http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2013/02/01/in-whose-hands-lie-sabah%E2%80%99s-destiny/

In whose hands lies Sabah’s destiny?

Vidal Yudin Weil | February 1, 2013

It is time to end decades of grinding uncertainty which has harmed the economic growth of Sabah.

COMMENT

For more than three and a half decades, the people of Sabah have always been aware of the huge number of foreigners arriving here and given fast-track citizenships to become voters.
We now hear directly from the horses’ mouth in the Royal Commission of Inquiry, confirming the clandestine modus operandi employed by Umno and carried out by the Election Commission and National Registration Department in rigging every Sabah election to sabotage the Sabahans’ choice of governments.
Unless the Barisan Nasional federal government now swiftly abolish the death penalty like it did the Internal Security Act, all the conspirators from both sides of the political divide might be sent to the gallows for high treason when their immunity from prosecution is revoked and removed once a change of government takes place.
Why even from the opposition side? How were they involved? For those who do not already know, apart from the dead and retired, 90% of the remaining perpetrators are now playing active roles in PKR and they are all at the top levels.
It is a fact known to all politicians from the peninsula that all along Malaya needs resource-rich Sabah and Sarawak to stay afloat instead of vice versa and one way to ensure that the money keeps pouring in is to deny and prevent the legitimate people of Sabah, at all costs and by all immoral and illegal means, from electing a state government that will turn off the hydrant.
But one question kept popping up among the people here even from the villages these days: is this union called Malaysia still tenable at all by international democratic standards propagated by the United Nations?
Many people in Malaya, including also senior constitutional lawyers and history professors, are pathetically confused that Malaysia is Malaya while Sabah and Sarawak are merely states like the 11 states in the peninsula.
What they never try to find out was: does Malaysia really have sovereignty without Sabah and Sarawak in the equation?
Is this what has become of citizens who were hoodwinked from young with a distorted version of events riddled with major historical inaccuracies and an endless series of purely fictional scenes played by non-existent characters and peddled by a government which is totally bankrupt of morals?
Is the Malaysia Agreement signed in 1963 actually legal? Does Britain have sovereignty over the whole of Sabah when giving independence? Is the Malaysian government still paying annual rentals to the heirs of the Sulu sultanate until today? If the Malaysia Agreement is illegal, doesn’t that mean that Sabah is technically still a British colony then?
Scotland with all its oil wealth in the North Sea will decide in a referendum by its people in 2014 whether to leave the United Kingdom; South Sudan with all its petroleum wells is now an independent nation as from 2011; likewise, if it is no longer in Sabah’s interest to remain in an unreformed union, should the legitimate people of Sabah be given the opportunity to decide in a referendum conducted by the United Nations if they would still be in favour of staying on or leave Malaysia?
Or, will Sabah secede and declare independence like Kosovo from Yugoslavia in 2008 which the International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in 2010 that the unilateral declaration of independence by the democratically and legitimately elected government of Kosovo does not violate any international laws?
But then again, isn’t it better and more fun to remain and make the federal government beg for financial survival?

Can Sabahans trust Anwar?
Sabah people resent the interference of Kuala Lumpur in their lives and their disillusionment with the BN federal government is now at an all-time high.
It is time for the people to have their say to settle this Malaysian quagmire in Sabah politics; this is the time Sabah voters must decide whether to claw back the sovereignty of Sabah from Malaya.
Voters in Sabah must use this chance to choose whether they want to be ruled by Malaya or to determine their own affairs while opting to stay in Malaysia.
This time, the situation is more serious than the political battles of 1976 and 1985 when Usno and Berjaya were kicked out respectively.
Do the people of Sabah still remember the long list of developments promised by Anwar Ibrahim to be carried out within 100 days after hijacking the mandate of the people in 1994? What came out of it? Will we still trust a Pakatan Rakyat led by this same man?
It is time to end decades of grinding uncertainty which has harmed the economic growth of Sabah.
Sabahans must send a historic ultimatum to Malaya to get out of Sabah affairs by showing all their parties the exit door. The bullying must be stopped. We must roll out the red carpet for a grand send-off for all the Malaya-based parties.
Until Sabah is finally free from all forms of interference by any party from Malaya, everyone is a slave.
The present BN government does not embrace reforms and the current chief minister does not have an effective and intelligent Cabinet. BN politicians are most dangerous, most obnoxious, and the least intelligent.
Will the election manifesto of local opposition parties insist that powers be returned to the state as her interests are best served in a complete autonomy and promise the people to be flexible and adaptable in order to re-invent the economy of Sabah?
As millions of Malaysians in Sabah are saddled with debts, will there be major changes to difficult questions confronting Sabah? Will our local opposition politicians make us more competitive? Will they be fair and democratically accountable? Our economy is now very brittle and recovery must not take longer than six months; we badly need a new chief minister who is capable of change and ensure that citizens have jobs, small businesses will not struggle with low turnovers, and families not squeezed by high inflation.

