PRE-MALAYSIA FEDERATION | The 'Malay' ties that bind, and a pan-Malay dream betrayed

From InterAksyon (Mar 25): PRE-MALAYSIA FEDERATION | The 'Malay' ties that bind, and a pan-Malay dream betrayed

If only because of family ties, there’s really nothing wrong with President Aquino hobnobbing with the Sultan of Johor, even if he is one of the most influential traditional leaders in Malaysia which has been forcefully trying to flush out loyal followers of the sultanate of Sabah that is resurrecting its claim over Sabah.

As a student in Harvard, Sultan Ibrahim Ismail, then a “tunku” or royal prince, was an ardent political admirer of the President’s charismatic father, the late senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, while self-exiled in Boston after undergoing heart surgery in the United States.

Ibrahim would later meet Ninoy in Singapore on his way home to Manila and join his family in Johor, which is adjacent to the island republic. The elder Aquino was believed to be also a close friend of Ismail’s’ father, Mahmud Iskandar Al-haj, who was sultan until he died in 2010.

Ninoy’s brother-in-law Ken Kashiwahara later wrote in the New York Times Magazine, ”On Aug. 14, Ninoy flew to Singapore using the fake passport with his real name. In Singapore he was met by the son of the Sultan of Johor and whisked across the border to Malaysia, where met with high-ranking officials from Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, to explain why he was going home and what he hoped to achieve.” After their meeting, Ninoy flew to Taiwan, his last stop on his way to Manila, where he was gunned down at the airport tarmac on Aug. 21.

Now, those ties between the Johor sultan’s family and the Aquinos have come back to haunt the President: Sultan Ismail is being tagged as Malaysia’s “link” to the Philippine president. The Sulu sultanate’s spokespersons alleged that this accounts for why Mr. Aquino “was lawyering for Malaysia.” Malacanang’s spokesman Edwin Lacierda, however, has replied, “how does one expect this government to support adventurism and armed approach in an issue that has …festered since the 19th century?”

The issue continues to heighten emotions and analysts say that could eventually affect close ties between the Philippines and Malaysia, even if the Philippines continues to play down the apparent diplomatic impasse on the issue

Perhaps it is best to consider that apart from looking at it diplomatically, one can start by looking at how both countries coped with a similar cultural heritage because of their Malay roots, and not suffer from a cultural amnesia, resulting from centuries of colonial domination.

For one, historian Dr. Cesar Adib Majul , wrote in his book “Muslims in the Philippines” that Muslim resistance, when Spain conquered the Philippines, was not an isolated or insignificant phenomenon, but “part of the general resistance of all Muslims people in Malaysia against Western imperialism, colonialism and Christianity.”

It was in this period that the sultanate acquired Sabah—then known as North Borneo – as a reward from the sultan of Brunei, for having quelled a civil war in his kingdom. In turn, the concern of the Sulu sultan for the survival of his fiefdom in the south against possible British intrusion forced him to lease Sabah in 1978.

Today, historian Zeus Salazar notes, 88 percent of Filipinos in Malaysia actually work in Sarawak and Sabah with probably the majority in the latter state, which is the very first area that once constituted, together with Sulu and part of Mindanao, the “bridge” between “Dunia Melayu” -- or One Malay race--and the Philippines. All this means that Filipinos were really in familiar surroundings, Salazar said.

"In terms of both custom and language – they know Malay, just as the inhabitants of Sabah are conversant with at least one of the languages of the Sulu-Mindanao area,” he said. “There lies the hidden reservoir for Dunia Melayu understood both as Bahasa Melayu and the culture and history that have kept it alive till now.”

Indeed, here lies the reality that sustains the Filipino dream of identification with the Malay race, with our national hero Jose Rizal and nourished after him by Filipino nationalist thoughts.

Malay nationalism

Salazar points out that it was Rizal and the other illustrados of the 1880s who required the reassuring comfort of a new nationality, “a new identity that they could only build upon the ideal of a ‘lost homeland’ whose bosom he (Rizal) would have to trace back in history to an equally lost Dunia Melayu.”

In his book “The Malay Connection,” Salazar wrote that Christian Filipinos actually recovered their Malay identity only in the late 19th century through the help of the Spaniards who considered them “inferior” because they were Malays.

Austin Coates also wrote in “Rizal: the Philippine Nationalist and Martyr” that the Indios Bravos, which Rizal organized in Paris in 1889, appeared to have had a “secret group” which pledged to the “liberation of the Malay peoples from colonial rule, a pledge to be made good first in the Philippines, later to be extended to the inhabitants of Borneo, Indonesia and Malaya.”

Salazar, however, pointed out that Rizal was actually interested in the broader language-and-culture-grouping (essentially the Malayo-Polynesian) to which the Tagalog and the Malays belong.

At the time of his martyrdom in December on 1896, Rizal was still learning Malay because it was common belief that Malay was the original of the Tagalog language, he said.

