Empowering Sarawakians through History, Part 4.

By Bunga Pakma

Thanks for your attention and your intelligent response to my articles. I am most grateful for your drawing me to see many aspects of Sarawak’s history I would have missed, and for letting me see that history from your point of view.

What is Empowerment anyway?

One reader writes to ask me when I am going to share the “empowering aspects”  of this series. She (or he—we’re all pseudonymous here) and others have made me aware that “empower” is a difficult word. I had better explain.

If I could lead an army into Sarawak and drive out the oppressors, would that be “empowering” Sarawakians? Perhaps not; it’d be myarmy. I’d be at equal risk of untut of the ego if I could say the Magick Word and cause Sarawakians to rise up as one. None of us can avoid fantasies like these. How many people I have heard build Revolutions in the air! We must turn to reality.

What do we have in our power? Philosophers—like you and me—have debated this question for thousands of years, and the consensus we have reached is, Not Much. We did not choose how we were born, we cannot choose not to age and finally die. We have a little power over the physical world. I leave this for your contemplation.

We have as individuals complete control over only one thing, and that is our will. Even here, that power operates within one small sphere. It is in our power to grant or withhold our assent, whatever we are forced to do. A thief may rob us at gunpoint, but he cannot make us agree that his action is morally justified. Nothing is more common than for a person to give up his life rather than assent to a tyrant’s claim to be acting with moral authority.

This is a power each of us possesses as a gift from God. We are empowered when we know we have that power.

Analects 9.26 Zi Han: The Master said, “The commander of the forces of a large state may be carried off, but the will of even a common man cannot be taken from him.”

Every state in the world claims to base its authority on the assent/consent of its people. No state that openly repudiated democracy would be regarded as legitimate. Sarawak is nominally a democracy and its ruler craves the legitimacy democracy bestows, as greedily as any other tyrant in a nominal democracy.

We see what extremes the régime has gone to in order to bring under its own control this precious legitimacy which only the assent of the people bestows. We see everything from vote-buying to physical intimidation, although you may note that goons are unleashed only on the poorest and least powerful people.

Ruling cliques have yet a more subtle and exceedingly ancient way of extracting the consent of the people. This consists solely in obscuring the nature of government in mystery. Government is complex. It is messy; human beings produce plenty of garbage, and somebody’s got to clean it up.

But government is not mysterious. Anybody can take part in it, and you don’t have to be a charismatic genius, a tough guy or a wizard to be a leader. Have you ever heard this from anybody? The depraved sociopaths who clamber and claw their way to power would have us all believe that only they can keep us in one piece, and the wing-nuts can see nothing but conspiracy.

In truth, government is a vast tragi-comedy of ignorance, blunders, greed and carelessness. A few responsible souls try to limit the damage, but most people in power exert every effort to bewilder, bamboozle and confuse the people with the bullshit that government is a dark, mighty secret and “only I can lead you to safety.” Here is the biggest and oldest of the Big Lies.

If the people of Sarawak have elected BN governments for the past 40 years, can we really take this as their assent? I should hope not. My hope is that Sarawakians come to see the “mystique” plastered over their history and conditions for what it is. No one knowingly eats a poisoned bun. As so many of you have urged, I second: be informed and vote.

Sarawak, Britain’s Last Colony

Whatever impelled Britain at first to accept Sarawak as its very last colony seems to me entirely unclear. Colonialism was on its way out all over the world. Perhaps European nations would have liked to hold onto their empires, but having been bombed and exhausted, they were in no position use the required force. Britain had kept India on her side through WW2 only by pledging speedy independence.

The British in July 1945 had voted out the war cabinet led by Churchill, and the new Labour government was ideologically against imperialism. Furthermore, the Brits had to pay the Brookes even more money for Sarawak. I can only conclude that simple possession of Sarawak persuaded the Brits to keep it. The Colonial Office in Whitehall was smugly satisfied at last to have control over what they had always thought of as their territory.

Cession was not popular. Vyner had ants in his pants to get the place off his hands and issued a proclamation in which he basically told the people to get colonized and get stuffed.¹ Still, when the Rajah and Ranee came to Kuching in April 1946 people greeted them with enthusiasm, and with many signs bearing Anti-Cession slogans. Genuine party-politics began at that moment in Sarawak. A substantial portion of the people had an opinion about their future, and were organizing to demand a hearing.

The Cession was formalized. The story is what you’d expect, a done deal, with a vote that had no chance of going against what had been pre-determined. There’s democracy for you. You may investigate the dreary details for yourself. However, the Sarawak people did not simply acquiesce in the handover. I doubt that their desire to retain the Brooke raj had much to do with any affection for Vyner personally. What Sarawakian really knew him? Opposition to Cession boiled down to two major objections: the people of Sarawak had been promised independence, and Sarawakians did not want to be colonized.

The Anti-Cession movement agitated with vigour for the next three years. Though questions were asked in Parliament and Sarawak received much publicity in the British press, the annexation of Sarawak was a fait accompli and the Colonial Office needed only to stall. The movement for Sarawak independence ended tragically. On 3 December 1949, Rosly bin Dhobie fatally stabbed the new British Governor, Duncan Stewart, in Sibu. Sarawakians, shocked that things had gone as far as political assassination, quieted their unhappiness at cession to a murmur. Meantime, Stewart’s murder gave the colonial power welcome excuse to assert its authority more vigorously.

The Real Twentieth Century

Received opinion insists on the contrary, but in truth the 20^th century was the century of political reaction. By 1900 the Left had developed for 200 years and represented a large and respected part of the political spectrum. People witnessed progress in all fields and they hoped the day was coming when human ideals of social justice would at last be fulfilled.

World War One and the Bolshevik Revolution destroyed these hopes. Governments lost no time demonizing the Left, and Soviet Russia proved that communism, as they practised it, was not in the least connected to the ideals that brought communism to being.

Sarawak was barely colonized when the Cold War broke out. In 1948 the Cold War arrived in Peninsular Malaya when insurgents killed three white planters. Indonesia was fighting a war of independence against the Dutch, the French were fighting the avowedly Communist Vietminh in Indochina. On the one hand, leftist aspirations abounded in SE Asia, and the European colonists or former colonists were scared. (The US had its concerns, too. The best introduction to them is Graham Greene’sThe Quiet American.)

The whites reluctantly acknowledged that their colonies were gone for good. Britain accepted this with more wisdom and worked to arrange things so that after independence, Malaya would remain “on friendly terms” with them. A lot of rubber and tin still made money for England, and a Malayan élite who had reason to be grateful to the Empire would not let Malaya drift to the left.

The formation of Malaysia was a masterpiece of statecraft towards this aim. The year 1963 arrived. The Brits were leaving Borneo, and Malaya could “have” Sarawak, Sabah and Singapore, and reconstitute itself as Malaysia. The Brits and the Tunku devised a package that neatly satisfied them both. Sarawakian and Sabahan natives were to be classified as “Malays,” so that even with Singapore in the mix Malaysia would still possess a “Malay” majority; and the Brits got a government that wouldn’t nationalize their businesses.

In the end it was even better. Singapore got booted out, and so the “Malay” majority counted for more than ever.

I shall spare you more words and direct you to an article by a very fine historian of Sarawak, Prof. Dr. Ooi Keat Gin, of USM, Penang. He discusses the formation of Malaysia better than I could ever hope to. Read it, admire Prof. Ooi’s prose, and weep.

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Related Link : http://pengayau.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/how-sarawak-was-conned-into-the-formation-of-malaysia/