Najib embarrassed

It was reported that in the second quarter of 2012, government debt was expected to be around RM503 billion or about 54% of GDP; we are indeed standing on the thin rope of bankruptcy.
As usual, a major international embarrassment happened last week to our prime minister.
Our beleaguered and embattled Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak went overseas to Gaza in a bid to divert attention away from all his failures at home exactly like what former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad did when he was pushed to a tight corner; only this time, it backfired right into his face when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced Najib’s visit as interfering in their domestic affairs.
Many Malaysians, particularly 99% of the Malays, do not understand the Palestine conflict. The issue in Palestine was never about religion between Judaism and Islam; it was always about the occupation of land and flooding the occupied territories with Jews from all over the world.
The facts are that many Jewish Israelis do not agree with their government’s actions and supported the Palestinians in their struggle; and that many leaders and victims in Palestine are in fact Christians – Hanan Daoud Khalil Ashrawi is one fine example, among others.
Every year when he was still alive, Yasser Arafat accompanied his Christian wife Suva into church to celebrate Christmas mass and one particular year he took to the pulpit and told the congregation in front of international media that Jesus Christ was born a Palestinian and He (Jesus) also would have fought the Israeli occupation.
Did our Malay leaders tell the citizens, particularly the Muslims, about this? Instead, they make it look like as if it was a Jewish conspiracy against Islam.
Are the Muslim people of Palestine closer in brotherhood to the Muslims of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Iraq, and Syria who fought and brought down their tyrannical governments or are they closer to the Muslims of Malaysia who support a despotic government corrupted to the core?
A government that relied on suppressing the people and keeping them segregated and unequal in religion and race as a tactic to hold on to power? A country where citizens were denied the attainment of equal individual and collective rights which should also include the right to separate identities and cultural institutions after five miserable decades of so-called independence?
Is it any surprise that integration and living in harmony was never in Umno-BN’s vocabulary?
Doesn’t the Umno-led BN government look more like the cruel regimes of Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Ben Ali, Saddam Hussein, and Bashar al-Assad?
The question now is no longer whether all these are being done to dupe the Malay Muslim voters, but whether the Malay Muslims are still gullible enough to be fooled?
Sabah’s situation is no different from Palestine; we are also fighting occupation by Malaya politicians who are flooding us with foreigners by giving them citizenships.
Like Palestine, all the Christians and Muslims in Sabah must kick them out.
Khalifah al-Barat mengutuk Emir al-Nusantara
Jejak al-Gaza menyinggung Ummah
Al-Munafig menyamar sebagai Mukmin
Abu Jahil menjaja Hikmah
Fitnah menjadi Lumrah Langkasuka
Ulama buta Fatwa sesat
Baitulmal dirompak Rakyat dikejami
Sang Pendusta berlagak Imam Mahdi
Intifada Palestin seruan kepada Sabah
Undi Pembangkang menggantikan batu
Merejam Syaitan di PRU 2013 – Ameen.
The writer is a former member of Sabah’s faded tourism industry; loves food and speed; and blogs at http://legalandprudent.blogspot.com giving no quarters.