Legal Versus Moral

• 22 November 2019
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A Sarawakian has claimed, on behalf of his political party, that the 1963 Malaysia Agreement is void because it did not have any approval from the peoples of Sarawak and Sabah, then British North Borneo. He dismissed the report of the Cobbold Commission saying that it interviewed only a small part of the peoples of those two, then, colonies and could not give a true representative view.

In claiming that he is factually correct. There can only be a handful of persons who were present in those colonies at that time and who are still alive. Certainly all the political figures, British and Malaysian, are no longer with us and cannot be asked to confirm or deny what Mr. Voon alleges.

But it is a fact, to which there are still a few witnesses, that Britain was under heavy pressure to de-colonise its remaining overseas territories and, significantly, that the two Borneo colones had made only a few small steps towards the political processes that would enable them to function as independent nations.

Malaya, on the other hand, had been independent for some six years and represented a possible way for an unprincipled British government to offload its Borneo colonies. That, its political rulers appeared ready to do so the Cobbold Commission was, so to speak, cobbled together, sent to Borneo and tasked to bring back the desired result. Which it duly did having, as Mr. Voon points out consulted only a small segment of the people of the two Borneo colonies.

To be fair it would have found it difficult to make a broad assessment since, at that time, most native people still lived in longhouses with very little communication outside their local areas, even less in the way of mass communication organs and content to live as the Brooke rulers had told them to do. The urban Chinese were virulently opposed and let the Commission know that in unmistakable fashion. But official eyes see what they want to see and that wave of opposition was either blandly ignored or written down to “Chinese communism”

So a thoroughly unsatisfactory assessment of public opinion became, in Report form, an endorsement of the Malaysia proposal and, in short order, Malaysia was created and British politicians were able to turn their attention to whatever domestic matters then concerned them. Colonialism has been, and no doubt will be, widely. condemned, mostly by those without any knowledge of it and with their own political axes to grind. Some former colonies have developed others have merely vegetated in the corruption that inevitably arrives when a feudal system is replaced by a nominal democracy.

The plundering of Sarawak and Sabah since independence, carried out by their own political leaders, provides incontrovertible evidence of that proposition and those who have prospered mightily since “Independence” are seen to be the first level criminal clique whose activities in so many ex-colonies are so glaringly obvious and equally glaringly ignored.

It is to be hoped that if this particular critic ever attains political power to change things for the better, does so. All the past evidence shows that this outcome is unlikely.