the “new” Federation of Malaysia.

In the 1963 Federation of Malaysia Constitution, Sabah is an equal partner of Malaya, Sarawak and Singapore.

In the 1965 constitution of the so-called Federation of Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak are not equals of Malaya but listed as two of the states and therefore having the same status, no higher no less, than the states in Malaya.