Sabah on my mind

I loved Sabah from the first time I set foot there in August 1987 when I was a New York-based journalist and, for the very first time in my life, most belatedly discovering Southeast Asia beyond Philippine shores.

Flying into Kota Kinabalu one lovely day at the peak of the durian season brought back memories of my own childhood days in Mindanao. I was always aware that Borneo Island, to which Sabah belongs, was practically next door to my home region and the two then-underdeveloped islands had so much in common in geography and culture.

The closest I got to Sabah in my younger days was Zamboanga, where I went as a boy scout for a jamboree in the early 1960s. My father’s wartime buddy and his wife, proud residents of the City of Flowers, sent me home loaded with huge cans of English toffee along with gifts for my parents like Ban-Lon shirts, batik materials, Blue-seal cigarettes and other consumer goods smuggled from what was then known as North Borneo.

I choose to reminisce about Sabah in the warmest terms of innocence and discovery as today’s standoff between the Kirams of the ancient Sultanate of Sulu and the Malaysian authorities comes to a breaking point. I sincerely wish that some peaceful and equitable formula could be found to avoid any bloodshed or further complications of an unfortunate and still-unresolved chapter of Philippine-Malaysian relations.

I am only too aware of the tangled history of the Philippine claim to Sabah that has been botched by successive administrations from Macapagal to Aquino II. How this historic claim triggered the decades-old Muslim insurgency in the south (and with no little amount of Malaysian intervention) as well as the shameful record of Malacañang’s continuing perfidy is a matter of public record.

I am saddened by President Aquino’s harsh attitude towards Sulu activists holed up in Sabah and his insensitivity to human rights issues that seems to fall heartlessly in line with the overblown national security position of the Malaysians. He reminds me of President Fidel Ramos’s tragic mishandling of the Flor Contemplacion case that, I believe, caused Ramos to lose his chance of amending the Cory Constitution and getting a second term.

If President P-Noy is not careful, I daresay he could suffer the same fate that bedeviled his mother’s successor. Ramos’s equally bold claims of economic progress and personal popularity evaporated overnight in the wake of national revulsion over his putting a foreign government’s draconian laws higher than the feelings and human rights of ordinary Filipino people.

What seems clear is that there is no rebellion or invasion involved in Sabah today, just a desperate, if pathetic move provoked by long-standing neglect and intolerance by the two governments involved. The sultan’s people are the victims, not the aggressors of history. A truly just solution cannot be arrived at by brutal force of arms or the accustomed manipulation of international law.

Whatever the result of this imbroglio, what I hold dearest in memory is the Sabah that has always enchanted me as an extension of my Mindanao past and upbringing. After my initial visit to KK, I went back to Sabah twice on extended visits: in the mid-1990s covering the now-sidelined East Asia Growth Area (EAGA) initiative of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, and as recently as October 2011 on a private vacation to enjoy the state’s incredible nature parks and wild life.

In the glorious EAGA days before the 1997 Asian financial crisis shot down ambitious plans to turn Davao, Kota Kinabalu and Manado into the growth triangle’s major capitals, my Filipino group was warmly received by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and his wife because of good words put in by their daughter, Marina, our friend and a frequent Manila visitor in those days. We were pampered to the gills for a week at the posh Shangri-la Tanjung Aru Resort, where the Mahathirs were also staying.

In my 2011 trip with fraternity brothers, we sailed around the pristine islands of Kinabalu Bay that are protected from commercial exploitation in honor of Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s founding father. We frolicked with friendly orangutans (“Forest People”) or apes in a forest reserve for endangered species. By this time, KK had shed its old provincial backwater look for the modern vibrancy and cosmopolitan aura of a smaller, gentler, greener and non-polluted version of our Cebu and Davao.

I always tell my friends who want a quiet and relatively inexpensive vacation in a lovely place without the aggravations of big city life to put KK at the top of their lists. In my book, KK is ranked close to Penang, Malaysia as a place where I can write and have a worry-free stay anytime. Unlike in the old days, you need not get to KK in the roundabout and expensive way via Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. You can fly direct from Manila via Cebu Pacific or via Air Asia from Clark.

Back in the early 1960s, Dad’s buddy was full of stories about how in the late years of the Pacific war, after they survived the Bataan Death March, they had been assigned as guerrillas to Sulu, going as far as Sandakan, the North Borneo port closest to our southern backdoor. The Tausugs of Sulu hardly minded the open and unpoliced border because relatives lived on both sides and commuting by sea was no problem. From Tawi-Tawi, for instance, they could go in their swift powerboats in the morning and be back home before dark.

“Sulu is paradise on earth, so many beautiful islands and beaches and with all those very friendly people,” Dad always said of the place he came to know well at age 20, where he first fell in love with a lovely Sulu woman before he met and married Mom in Manila a few years later. “North Borneo is like Mindanao, more forested and with very few people.”

