Sabah not in Malaysia, Locsin tells US aid unit

THE Department of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday told the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to correct an announcement that described Sabah as part of Malaysia.

“Sabah is not in Malaysia, if you want to have anything to do with the Philippines,” said Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., after USAID tweeted it had donated 500 hygiene kits for Region 9 (Southern Mindanao) “for use by returning Filipino repatriates from Sabah, Malaysia, who arrived in Zamboanga City and Bongao, Tawi Tawi.”

In his official Twitter account, Locsin warned, “You better edit that announcement if you know what’s good for you.”

Prior to this, Locsin had always maintained that the country will never abandon its claim to Sabah, for which the Sultanate of Sulu gets “rental payment” from Malaysia decades after the territory was “awarded” to it by Britain.

Republic Act 5446, which took effect on September 18, 1968, considers Sabah as a territory “over which the Republic of the Philippines has acquired dominion and sovereignty.”

On July 16, 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the Philippine claim over Sabah is retained and may be pursued in the future. Close to a million Filipinos reside in Sabah, with an area of 73,631 km² east of Borneo, and they comprise one-third of the total population. Many of them work in construction, fisheries or labor-intensive industries. According to certain historical accounts, in 1658 the Sultan of Brunei gave Sabah to the Sultan of Sulu “either as a dowry or because troops from Sulu helped him quell a rebellion.” In 1878 the Sultanate of Sulu signed a contract, known as a pajak, that allowed the British North Borneo Company to occupy Sabah in perpetuity as long as it regularly paid the sultanate a sum of money. The British colonial government succeeded the company, however, and, in 1946, Sabah became a Crown Colony. In 1963 Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore formed the Federation of Malaysia. While the British and Malaysia interpreted pajak to mean “sale,” the Sulu Sultanate has always maintained it means “lease”. Even today, Malaysia pays about RM5,000 (S$1,680) a year to the Sulu Sultanate. However, Malaysia considers this dispute as a “non-issue” as it interprets the 1878 agreement as that of cession, and it asserts that the residents of Sabah had exercised their right to self-determination when they joined to form the Malaysian federation in 1963. The Filipino population in Sabah from mainland Philippines is estimated at roughly 900,000, but the natives of Sabah who are descendants of the Tausug population from the Sulu Archipelago are not included in the number. There are no official statistics but it is estimated that more than a million comprise native Sabahans of Tausug descent. It is safe to say therefore that almost two-thirds of the entire population of Sabah are Philippine related, according to Anne de Bretagne, cofounder and administrator, Philippine Sabah Claim Forum.