This book has examined the political dynamics of the relationship between ethnic politics and developmentalism in the context of a minority-dominated state on the periphery of a political federation. It has focused attention on a specific period associated with the emergence, rise, and demise of the BERJAYA party in Sabah. It has argued that the BERJAYA period was instrumental in the reshaping of Federal-State relations in Sabah, and that the contours of BERJAYA's political fortunes can best be understood by locating it within the competing pressures of ‘bottom-up’ demands for political and cultural autonomy and the ‘top-down’ pressures of a centralizing Federal Government that was suspicious of such demands. The path BERJAYA trod in order to mediate these pressures — jettisoning its initial ‘multiracial’ stance in favour of a conjunction of Islamization with developmentalist policies, in an attempt to mould a population more conducive to Federal ambitions — had some initial success but eventually generated a sufficiently strong popular backlash that saw the party swept from power in 1985.

This chapter concludes the analysis by tracing political developments in the State in the post-BERJAYA period, demonstrating that such tensions continued to frame the political process in Sabah until the Federal regime changed tack in 1994 by dropping any further support for ‘multiracialism’ in the State and, instead, imposed a West Malaysia-style ethnic coalition, backed by a concerted developmentalist drive. While ethnic and religious discontent and tensions remain in the State, this formula has effectively neutered Sabah as a site of political contestation.

It is important at the outset to note that in seeking to oust the BERJAYA Government from power in Sabah, Pairin and the PBS did not set themselves up in direct opposition to the BN coalition in Kuala Lumpur, and repeatedly avowed their intention to seek entry to the coalition should they win the election, much as BERJAYA had done when it first ousted USNO.

INTRODUCTION

The BERJAYA party relied on the concept of ‘multiracialism’ to bring down the USNO regime in 1976. However, the idea was problematic for the BERJAYA party both at the Federal level and in Sabah itself. Initially, the concept of ‘multiracialism’ did not appeal to the other dominant pro-Islamic parties, such as UMNO and PAS, within the BN coalition. The BERJAYA party could not draw support from the majority of the Muslim electorate who were strong supporters of USNO in Sabah. This problematic situation for BERJAYA intensified with the advent of the Mahathir Administration at the Federal level, which increasingly moved towards Islamization.

ELECTORAL POLITICS: WHO GOT THE MUSLIM VOTE?

As Milne and Ratnam (1969) observed in their study of voting patterns in the 1967 State elections, the UPKO-USNO contest was expected to, and did, follow broadly ethno-religious lines, with Muslim bumiputera generally voting USNO, non-Muslim bumiputera voting UPKO, and the Chinese generally — although less consistently — voting SCA. However, it was less easy to advance a similar analysis for the 1976 State election, for two reasons. Firstly, BERJAYA was a new and untested party and it was thus not immediately clear how voters would take to it. Secondly, its espousal of ‘multiracialism clearly demonstrated, at least, the ambition to win votes from more than one community. It was in this latter respect that the initial BERJAYA line-up was notable for its prominent candidates from all the major ethnic and religious groups, including Kadazan Muslim convert Donald Stephens, Christian Kadazan Peter Mojuntin, Muslim Bumiputera Harris Salleh, Salleh Sulong, and Chinese Yap Pak Leong.

Unfortunately, ethnic distribution data such as that used by Milne and Ratnam is not available for the 1976 election. However, we can get an idea of the religious breakdown of the vote by looking at the ethnic distribution of the districts — for which census data is available — and comparing this with the aggregate votes received in the State constituencies within the respective districts. Typically, each district contained between two to four State constituencies. Figure 6.1 shows the relationship between the proportion of the population made up of the predominantly non-Muslim groups — the Kadazan, Murut and Chinese — and the proportion of the total vote for BERJAYA in all twenty-one districts.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter looks at how the ‘multiracial’ politics of the BERJAYA Government in Sabah took shape within the ambit of the Federal Government's policies, particularly in the ‘federalization’ of strategic Sabah Government affairs by Kuala Lumpur. The BERJAYA party never really defined what it meant by ‘multiracialism’. However, it was a term that was agreed on by both the Federal Government and BERJAYA to politically undermine the pro-Muslim appeal of the USNO party, and as a way of appealing to the non-Muslim electorate in Sabah. As far as the political organization of the BERJAYA party was concerned, a ‘multiracial’ party suggested a relatively broader ethnic representation within the party and the State Cabinet. The ethnic distribution of BERJAYA's candidates for the 1976 Sabah State election was 24 Muslim bumiputera, 14 non-Muslim bumiputera and 10 Chinese candidates, as opposed to the majority of Muslim candidates in USNO. Maintaining the ethnic balance within the State Government was important in projecting a ‘multiracial’ representation. However, BERJAYA's pledge on ‘multiracialism’ was complicated by the process of ‘federalization’, here understood as the transfer of certain State jurisdictions on Sabah affairs to Federal Administration. The federalization of a number of State departments and the transfer of Labuan to Federal control in 1984, for instance, did not necessarily strengthen the State Administration in Sabah, but it was an enabling process for the Federal Government to rationalize Federal-State relations, and subsequently the State Government as well.

