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By Farish A Noor
Allow me to begin by stating categorically that I am a committed Southeast Asian-ist and a committed ASEAN-ist.
In
my work as a lecturer I have constantly reminded my students of the
constructed nature of Southeast Asia today, the relative newness of our
political borders, and the newness of our nation-states. I have also
emphasized the shared overlapping histories of the many diasporas that
populate this complex and sometimes confounding archipelago of ours.
It can be summed up thus: We Southeast Asians are caught between a fluid region and a hard state.
No
matter how hard some of the hyper-nationalists among us may try, they
cannot deny the fact that we share a common, interconnected
history/histories. These histories often overlap, make contesting
demands and claims, and contradict each other. But that is the nature of
history as a discourse, for it is a narrative without a full-stop and
is a discursive terrain that has to be looked at from a multiplicity of
angles.
There can never be a final history to any
area or subject, for as soon as we put the pen down, time marches on
and we are forced to return and revise our settled assumptions.
For those who seek a happy panacea to their existential angst, history
is not the remedy because every single historical claim can and will be
contested by another.
That makes
history a soft and unstable foundation for any political-economic claim,
but thankfully it is also the reason why historians like me won’t be
unemployed any time soon.
So much for fluidity and shifting
historical parameters. Now comes the hard part: We Southeast Asians also
happen to be living in the present-day postcolonial world of ASEAN,
made up of nation-states that do what nation-states do:
Compartmentalize, categorize, delimit and demarcate, fix boundaries and
police them.
I have to state here that I am not a big
fan of the postcolonial nation-state for the simple reason that in my
opinion the post-colonial nation-state is simply the inheritor of the
proclivities, bias, myopia and solipsism of the colonial state of the
past.
Look around us in Southeast Asia today
and what do we see, but postcolonial nation-states that continue to
police their people, their borders, their identities and the very
epistemology and vocabulary that frames our understanding of ourselves
and the Other. Categories like "citizen" and "foreigner" are modern
labels that we, Southeast Asians, have inherited from our colonial past
along with dubious concepts like racial difference.
Contradiction
What,
then, are we today? It would appear to me at least that we Southeast
Asians are a hybrid, mongrel lot of communities and peoples with a
complicated past.
On the one hand we still retain the
residual traces of our primordial roots to land and sea that tell us
that this region is our shared home. But we also happen to be modern
citizen-subjects living under the modern regime of the racial census,
the identity card, the passport and the national flag.
We cannot escape this contradiction
because this is what our common history has bequeathed us today. We are
modern Southeast Asian citizen-subjects who live in a region with a
complex history that predates modernity, colonialism and the
nation-state, and we cannot escape our past any more than we can escape
our present.
But this contradiction is now manifest in
what is happening in the East Malaysian state of Sabah. In the midst of
the chest-thumping, saber-rattling jingoism and hyper-nationalism we
see rising in both Philippines and Malaysia today, we ought to take a
step back and look at ourselves honestly in the face.
It seems that what is confronting us now
is a clash between the modern state, driven as it is by its modernist
logic of governmentality; and the primordial attachment of some people
to land and space that exceeds the confines of temporality and space.
What has happened is that a group of
non-state actors, namely those who claim to be the descendants of the
Sultan of Sulu, have unilaterally and without the consent of the
government of the Philippines, entered into the territory of another
state – Malaysia – bearing arms and demanding their right to settle
there.
Both the Malaysian and Philippine state
are at a loss as to what to do, for both states are now forced to deal
with a non-state actor that does not play by the rules of the modern
state.
Such a situation can be extended
hypothetically in a million directions: What if a bunch of Malaysian
citizens unilaterally entered Singapore and claimed it on the grounds
that it was formerly a part of the Malay kingdom of Johor? What if a
bunch of Thais entered northern Malaysia and claimed the state of
Kelantan on the grounds that it was formerly part of the Siamese
kingdom?
The possibilities are endless, and
dizzying to boot- but the problem would remain the same: How should a
state or states deal with non-state actors?
Reviewing history
Two historical details ought to be brought into play at this point:
The first is that the history of Sabah itself ought to be foregrounded
at this stage, as Philippine and Malaysian nationalists have failed to
ask what do the people of Sabah think about this.
