The forgotten riots and the subjugation of Sabah

 
Sabah writer and film-maker Nadira Ilana, a winner of the Justin Louis Award in this year’s Freedom Film Festival, talking about why she made The Silent Riot, a film about the forgotten events of 1986 Sabah, months after the KL-backed Harris Salleh regime was narrowly defeated by resurgent Kadazan-Dusun nationalism in the 1985 state elections.

In an extraordinary spectacle in the wee hours after the election, Sabah strongman Tun Datu Mustapha of Usno beseiged the Governor, demanding to be declared as chief minister instead of Joseph Pairin Kitigan, the leader of Parti Bersatu Sabah, who had broken with Harris’s Berjaya party. Pairin was finally declared the rightful chief minister by a court decision.

On March 12, seven plastic explosives were detonated in Kota Kinabalu, and a bomb detonated in Tawau. In the subsequent disturbances, five people died. RTM staged a running live telecast from Kota Kinabalu of rioters holed up in a mosque and of police action to dislodge them.

There was little doubt that this was part of a process of destabilising the Pairin government, hand in hand with enticements to PBS assemblymen to defect. There was little doubt among KL political observers that the strongman government of Mahathir Mohamad strongly favoured strongman leadership, not nationalism of a different variety.

In May, the Pairin government called for another election, which it won, with a bigger margin. He was to win two more elections, in 1990 and 1994 — but then his followers immediately defected en masse to the Barisan Nasional in a coup engineered in KL after years of destabilisation efforts aimed at the Kitingan brothers, with allegations of corruption and secession.

Kadazandusun nationalism both flowered and withered under Kadazandusun leadership and that is a tale still untold, with only drips and draps about the Kitigans, the late Donald Stephens and Peter Mojuntin.

But the subjugation of Sabah is mostly a tale of Malayan — meaning Umno Malay — expansionist neo-colonialism and with oil, timber and political corruption on a grand scale as a backdrop, featuring the usual KL suspects, among them Mahathir Mohamad; his deputies Musa Hitam and Ghafar Baba; of Rahim Noor, the policeman who propped up the Mahathir regime in 1987 and in 1997; of Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and many, many others. Not forgetting, of course, the man most notably linked to defections, Anwar Ibrahim, the “black-eye” victim of Rahim Noor’s fist.

Blood and money. The fist or the buck in the other hand.

That’s Malaysian politics and Malaysian democracy. Isn’t it?