Demographic implosion in Sabah?

The Malaysia Today
10 February 2006


Demographic implosion in Sabah?

Kim Quek

Sabah’s population has exploded by five folds since 1970, according
to Malaysiakini’s stunning news on Feb 6. In its news report titled
“Sabah facing an Epic problem”, correspondent Tony Thien stated that
the State’s population has grown from 0.65 million in 1970 to 2.99
million in 2004, and Sabah NGO leaders estimated that out of the 3
million population, 2 million are illegal immigrants, many of them
enjoying Bumiputra privileges. (In making this estimate,
consideration was given to the fact that 800,000 Sabahan Malaysians
have left the State from 1995 to 2004 according to immigration
records.) These Sabah leaders are now petitioning for a royal
commission of enquiry which should, among others, “investigate into
why so many ICs were issued, who authorized it and under what law”.

While the phenomenon of Sabah’s population explosion arising from the
influx of illegal immigrants has been common knowledge, I find it
strange that people should be asking the hows and whys – shouldn’t
these also have been common knowledge? Have we forgotten Justice
Muhammad Kamil Awang’s judgment annulling the Likas election in Sabah
in June 2001?

In a rare display of judicial independence under former prime
minister Mahathir Mohamad’s rule, Justice Muhammad through his
judgment chronicled page after page, details of a massive illicit
campaign to convert illegal immigrants into voters through unlawful
issue of blue ICs and unlawful registration of these IC holders into
the electoral rolls. These details of illegal activities included
many instances of witnesses’ testimonies, affidavits and
incriminating government and political party correspondence and
circulars. These evidences point irresistibly to the involvement of
the National Registration Department, Election Commission, police and
UMNO officials in a conspiracy to massively convert illegal
Philippine and Indonesian immigrants into citizens and voters. In
fact this phantom voter scam was so serious that, such revelation in
the judgment was described by Muhammad as only the “tip of an
iceberg”. Muhammad’s judgment also gave details of how repeated
official complaints from the opposition parties of such fraudulent
practices had been consistently stonewalled by the authorities all
the way up to the highest levels of government, including a rejection
for debate in Parliament.

On 28th June 2001, I wrote an article titled “In defence of Justice
Muhammad and judicial integrity”, countering the concerted attacks by
Mahathir and former de facto law minister Rais Yatim against Justice
Muhammad. In an obvious attempt to cover up ruling BN’s wrong-doing,
Mahathir and Rais accused Muhammad of using the judgment to vent
personal grudges against the government through “politicking and anti-
administration comments”.

In my article, apart from exposing the falsehood of Mahathir’s and
Rais’ accusations, I dwelled at length at the motivation behind this
illicit campaign to turn illegal immigrants into citizens, and also
at the fatal impact such devastating demographic changes in Sabah
society and in the electoral rolls had on the original Sabahans. I
also outlined remedial steps that should be taken to undo these
damages. These comments were as relevant then as they are now. Since
this issue has now caught national attention, I would append relevant
extracts of this article as inputs towards resolution of this mess,
which is obviously of crisis proportion to Sabahans now.

After stating in the article that the highest authorities in the
National Registration Department and the Election Commission in Kuala
Lumpur had been incriminated in this phantom voters scam, I wrote then:

“What motivated these highest civil servants to commit such
treasonous acts against the Sabah State in unlawfully admitting these
tens of thousands of illegal immigrants as citizens and voters?
Personal gains can be ruled out, as these are more than offset by the
heavy punishment that can be meted out for such high crimes against
the country.

“The only plausible explanation is that this is the political
strategy of the UMNO leadership to regain political power in Sabah
from the Kadazan (mainly Christians) dominated PBS. The latter had
won every Sabah election since 1986 save the last one in 1999. It did
not take a genius to find out why. Until the last election in 1999,
the Sabah electorate had been such that non-Muslim Kadazans and
Chinese overwhelmingly outnumbered Malays (all Muslims) and other
Muslims. With UMNO’s heavy emphasis on racial and religious
privileges, which alienated the non-Malays and non-Muslims, there was
virtually no chance that the UMNO dominated Barisan Nasional could
unseat the PBS Government, unless there was a drastic restructuring
of the ratio of Muslim dominated electorates to non-Muslim dominated
electorates and re-drawing of the electoral boundaries.

“And this is exactly what happened. Through massive infusion of
illegal Philippine and Indonesian immigrants (who are all Muslims )
into the electoral roll and gerrymandering, Muslim majority
constituencies in Sabah in the 1999 electoral roll had suddenly and
inexplicably increased from 30% to 50% of the total constituencies of
48 within a short period of 5 years. Given this numerical boost,
Barisan Nasional swept the last Sabah election in 1999, after
employing every dirty election trick available under the sun
including the usual blatant abuses of government agencies and
resources and the mass media which was completely under the thumb of
the ruling coalition.

“Now that Justice Muhammad has established legitimacy to past
complaints of serious electoral frauds that have hitherto been
rejected by the election courts and denied by the government, we must
pursue relentlessly to clean up this mess and restore justice to the
people of Sabah. An independent commission of enquiry should be set
up immediately with the following objectives:

A) On illegal issue of blue ICs:

- Uncover the syndicates that issue blue ICs to illegal immigrants.

- Bring the offending politicians, National Registration officials
and other government appointed officials to books.

- Trace the offence to the highest-ranking politicians for directing
this illegal campaign and uncover the political motive.

- Ascertain and cancel all blue ICs illegally issued.

B) On phantom voters

- Cleanse the electoral roll of all phantom voters which include
electors issued illegally with blue ICs, electors registered with
temporary ICs and fake ICs, electors with duplicate IC numbers and
electors disqualified through court conviction (all of these
classifications of phantom voters were elaborated in Justice
Muhammad’s judgment).

- Ascertain officials of the Election Commission who collaborated in
the operation to register phantom voters and who had given direction
not to entertain objections to these phantom voters.

- Ascertain the motive and trace the offence to the highest-ranking
politicians who initiated this operation.”

Looking back historically, this illegal immigrant nightmare in Sabah
started in the early seventies when the late chief minister Mustapha
Harun (an ethnic Suluk born in Philippines) opened the floodgate for
the Southern Filipinos (mainly Suluks) to swarm unto the shores of
Sabah. Since then, the unrestrained inflows of illegal immigrants
from both Philippine and Indonesia over the decades resulted in these
immigrant societies growing to monstrous proportions. These
immigrants have been not only posing grave security threats to the
outnumbered Sabahans, but have now taken centre stage as phantom
voters to dislodge the indigenous population from their legitimate
seat of power.

Through such betrayal of Sabahans’ trust in the BN federal
government, Sabah’s security has been endangered and Sabahans’
constitutional rights of self-determination stripped. Is it not right
and proper that a royal commission of inquiry be set up now to
ascertain the true facts and strategise on remedial measures? Must
Sabahans continue to suffer silently? When will they rise up to be
the masters of their own fate?

Ends