After the 1969 national emergency, politics at the Federal level was affected by the UMNO party crisis. This crisis was situated in the disagreements between Tunku Abdul Rahman and Razak over the root cause and the subsequent analysis of the 1969 ethnic incident (Khoo 1992).

INTRODUCTION

James Ongkili, a native Kadazan historian of Sabah and politician who figured prominently in the BERJAYA Administration, once described North Borneo before the founding of the British North Borneo Company in 1881 as a geographical realm with “no community, no overall administration, no State economy, no State government … only mountains, jungles, rivers and the surrounding seas, and isolated villages scattered over the more than 29,000 square miles of tropical and warm equatorial land” (Ongkili 1981, p. xxvii). Indeed, these remarks were made in his introduction to a Commemorative History of Sabah, sponsored by the BERJAYA State Government as part of a ‘centenary’ celebration. For Ongkili and, implicitly, the State Administration in which he was the senior cabinet ‘representative’ of the native, non-Muslim ethnic groups, the history of Sabah began with colonialism — a sentiment markedly at odds with the intellectual and political discourse of nationalists in West Malaysia and beyond, who are usually at pains to emphasize the glory of pre-colonial political systems such as, in the West Malaysian case, the Sultanate of Melaka (Brown 2007; cf. Smith 1999).

Before Western colonialism, the Brunei Sultanate was a major power in the region, controlling substantial portions of Borneo and southern parts of the Philippine archipelago. However, the Brunei Sultanate began to lose its territories between 1840 and 1890 as a result of the expansionist policies of the Brooke regime in Sarawak and the presence of British North Borneo Company (BNBC). The rapid ‘dismemberment’ of Brunei therefore happened through the process of the cession of many rivers, except for the Limbang River which was annexed by the Brooke regime in 1890 — an occupation that the Brunei Sultan has never legally conceded till today (Tarling 1971; Wright 1970).

INTRODUCTION

When Sabah joined Malaysia, it was still a colonial-administered territory. Unlike in Malaya, pre-independence elections had never been instituted and the level of political awareness in Sabah was low. This began to change when the Malaysia plan was proposed in the early 1960s, providing the impetus for the emergence of at least five political organizations defined along ethno-religious lines. The leaders of each political organization, such as Mustapha Harun, Donald Stephens, and G. S. Sundang, emerged as pre-eminent in the local political scene because, as Native Chiefs, they had played a considerable role within local authority establishments in the British Colonial Administration. Prominent Chinese businessmen had also been actively involved in the Legislative council, since the days of the BNBC, as well as in collective organizations through the Chinese Advisory Board during the Colonial Administration. The emergence of a political trend dominated by these personalities was conditioned by their political relations with the Governor. Because of the relative weakness of political institutions in Sabah, there was more scope for these personalities to dominate the political scene (Loh 1997), giving the appearance that politics in Sabah consisted of little more than their changing political fortunes. The autonomy of these local ‘big-men’ (cf. Abinales 2000) was, however, circumscribed by the influence of the Federal Government in Kuala Lumpur. The early years of Malaysia were hence a period of some considerable political turbulence, as these local leaders and their associated ethnic elites vied both with the Federal Government and against each other to consolidate the ‘rules of the game’ in their favour. The diverse ethnic and religious constellation of the state meant that the Sabah Alliance formula, directly imported from the Peninsula, was considerably less stable than its West Malaysian counterpart.

This book aims to bridge an understanding of the politics of the Malaysian state of Sabah within the broader spectrum of the country's political system and development. As one of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo, along with neighbouring Sarawak, Sabah is separated from the West Malaysian peninsula by a thousand kilometres of the South China Sea. Moreover, both states also have historical legacies and cultural and political endowments vastly at odds from West Malaysia. To take one simple but important example, the common ethno-demographic characterization of Malaysia as divided into a Malay /bumiputera majority, and Chinese and Indian minorities may be essentially accurate in political, if not anthropological, terms for West Malaysia, but falls far short of capturing the political complexities of ethnic diversity in Sabah and Sarawak. Politics and political parties in Sabah hence tend to be less ‘racialized’ (Mandal 2004) and the communal model of party politics, which is so often the focus of interest in comparative studies of Malaysia (e.g. Horowitz 1985; Lijphart 1977), is consequently considerably less entrenched in Sabah. Historically, state elections in Sabah have produced an absolute majority for a single party that claimed ‘multi-ethnic’ status in six consecutive elections between 1976 and 1994. In West Malaysia, prior to the surprise results of the March 2008 elections, only Penang had come anywhere close to this and then only once, with the victory of the nominally multi-ethnic Gerakan party in 1969, which subsequently entered the Barisan Nasional (BN, or National Front) coalition.

