‘SINGAPORE’S DEPARTURE HAS RENDERED MALAYSIA AGREEMENT NULL & VOID’: AFTER DECADES OF BEING AN UMNO-BN ‘YES-MAN’, JAMES MASING WANTS ‘NEW DEAL FOR UNION OF MALAYA, SARAWAK & SABAH’

SARAWAK Deputy Chief Minister James Masing has suggested the 56-year-old agreement that helped form Malaysia, the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63), be torn up and a new deal drawn up to replace it.

In response to the statement from the prime minister’s office earlier this afternoon that stated Putrajaya, Sarawak and Sabah have sorted out seven disputed rights the two Borneo states have demanded back from the federal government, Masing asked if the seven rights were part of MA63 or a “new deal for Malaysia”.

Masing did not sit on the special cabinet committee on MA63 that discussed disputes in the agreement.

“MA63 was a done deal. It was agreed upon and signed by parties from Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah.

“It has nothing to do with the committee on MA63 chaired by Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad,” he said.

Masing, an anthropologist by training, said to his understanding, Singapore’s withdrawal from the Malaysian federation in 1965 would “legally render the four-party MA63 null and void because there was no supplementary agreement signed between Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah after 1965 to validate the three territories’ union”.

He said he viewed the negotiations and agreement reached in the committee as “equivalent to the creation of a supplementary agreement, which should have been carried out immediately following the withdrawal of Singapore”.

“If this is what the current meeting involving Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah is all about, I am for it.

“Let us renegotiate a new deal for the union of Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah.  

“Let the three territories in Malaysia make a new agreement.”

Masing said the new agreement could not be called MA63 as “this is a new deal that has superseded MA63”.

He said the freedom to work out the new agreement lies exclusively with the individual territories: Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah.

He said if this is done, it would then indeed be a “New Malaysia” born as promised by the Pakatan Harapan government.

In the statement from the prime minister’s office, it said it had come to a series of agreement with the two Borneo states on duty claims in the export of timber and forest produce, gas distribution in Sarawak, the right of the states to enact their respective labour laws, control of the Health Department, administration of Sipadan and Ligitan islands by Sabah, and agriculture and forestry issues.

– https://www.themalaysianinsight.com/