The Sarawak Political Scene

Abstract

THE MALAYSIAN SHIP OF STATE was officially launched on September i6, 1i963, in a ceremony which had been delayed some sixteen days by Britain and Malaya while the United Nations attempted to assess popular opinion in the Bornean states in order to assuage the feelings of two of Malaysia's less enthusiastic neighbors, Indonesia and the Philippines.' When Tengku Abdul Rahman presented his seemingly offhanded proposal for a "Mighty Malaysia" at a Singapore press luncheon on May 27, i96i, the plan appeared disarmingly simple: the eleven states of the Peninsula would unite with the island city-state of Singapore, the quasi-independent Sultanate of Brunei, and the British colonies of Sarawak and North Borneo to create a new bastion of parliamentary democracy, the Federation of Malaysia. The solution seemed neat and simple at the time. Chronically troubled Singapore would be incorporated into the politically more predictable Federation of Malaya before the required constitutional review of i964 could provide even greater opportunities for mischief for Singapore's already sizeable left-wing political forces.2 To offset this sudden influx of I.2 million Singapore Chinese, the three Bornean states could offer almost one million Malays and tribal natives, who might not be homogeneous, or sometimes even congenial, but at least were non-Chinese. In addition, the Malaysia scheme would remove from Southeast Asia the last of the British colonies; their existence probably did not seriously disturb the ruling Malayan Alliance but they had to be viewed realistically as potential foci for anti-colonial agitation from Indonesia, and at the same time Malaysia could draw into the fold the out-dated Sultanate of Brunei, an anachronism that could not be expected much longer to retain its nineteenth-century way of life and remain a backwater in modern nationalist