Despite these manifest differences, Sabah and Sarawak are often underexplored or virtually ignored in mainstream analyses of the country's political system. Broad analyses of Malaysian politics that routinely appear on undergraduate reading lists (e.g. Case 1996; Crouch 1996 a; Means 1991), while interesting and insightful in their own ways, are often primarily or exclusively studies of West Malaysia. Sabah and Sarawak are largely ignored in Malaysian political studies, primarily because they do not conform to the conventional perspectives of ethnic politics found in West Malaysia.

The historiography of the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), and what has been called the ‘shooting war’, has already been well-covered in the literature, but the role of secret intelligence and the Malayan Police Special Branch in the armed struggle against the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and its military wing, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), has hitherto been largely neglected. In this book, the focus is on the Special Branch, the main intelligence agency of the Malayan government. Of course, there have been several emergencies in the history of Malaya since the end of the Second World War. The present study is focused exclusively on the First Emergency of 1948–60, at a time that tested the capacities of both the British colonial government and the local Malayan government after independence in 1957. Already, at the conclusion of that first Emergency, there was evidence of ongoing communist opposition, which led to what has been called the ‘Second Emergency’, but that subject is beyond the scope of this book.

Although intelligence studies have come under the academic scrutiny of Western historians and political scientists, who have come to regard intelligence and political surveillance as a critical feature of modern state and society, similar studies have not emerged in the Asian context. This book attempts to make good this deficiency. It deals with the role of the Special Branch in the Emergency and argues that successful intelligence gathering was a crucial feature not only of British colonial rule in Malaya, but also of the independent Malayan government that took over from the British in 1957. There is little doubt from the evidence presented in the following chapters that without the political and military intelligence provided by the Special Branch, it would not have been possible for the Malayan authorities to defeat the CPM's armed uprising and bring the Emergency to a successful conclusion in 1960. The expertise and operational intelligence provided by the Special Branch was critical.

It has been said that the Achilles heel of the Communist Party of Malaya was its communications. This chapter deals with the Special Branch's analysis of the CPM's communications system and the use of couriers during the Emergency period. It presents, too, a case study of a Special Branch operation leading to the arrest in 1952 of Lee Ten (Tian) Tai, alias Lee Meng (usually referred to by her alias), the leader of the notorious Kepayang Gang operating in the Ipoh area, and a leading communist operating under the direction of the CPM's Central Committee, who headed the communications system connecting Ipoh with Singapore and the CPM's Central Committee in southern Thailand. The case study of Lee Meng refers to the early part of the communist insurgency, when the threat to British Malaya was still serious because the new intelligence system introduced by Jenkin and the Briggs Plan was yet to be thoroughly tested. In some senses, the arrest of Lee Meng provided evidence of the expanded capacities of the new intelligence system, the growing confidence of Special Branch and the effectiveness of the co-operation between the Malayan and Singapore Special Branches.

The chapter analyses, too, the breakdown of law and order and the proliferation of communist terrorism in the Ipoh area between 1949 and 1951 with which Lee Meng was closely involved. Lee Meng's arrest and subsequent trial for being in possession of a hand grenade, a capital offence under the Emergency Regulations, received considerable publicity in the British and Malayan press. It presented several unusual features that will be discussed in this chapter, leading to the involvement of the British, Hungarian and Malayan governments, the British Commissioner-General for South East Asia, the Malayan High Commissioner and the Sultan of Perak, Sir Yussuf ‘Izzuddin Shah.

The Malayan Special Branch found itself at a considerable disadvantage in taking over responsibility for political, security and operational intelligence at such short notice from the Malayan Security Service. Though the Special Branch absorbed most of the former Malayan Security Service personnel based in Malaya, it was still under-strength in the first few years of the Emergency. As related in the preceding chapter, the MSS itself was under-strength when it handed over its functions to the Malayan and Singapore Special Branches, and in Malaya Lieutenant Colonel Dalley had to arrange, at least temporarily, for the local police CIDs in the territories of Pahang, Malacca, Kelantan and Trengganu to cover political and security intelligence on behalf the MSS. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that at the beginning of the Emergency, the Special Branch was criticised by the higher echelons of the military and the civil administration for its perceived unpreparedness and slowness in providing operational intelligence. In many cases, handwritten and cyclostyled communist documents recovered from communist camps or found in the possession of captured or dead communist insurgents were discarded as being of little more than routine value and not afforded the importance they deserved. From the evidence available, it would seem there was some validity to the criticisms. One of the reasons for the jam of documents was, of course, that the Special Branch was under-staffed and simply unable to cope with the backlog of documents awaiting translation. The MSS may have inadvertently contributed to this state of affairs by handing over a large backlog of communist documents awaiting translation to the Special Branch in August 1948. In Dalley's letter of 13 July 1948 to Sir Ralph Hone, for instance, he admitted the MSS had a considerable accumulation of communist documents awaiting translation because of an acute shortage of translators and supporting office staff (Chapter 2).