(Business Mirror) - Regardless of how this tense situation ends, the Sultanate of Sulu has succeeded in what its leaders had set out to do, which was to draw world attention to its proprietary claim over Sabah.
WHATEVER can or will happen in the next 24 hours in the potentially explosive standoff between the Malaysian government and about 180 followers of the Sultanate of Sulu who had daringly “invaded” Sabah since February 5 is, of course, anybody’s guess. (The Malaysian government the other day gave the Filipino “intruders” 48 hours to leave the village of Tanduao, Lahad Datu, where they are holed up. The Philippine government, for its part, has sent a ship to fetch the women and other civilians who had joined the armed contingent in its incursion into Sabah.
But already, regardless of how this tense situation ends, the Sultanate of Sulu has succeeded in what its leaders had set out to do, which was to draw world attention to its proprietary claim over Sabah.
More important, the Sultanate’s ploy has succeeded in prodding both Malaysia and the Philippines to at least begin mulling over the possibility of a mutually acceptable closure to this long-festering territorial dispute.
The 180-man contingent (which included a sprinkling of five women and an undetermined number of male civilians) that had established a sort of beachhead in a little village called Tanduau since Day One, actually had only one purpose. That was to dramatize, by staging a symbolic foothold in Sabah, the Sultanate’s long-standing territorial claim over that part of North Borneo.
The decision to make this dramatic gesture was arrived at on November 11, 2012, by the Sultanate of Sulu under the leadership of Sultan Jamalul Kiram III, Sultan “Bantilan” Esmail Kiram II and Rajah Mudah (Crown Prince) Agbimuddin Kiram. On that day, the Sultanate decided it would “finally bring their constituents to its sovereign domain of Sabah [North Borneo], which has been under the illegitimate possession of Malaysia since 1963.”
As it turned out, the decision to order a small contingent from the royal army to cross over to, and establish a beachhead in, Sabah was both a timely and brilliant maneuver.
The incursion into Sabah of that contingent was the equivalent of a “poisoned pawn,” which is offered as an easy target in a chess game.
Had the Malaysian government given in to the temptation to eliminate the small contingent from Sulu as it could easily have done, the resulting bloodshed would have resulted in various horrendous “positional problems” for the Malaysian government.
As pointed out by Abdullah Gabriel in a comprehensive backgrounder that he wrote recently, North Borneo was once a territory of the Sultanate of Brunei, whose lineage is intertwined with the royal dynasty of Sulu. Malaysian authorities must have realized that it couldn’t simply use its superior force to drive away the “intruders” from Sulu without incurring the displeasure or ire of the Sultanate of Brunei.
It could have been a gory massacre as the contingent was under instructions to hold its ground at all costs. Their all-important mission was to reassert the ownership claim over Sabah in behalf of the sultanate.
The move turned out to be excellently calibrated do-or-die move on the part of the Sultanate of Sulu.
Majority of the “invaders” are fully armed soldiers from the Sultan’s royal army and the Moro National Liberation Front headed by Nur Misuari. Misuari said his soldiers, as well as those of the royal army, were ready to die in defense of the Sultanate’s cause.
The fact that the 180-man contingent is headed by no less than Rajah Mudah (Crown Prince) Agbimuddin, brother of Sultan Jamalul Kiam III, is not happenstance. It was part of a grand design to make a powerful political statement to Malaysia and the world by staging what is now clearly a sham invasion.
After the contingent had crossed over and successfully landed on Sabah’s little village of Tanduao, town of Lahad Datu, both Malaysian and Philippine governments were caught flat-footed and couldn’t decide on what would be an appropriate countermove or reaction.
Malaysia’s response was to issue a warning and after a few more days, it decided to set up a food blockade around the village to starve out the intruders.
The Philippines, for its part, positioned its Coast Guard boats in the Sulu Sea to prevent possible reinforcements from the sultanate in case a shooting war erupts. We were told that the idea was to prevent an escalation to a full-scale war. The foreign affairs department was immediately put to work.
After correctly sizing up the situation, Malaysia decided to treat the intruders from Sulu with kid gloves. It saw how the “invading force” from Sulu wasn’t showing any belligerence and was too small, besides, to be considered a real threat to Malaysian national security.
The fact that several women had joined the contingent must have also helped reassure Malaysia that making war was not the intention.
Actually, Sultan Jamalul only last week wrote to assure Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak that the sultanate’s followers “came to Sabah to live in peace.” It was like saying, “hey, Mr. PM, these people are merely getting a foretaste of what it would be like to settle down in Sabah, which is ours, after all.”
As far as the entire Sultanate of Sulu is concerned, that part of North Borneo that Malaysia now officially considers the eastern State of Sabah rightfully belongs to them. Abdullah Gabriel, a historian, warns in a paper he wrote on February 22, 2013, that this is the very reason the potentially “explosive standoff could escalate into a full-scale war.”
Gabriel wrote that the Sultanate of Sulu fervently believes the territory in question “has been under the illegitimate possession of the Federation of Malaysia since 1963.”
Gabriel wrote: “North Borneo was once a territory of the Sultanate of Brunei, whose lineage is intertwined with the royal dynasty of Sulu. It was ceded in the late 17th century to the Sultanate of Sulu as a grateful reward for the timely help of the Sultan of Sulu, a cousin of the Sultan of Brunei, in quelling a long and bloody rebellion. That territorial patrimony embodied the sacrifices of their ancestors and, therefore, North Borneo, besides its geographical proximity, is forever etched in the hearts of Suluks (inhabitants of Sulu Archipelago) with immense emotional attachments and a constant reminder of Sultanate grandeur.”
And so, we have to hand it to Sultan Jamalul Kiram III. His decision to go for drama in reviving his sultanate’s long-festering territorial claim over Sabah against Malaysia has clearly paid off.
Sabah is so near the Philippines that on a clear day, one could almost see its landmass from the shores of Sulu, Palawan, Basilan or Tawi-Tawi. A Muslim friend of mine says it seems so near on the horizon “you can almost touch it with your hand.”
It must be hard for the people of the Sultanate of Sulu to have to gaze forlornly at the land of their dreams, that seems so near and yet so far.
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