Let us note that Sabah was never an empty space that was passed on from
one power to another. In the past, Sabah came under the domination of
the Kingdom of Brunei, and it was Brunei that then gifted parts of Sabah
to the Kingdom of Sulu, and it was both the kingdoms of Brunei and Sulu
that then passed it on to the British North Borneo Company. But Sabah
has its own past, its own history and its own people - who seem to have
been left out of the discussion altogether.
The indigenous people of Sabah happen to
be the Kadazandusuns and the Muruts, who consist of the Bonggis (Banggi
island, Kudat), the Idaan/Tindals (Tempasuk, Kota Belud), the Dumpaas
Kadazans (Orang Sungai, Kinabatangan), the Bagahaks (Orang Sungai, also
Kinabatangan), the Tombinuo and Buludupis Kadazans (Orang Sungai, also
Kinabatangan), the Kimaragang Kadazans (Tandek and Kota Marudu), the
Liwans (Ranau and Tambunan), the Tangaah Kadazans (Panampat and Papar),
the Rungus (Matunggong and Kudat), the Tatanah Kadazans (Kuala Penyu),
the Lotuds (Tuaran), the Bisayas (Beaufort), the Tidongs (Tawau) and the
Kedayans (Sipitang). Then there are the Muruts who consist of the
Nabais, Piluans, Bokans, Taguls, Timoguns, Lundayehs, Tangaras,
Semambus, Kolors and Melikops.
These are the indigenous communities of
Sabah, and if anyone has a right to the land of Sabah it ought to be
them. Nobody denies that Bruneians, Suluks, Ilanuns, Bugis, Malays,
Chinese, Indians, Arabs and other communities have resided in Sabah too
in the past, but the latter came from other kingdoms and polities, and
in the case of the Bruneians and Suluks of Sulu, they also happened to
be outsiders who imposed their dominance over the indigenous people of
Sabah.
This brings me to the second point I want
to make: It has to be remembered that both Brunei and Sulu held sway
over Sabah as a territory under their dominion, in a manner that seems
more akin to the way the British North Borneo company held sway over
Sabah from the 1880s to 1940s.
When the descendants of the Sultan of
Sulu claim to "own" Sabah today, what exactly does this deed of
ownership entail and mean? Does it signify Sulu’s former political
dominance over a territory that was gifted to it by another domineering
power? If so, then how is this any different from making a colonial
claim over a land whose people may not even recognize Sulu’s right to
govern over them?
It is ironic that while the
self-proclaimed Sultan of Sulu bemoans his loss of dominance, nobody
(not even the Sultan) has asked if the Kadazandusuns, Muruts and other
indigenous people of Sabah want to live under his dominion. Furthermore,
it seems to only underscore the fact that Sulu’s claim (like Brunei’s
and Britain’s) was that of an external polity claiming a territory that
was not part of their homeland proper.
Cosmopolitan Sabah
None
of this alters the fact that Sabah has always been, and remains, an
extraordinarily cosmopolitan space where cultures and peoples overlap
and share common lives and interests. In comparison to other parts of
Malaysia, for instance, Sabahan society retains its fluid and dynamic
identity until today.
In Sabah it is not uncommon to come
across indigenous families where the siblings happen to be Muslim and
Christian, all living under the same roof and celebrating Muslim and
Christian festivals together. Sabah society also seems more decentered
compared to other communities in the region: The Kadazandusuns do not
have a concept of Kingship, and instead govern themselves along the
lines of communal leaders (Orang Kaya Kaya) and their symbolic grand
leader called the "Huguan Siou."
So tolerant and open is Sabah society
that inter-ethnic marriages are common, with Kadazandusuns and Muruts
marrying Malays, Chinese, Arabs as well as Suluks, Bugis, Bajaos,
Bruneians. It has been like this for hundreds of years; and I hasten to
add that I actually grew up in Sabah between the years 1981 to 1984, and
recall how open, eclectic and mobile Sabah society was then.
Sabahans have never had a problem with
other communities settling there, and that is why we still see large
numbers of Suluks, Bajaos, Malays and Chinese across the state, settling
into mixed families or into smaller settlements. Furthermore Sabahans
are attuned to the reality of living in a fluid archipelago, which is
why its coastal settlements have always been transit points where people
from abroad come in and out with ease.
