The Philippines and Sabah in the 1970s

This is the first installment in a series on this subject. All columns in the series are based on US diplomatic cables declassified in 2005 and 2006 and  now available in WikLeaks’ Public Library of US Diplomacy at wikileaks.org/plusd.

Last week, we saw that in 1975 US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that any attempt by the Philippines to invoke the provisions of the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) over Sabah would “create difficulty” for the USA, but the Marcos government had come close to doing that just two years earlier.
As a result of the events earlier this year, the Philippine claim to Sabah is now widely-known, the argument being that the Sultan of Brunei ceded territory in North Borneo to the Sultan of Sulu in the mid-17th or early 18th century (depending on which version one reads), whose descendent in 1877 to 1878 leased (or, in the opposing view, ceded) that territory to the British North Borneo Company. In 1963, Sabah became part of the Federation of Malaysia.

It was claimed that in 1968 President Ferdinand Marcos had trained a Muslim force called Jabidah on Corregidor with the intention of using this to regain Sabah for the Philippines. According to some sources, this came to grief when the trainees rebelled and, in the most widely-circulated account, were massacred as a result. This latter has been disputed recently, but in any case the operation was aborted.

Nevertheless, there were two serious and inter-related consequences. It is widely accepted that the Jabidah massacre was a crucial factor leading to the formation of the Moro National Liberation Force (MNLF) led by Nur Misuari; secondly, Marcos would claim that from 1969 onwards Malaysia had trained MNLF rebels, including Misuari, at Pulao Panghor, an island twelve hours’ drive from Kuala Lumpur, with other training exercises being held at Lahad Datu and Banguey Island, Sabah, and that arms and ammunition were being provided by Tun Mustapha, Sabah’s Chief Minister.

Ferdinand Marcos would sometimes surprise the Americans by his nuanced view of the Muslim conflict. US Ambassador William Sullivan reported that in a meeting on Aug. 26, 1973 Marcos made a clear distinction between the situation in the Sulu archipelago and that on Mindanao itself. While he saw the former as arising from “outside agitation from Sabah,” with regard to the latter he “showed a surprising sympathy for the rebels and a caustic criticism of his fellow Christians. He placed the basic blame for the current situation on Christian greed for Moslem lands and the insensitivity of Christian governors, military leaders, and Constabulary. He felt the Mindanao situation was more “fundamentally significant than the Sulus…”

Earlier that same year, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) appeared to be on the defensive in many areas of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, and on March 5 Marcos related his deepening concern to Sullivan’s predecessor as US Ambassador, Henry Byroade, stressing the need for military equipment and inferring  that the MNLF had the initiative. Rather more ominously, he stated that the Philippine government would probably discuss the “deteriorating situation” with the Mutual Defense Board (MDB), which administered the 1951 MDT. When Marcos asked him what he thought of that proposal, Byroade guardedly replied that the US members would be able to merely listen, as decisions would be made elsewhere.

Mention of the MDB, of course, raised the question of the treaty itself, under which either party could in certain circumstances call upon the support of the other in the event of attack by a third party in the Pacific area. Byroade was far from happy at this turn of events, advising Washington that in such “deteriorating circumstances” a Philippine attempt to “engage our bilateral mechanisms” would “pose some problems” for the US government. “It would therefore be in our interests,” he said, “to head off such moves while we deal with military supply matter in most appropriate fashion.”

Byroade therefore recommended a “series of demarches” (courses of action or maneuvers) “on Malacañang by Asean members Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore and also Australia as well as ourselves” in order to persuade the Malaysian government “to restrain role of Sabah and Tun Mustapha…” Direct approaches by the Philippines to Malaysia had been unsuccessful due to the “Sabah claim issue” and so “it is clear greater pressure needs to be exerted on Malaysians.” It would also be useful, he continued, for the UK and Australia (fellow-members with Malaysia in the British Commonwealth) to indicate to Malaysia “how unwise and unrealistic it is to seek abandonment of Philippine Sabah claim under pressure of these circumstances.”
It is clear from this that the Americans did not seriously doubt that the MNLF was receiving arms from Sabah, if not from Malaysia itself, and this would become clearer still over the next few years.

In March 1975, for example, French military attaché Col. Loussouarn, resident in Jakarta, made a brief visit to Manila during which he was shown some French 81-mm mortar rounds recently captured by Philippine troops in Cotabato, where in recent months over a hundred had been fired at the AFP’s regional headquarters. Loussouarn had the serial numbers checked and reported that they came from a batch recently sold to Malaysia. According to Ambassador Sullivan, the Filipinos had previously assumed that such weapons had been coming from Libya.

A few days later, the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur reported that a non-resident American businessman, active in Malaysia and Asia for nearly a quarter of a century, had told Embassy officials than a former British civil servant, now a private businessman based in Singapore, was “involved in the arms trade with Sabah with ultimate objective of supplying weapons to Filipino Muslims.”
In succeeding weeks, we’ll examine the progress of those “demarches” recommended by Byroade.

source:  Tribune by  Ken Fuller