Depictions of Violence

The saga in the east of Sabah continues.

Airstrikes have been used on the less-than-200 invaders in a coastal village who formed the backbone of the main siege situation - which seems a little over the top to me. We are receiving daily missives from the government informing us that the situation is under control, although today a Special Security Area was announced, which rather challenges the notion that everything is fine again. A number of Malaysian commentators have noted that "The situation is under control" is just something that's said, you know, in these kinds of situations - like, "Don't worry, you're going to be just fine", or "The cheque's in the mail." It's a matter of form.

In Ranau district - which is about as far as you can get from the Special Security Area without leaving Sabah - tensions have been running high recently. The Royal Army of Sulu is pretty much the only topic of discussion in the canteen.

On Tuesday, near one of my schools, villagers summoned the police, worried about the sudden appearance of a number of Sulu flags, with a sizeable group of Filipino workers in the timber camp nearby being accused of sympathy for the terrorists. The police had to reassure the villagers that the flags weren't Sulu in origin, and  had in fact been put up by an overenthusiastic member of a new political party, as part of the election campaign.

Another day, one of the same Filipino workers asked for a couple of hours of credit at a local vegetable stall, a common enough request in these parts. The stall-owner refused and called the police, accusing the man of trying to steal from him. The policeman, apparently with an eternal well of patience, calmly pointed out that the stallowner still had the vegetables in his possession.

I do feel sorry for Filipinos in Sabah at the moment; the lack of sympathy is astounding. Malaysians are in deep shock at the deaths of eight policemen during the fighting, and are genuinely afraid of what might happen if the 800,000 Filipinos living in Sabah decide to join the cause.

This is not helped by the flood of militant photos and videos on Facebook and the internet. The pictures are violent and scary, showing masked soldiers and guns and prayers being said before battle. 

They get more and more graphic: I have (unwillingly) seen pictures this week of decapitated heads being carried by weeping women; dead bodies with their Philippine Army boots highlighted, and corpses in begging positions, their blackened arms raised above their heads. They are more explicit in their depiction of death than I have seen in Western media, but my colleagues do not seem as fazed as I am. Photos of Malaysian deaths carry doas or prayers written on them; Philippine death photos raise questions with the government, for instance, "Why does this man have a Malaysian ID card? Did you invite him here Mr. Prime Minister?"

But the very worst so far came in the staff room at one of my schools, where, before I realised what I was being invited to see, I was seeing the first two dead policemen being beaten and sliced open and kicked by the Philippine invaders, the whole event being filmed on one of their phones for posterity.

With rallying cries like these, is it any wonder that this national grief and terror is continuing unabated?

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.