Just before the Lahad Datu incident I was
informed that a large number of Suluks had arrived for a wedding, and
they came in without passports and visas, and left peacefully
afterwards.
It has been like that in Sabah since my childhood. But my fear is that
culture of openness and fluidity came to an untimely and graceless end
when some of the followers of the Sultan of Sulu landed with guns and
rocket-launchers.
Fluid borders only exist under one
assumption: that the visitor is a friend, and not an aggressor. The
moment guns come into the picture, the fluid border dries up and becomes
hard.
Hardened borders, hardened hearts
I
hate nationalism. I said at the beginning that I am a committed
Southeast Asian-ist and ASEAN-ist, and this debacle in Sabah has not
weakened my resolve, as both an academic and an activist, to work
towards closer ASEAN integration.
Here in my institute in NTU, I see the
faces of ASEAN every single day: My students come from Singapore,
Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, in fact all of
ASEAN. Being childless myself, I regard them as my wards and
responsibility and like all teachers I want them to succeed in the
future. I also want them to succeed in an ASEAN region where every ASEAN
citizen feels that the entire region is his or her home, a place he/she
belongs to, a place where he/she would not feel like a foreigner.
But as I said at the beginning, we ASEAN
citizens also live in the age of the modern nation-state, and there is
no escaping the fact that we are modern citizen-subjects as well. Being
caught between a fluid region and a hard modern state is not an
existential crisis that we cannot resolve, for we can bring to the
modern nation-state our subjective longings to see greater integration
on a people-to-people level that takes the nation-state one step
further.
Already we see that the modern
nation-state is beginning to transcend itself in ASEAN: The
communicative infrastructure that we have built – through roads, rail
and cheap airline communications – means that more Southeast Asians are
traveling, studying, working and living in different parts of the region
than ever before.
Gone are the days when a Malaysian,
Filipino or Singaporean would be born in his country, study in the same
country, work and die in the same country. In the near future, we may
well live to see the birth of the first ASEAN generation who are born in
one country, study in another, work in another and die in another, all
the while feeling that he or she is still at home, in Southeast Asia.
But for this to happen, we cannot bypass the nation-state entirely; for we need the nation-state in order to transcend the nation-state. We
need the nation-state to evolve where it may one day accept the reality
that its citizens have multiple origins, multiple destinies, multiple
and combined loyalties.
We need to work towards an ASEAN future
where our governments may come to accept our complex, confounding
hyphenated identities as something normal, and not an anomaly; when
someone who is Javanese-Dutch-Indian-Arab like me can claim to come from
Indonesia, be born in Malaysia, work in Singapore and love the
Philippines.
Ironically, this is the impasse we are at
today: To revive our collective memory of a shared Southeast Asian
past, we need to work with and through the nation-state as the dominant
paradigm that governs international relations.
What we cannot and should not do is
selectively appropriate history to make outlandish claims that further
only our own limited ends, the way China has been doing by turning to
its own China-centric history books in order to claim the South China
Sea as theirs.
Such selectivity, be it in the case of
China’s or the Sultan of Sulu’s, denies the fact that history will
always remain contested by others. Unless we are prepared to accept that
whatever view we have of the ASEAN region is only one of many views,
and that we need to accept that multi-perspectivism is the only way to
navigate ourselves on the choppy waters of history, we will remain
forever trapped in our own myopic delusions.
At present, the Sabah impasse has stirred
violent emotions among nationalists in Malaysia and the Philippines,
with armchair tacticians talking of more violence.
Such idle talk is unbecoming of us, a people who share a complex history
whose richness we ought to be celebrating instead. And my final appeal
is this: End this incursion into Sabah for the sake of the Sabahans as
well as Filipinos and Malaysians; for what this has done is engendered
feelings of deep fear and distrust among the Sabahans who have for
centuries been among the most open communities in the region.
The thousands of Suluks, Bugis, Bajaos
and others who have settled in Sabah for decades have done so with
relative ease, but no longer. The Sulu gunmen who landed in Sabah did
not only bring their M-16s and rocket-launchers with them, but also the
divisive dichotomy of "Self" and "Other/Foreigner," and the last thing
this academic wants to see is yet another wall being built to divide
Southeast Asians all over again. - Rappler.com
Dr Farish A Noor is Associate
Professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU
University Singapore. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not
necessarily represent his institution.
All photos by the the author.
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