Double post-colonial identity’

Like Rizal, most nationalists then were on “the twin tracks of a double post-colonial identity for the Filipino.”

Salazar, for instance, cited Apolonario Mabini, who had no knowledge of the Bahasa Melayu – the Malay language -- but looked at “the Philippine Revolution within the broader framework of liberation for all Malayan peoples.”

In line precisely with Rizal’s Indios Bravos Project, Mabini’s Revolution was designed to “give light to the gloomy night in which the vilified and degraded Malay race finds itself, so that it may be led to social emancipation,” he said.

For this, Rizal was enshrined not only as a national hero, but also as the “pride of the Malay race." Wonder no more why Malaysia has always given Rizal a special place of pride in its commemorations.

With the entry of the Filipinos’ Malay past into textbooks and the popular consciousness during the first six decades of the 20th century, our Malay identity became almost a sine qua non to the Filipino identity and nationality, according to Salazar.

"Malay was just an idea congruent with the Filipino identity which itself had uncertain cultural contours,” he said.

"Nonetheless, it was reportedly an idea of “no uncertain emotional force” that became evident in the support that Tan Malaka got in 1927, in the largest English-language press and from the then already practically English-speaking elite, when he faced deportation by the American authorities on the instigation of Dutch colonizers.

As an influential Manila paper put it at that time: “The Filipinos would be hypocrites were they to misname their feelings as regards the nationalist movement in Java of which Tan Malaka is today the visible symbol in our minds. He is Malay as we are Malays, and this racial kinship stirs in us the deepest sympathy for him ….Tan Malaka might be Filipino patriot, of the generation of Rizal, come to life….We thus understand him….”

Pan-Malay irredentism

Five years later, student activist Wenceslao Vinzons revived the Pan-Malayan irredentism when he founded at the University of the Philippines the Perhempoenan Orang Melayu, or Pan Malay Alliance, which sought to “promote the study of the history, civilization and culture of the Malay race... and to develop a sentiment of unity among brown peoples.”

Salazar noted that Vinzons dreamed of a “unified Malaysia extending from the northern extremity of the Malay Peninsula to the shores of the remotest islands of Polynesia” with Manila students form the Philippines, along with those from Thailand, the Malay peninsula, Indonesia and Polynesia. The “miniature league of Malayan brotherhood, ” the historian said, held secret rituals with Malay as ceremonial language.

Malay was also the “common language” which Vinzons wished could be adopted by all Malay nations “in the vision of the United States” in order to “overcome our frailties, so that by our renewed racial vitality we may give birth to a new nationalism, that of Malaysia redeemed.”

Another UP student leader, Domocao Alonto, the organization’s vice president and Vinzon’s fraternity brother, later even filed a bill, as a congressman and later senator, renaming the Philippines as Malaysia. This was years before the federation of Malaysia was founded.

After a preliminary meeting with then Speaker of the House Manuel Roxas, Dr. Jose P. Laurel, UP President Rafael Palma, Dean Maximo Kalaw and Arturo Tolentino, Vinzons transformed his Pan Malayan Union into a political party, The Young Philippines, which was formally launched on January 7, 1934.

Among the prominent members who joined the party between 1934 and 1941 were Carlos P. Romulo and Diosdado Macapagal. Vinzon’s party developed a libertarian program, aspiring for the independence of nations under a foreign domination and the establishment of “a confederation of free Malayan Republics.”

Despite his commitment to Pan Malayan unity, Salazar wrote that Vinzons was also keenly aware of the need for a national language among Filipinos, continuing Rizal’s and Mabini’s double vision of nationalism – the “Filipino nationality within the greater Malay-speaking nations of Malaysian peoples.”

Most of the letters Vinzons wrote would end with either “Yours for a greater Philippines” or “Yours for a greater Malaysia.” It was also Vinzons who, together with Quezon, was instrumental in getting Tagalog approved as the national language of the Philippines.

Vinzons joined the guerilla movement during WWII and was executed by the Japanese for refusing to cooperate with them. His hometown in the Bicol province of Camarines Norte was later named after him.

Meanwhile, when Macapagal won the presidency of the republic, he sought an entente with Malaysia and Indonesia through the creation of Maphilindo with Vinzons’ pan-Malay unity as his guide.

Macapagal worked out with Tungku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia and Sukarno of Indonesia the Manila Accord of 1963, in which the three countries of Malay stock agreed “to take initial steps to establish Maphilindo through frequent and regular consultations at all levels to be known as Mushawarah Maphilindo.

That salutary sense of unity, however, was not to be for long, as colonizers rammed down their own agenda. “(But) With the creation of Malaysia and its attendant dispute between the Philippines and the new federation over Sabah, the corner of Kalimantan which with Sulu had been the historic bridge between Dunia Melayu and the Philippine area, the Pan-Malayan dream got its first shattering experience of the reality of modern realpolitik,” Salazar said.

http://www.interaksyon.com/article/57875/pre-malaysia-federation--the-malay-ties-that-bind-and-a-pan-malay-dream-betrayed