Sulu sea piracy

Pirates have landed. I'm not kidding: an army of desperate pirates from the Philippines arrived on the east coast of Sabah a few weeks ago, and have proceeded to engage in a number of standoffs with the police and army.

At the beginning, all we in the interior knew of it was colleagues on the east coast having to drive through several police roadblocks a day. But it's descending into gunfights and deaths, and while the town of Lahad Datu has become a ghost town and our colleagues are staying home, we further inland are also now dealing with roadblock after roadblock. Each car must be stopped, and each driver and passenger scrutinised. Suspicious cars are pulled over and papers examined. And god help you if you happen to be Filipino.

Now, the story itself is rather romantic, in the historical sense rather than the love sense. The invaders call themselves the "Army of Sulu" and they are led by the brother of the Sultan of Sulu. A couple of centuries ago, the whole of northern Sabah was given to the Sultan of Sulu by the Sultan of Brunei - because that's what monarchs do, they give each other huge swathes of land and dominion over the people who live there (the Sultan of Brunei also gave most of Sarawak away - to the white rajah, James Brooke. But that's another story.)

Later on, the Sultan of Sulu came to an agreement with the British North Borneo Company, leasing the land in perpetuity on payment of a yearly rent.

So far so good.

Then came the Second World War. Poor little Sabah got bombed twice, once by each side, and then afterwards, the Company bankrupt, it got handed over to the British government. The British government later granted independence to the Straits colonies, which became the Malayan Union, and then, in the 1960s, Sabah, along with Singapore and Sarawak, decided to join Malaya, and form the Federation of Malaysia.

The problem is that the Sultan of Sulu leased the land to the British North Borneo Company, not to the government of Malaysia, and although Malaysia still pays the rent each year, the Army of Sulu is keen to remind everyone that Sabah still belongs to the Sultanate of Sulu - and therefore, in modern terms, to the Philippines.

You see the problem?

An additional issue of course is that it's election year. On the one hand, the government doesn't want to be embarrassed, while on the other hand, it's been mooted that the invasion has been especially engineered in order to allow the government to show Sabahans that they need them - Sabah is currently not a safe win for the ruling party, and we've been seeing a lot of politicians lately, handing out cash to poor families and students and generally showing Sabahans that they're a good bunch, really, why vote us out now?

And while the endless roadblocks are an annoyance, should the Malaysian government not come to some kind of peaceful resolution that will avoid incensing the nearly one million Filipinos in Sabah, we may be looking at more serious disruptions to deal with in the weeks to come.