In those halcyon days, I was reminded, nobody talked of immigrating to North Borneo. Mindanao was itself underpopulated and the logging monsters had not yet completed their evil deeds. The Filipinos were regarded as more advanced in the material sense. We had all the money to buy smuggled goods. Fernando Poe Jr. movies were very popular in Mindanao as well as Sabah.

Dad and his buddy’s ecstatic words were very much in my mind some 26 years later when I actually flew into Kota Kinabalu or KK (once known as Jesselton), Sabah’s capital. I could hardly wait to go to Sandakan, a 30-minute hop by commuter plane, for the vicarious thrill of picking out the nearest Philippine island from a hillside overlooking the harbor.

At my Sandakan hotel and the public market by the sea, I felt like I never left Mindanao. The people at the front desk and the room boys, like many of the vendors and customers in the market, spoke Cebuano-Visayan, the lingua franca even of the Tausugs and other Muslim tribes of Mindanao. The carinderias served Visayan fare or lots of grilled seafood and chicken. The fruits were most familiar —durian, lanzones, mangosteen, marang, etc. The instant friends I made said there were frequent street fights among Filipinos, as if to show how much they felt at home in Sabah. 

My interviews with officials and community people gave me the impression that the hold of peninsular Malaysia or the central government on the state, as with neighboring Sarawak to the south and the independent tiny nation of Brunei in between, was tenuous at best. Malaysia was (is) a federation and each state is autonomous, none more fiercely than Sabah and Sarawak, which are separated from the mainland by the South China Sea or roughly the distance between Manila and Davao.

Sabah was never a Muslim state, and is not today. Something like 60 percent or more are not Malaysian Muslims. They come from local tribes like the Kadazans, Muruts and Bajaus and Chinese immigrants of of Hakka origins. As much as 25 percent are classified as foreigners, which include Filipinos and Indonesians. The native tribes, like the Ibans of Sarawak, have resisted domination by the Kuala Lumpur government, which inherited authority from Britain, the previous colonial power.

In fact, internal visas are required of Malaysians from the mainland so there would be no sudden demographic changes to turn the Muslims into the majority. The Chinese, if they don’t stick to Buddhism and Confucianism, convert to Christianity, not Islam. The Kadazans and Muruts follow this pattern of making sure the state stays secular, with all faiths regarded as equals.

The irony was that the Tausugs or Muslims from Sulu or other Muslims from the neighboring Indonesian state of Kalimantan, with higher population growth rates, stands to tilt the balance for Islam, but they are regarded as foreigners and kept at bay with rather harsh immigration rules in some kind of ghetto — wooden houses on stilts — just south of downtown KK. Also, a growing part of the Filipino community, more recent immigrants, are Visayans from Cebu and even Tagalogs, not Tausugs.

What surprised me was that in 1987, Sabah’s population stood roughly at one million in a state almost the size of Mindanao, which had a population about 20 times bigger. As of 2010 Sabah’s population had jumped to just over three million, still a far cry from Mindanao’s more than 25 million. With untold oil, natural gas and forest resources largely untapped, the state looms as a vast treasure house that the central government cannot just keep out of its clutches. No wonder Sabah’s state government limits immigration, wary of unwanted mass incursions from the mainland as well as from Mindanao and Sulu, which are much closer geographically with a historic claim to its territory.

The claim might be dormant because of Manila’s incompetence, but, as the recent standoff with the Kirams might show, the ghosts of the past just cannot be wished away that easily.

I wrote a special series on Sabah and other developments for New World Outlook, the magazine of the United Methodist Church in the USA, which had sent me on a month-long writing assignment to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. It was an eye-opener of sorts to the tangled politics of the region that I was to sustain after I moved back to Manila from US exile. After 1988, I made more frequent trips to the region, expanding my field to Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam and sustaining earlier exposure in the early 1980s to India, Nepal, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China.

Indeed, my interest in our little corner of the world was stoked and deepened quite ironically as a result of my American years as a political activist and journalist. My late Seattle-based uncle, Max Atienza, a Manila radio journalist of the 1950s who preceded me in covering Borneo and all of Southeast Asia, once told me of what had turned him on to the “backward” region we had always ignored because we were taught by our colonial masters to look much farther away to America and Europe.

“Everywhere I went in those islands I once never dreamed of visiting,” he said with a knowing smile. “I met women who looked like my mother, your grandmother, the same brown skin and loving eyes. I felt that that was where we Filipinos, our ancestors, came from. History tore us apart and from each other. But nothing today should keep us from rediscovering our long-forgotten ties of culture and aspirations. We belong to the same family of nations, just remember that.”   

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E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com.