THIS month, as fellow columnist Ong Weichong noted in an earlier article, marks the 30th anniversary of the formal ending of the communist insurgency in Sarawak. The Kuching Peace Agreement of 1990 brought back to society the remnants of the insurgents. A far more significant laying-down of arms was facilitated by the Sri Aman peace accord of 1973.
If the five-decade-old insurgency could be said to have effectively ended with a bang in 1973, it conclusively ended with a whimper in 1990. Nevertheless, the insurgency's duration pointed to the appeal of the Maoist-inspired ideology behind it. Also, while some native Dayaks were recruited into the insurgency, it had a strong ethnic affinity for Sarawak Chinese.
At its height, the insurgents
infiltrated the top hierarchy of Sarawak's oldest political party, the Sarawak United People's Party, which was, of course, the major political vehicle campaigning against Sarawak becoming a part of the Malaysia proposal when it was first mooted.
The porous Borneo borders
then meant political activists from Brunei, Indonesian Kalimantan and Sarawak moved freely about. The politically-ascendant Partai Komunis Indonesia at the time and the country's nationalist president, Sukarno, were major headaches for the then Sarawak colonial administration and, after Malaysia came into being, for the succeeding federation.
The fall of Sukarno and the anti-Communist coup that brought General Suharto to power in 1966 brought an end to Confrontation and took much of the wind out of the sail of the Sarawak insurgency. Its days were numbered from there on and its leaders finally sued for peace.
Insurgent leader Bong Kee Chok and the then Sarawak chief minister Datuk (later Tun) Abdul Rahman Ya'kub met in 1973 in Simanggang (subsequently renamed Bandar Sri Aman) to seal the Sri Aman peace deal. Thus was secured an agreement that stopped a debilitating drain on the country's and state's resources and allowed a much-needed and welcome focus on economic issues and development objectives.
What are the major takeaways from Sarawak's peaceful end to its armed insurgency, which at its height terrorised ordinary people and imposed security lockdowns and curfews even in urban centres like Sibu?
Foremost, I believe we need to have a healthy recognition that no man is an island, as the cliché goes, especially for a relatively small country like ours, sandwiched by much larger neighbours to the north, south and east. Whatever happens in our neighbourhood almost inevitably seeps across our borders one way or another.
Confrontation-era Indonesia was a prime example. Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, probably said it best when he
described the regional stability afforded by Suharto as having helped his island republic immeasurably too. The same can be said for our country.
Today, we confront new security-related threats along our eastern borders with the Philippines as radicalised Muslim insurgents there cross over with disturbing regularity to wreak havoc on Sabah. A lack of economic opportunities at home has meant hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have taken to seeing Sabah as the promised land, creating transient settlements which have become more or less permanent and posing political headaches to successive governments in Kota Kinabalu and Putrajaya.
Our policies to "prosper thy neighbour" — first by helping to midwife a new political dispensation for disenfranchised Filipino Muslims and eventually to help kickstart economic development in the southern Philippines through investments — are on the right track, although we seem to need almost infinite patience to see real fruits developing.
A far bigger neighbour looms over our horizons — China. Just as it was the source of ideological inspiration for ethnic kindred spirits taken in by Maoist theories and political guerilla tactics, today, it is the source of much more positive and benign inspiration as China's economic rise captures popular imaginations the world over.
Still, as this brings in its wake the West now regarding China as a strategic competitor, a small nation like ours may be dragged into such rivalry. Malaysians must be clear-eyed about where our best interests lie and avoid the mistake our earlier communist insurgents made of needlessly taking sides in the great ideological or strategic battles of the day.
The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak