THE Malaysian government has sought to conclusively repudiate claims made against the country by eight plaintiffs in the courts of international arbitration in Spain, France and the Netherlands. The plaintiffs claim to be heirs of the now-defunct Sulu sultanate, whose historical domains are now largely located in the Philippines. However, a few of them are in Sabah.

Besides responding through the courts in several European countries to counter the legal activity of the eight plaintiffs, the Malaysian government has also been keen to inform the public of the glaring deficiencies of the plaintiffs’ case. To this end, the government launched a website outlining the baselessness of any Sulu territorial or monetary claim to Sabah. It is also engaged in trying to win the hearts and minds of Malaysian and international observers.

It appears therefore that a colloquium held recently on the subject of “State Sovereignty and Immunity in Commercial Arbitration” in Sabah was also part and parcel of Malaysia’s public diplomacy. The colloquium was officiated by Law and Institutional Reform Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Azalina Othman Said and organised by the Legal Affairs Division of the Prime Minister’s Department. Several other agencies and institutions were involved.

In the first session of the colloquium entitled “The Sulu Case: Discovering the Missing Puzzle Pieces”, local researcher and historian Avtar Singh Sandhu staked out a couple of positions. These positions concern the nature or character of Sulu’s influence on east coast Sabah:

1. The suggestion that the Sulu sultanate had a system of government and administration over the east coast of Sabah is false.
2. There is no evidence to suggest there is truth to the claim.

It is possible that the Sulu sultanate’s influence here did not amount to any form of settled government, and consequently did not involve the ownership of large tracts of territory in Sabah. However, the deeper we penetrate the fabric of historical communities on east coast Sabah, the more we come to realise the improbability of Avtar’s subsequent claims:

1. The Sulu sultanate did not set up an “administration centre on the east coast of Sabah’, and
2. The Sulu sultanate’s “people” had to “travel to the east coast of Sabah to demand tribute”

These are points that can be counteracted by critically appraising historical evidence that Avtar himself had previously cited in addition to appending new historical evidence. I will restrict the discussion to the former. Avtar and his collaborator Shari Jeffri wrote that the Sulu sultanate had influence in some areas on the east coast of Sabah which served mainly as bases for their pirates to operate from and collected tribute from some native villages on the east coast, such as birds nest and jungle products as well as slaves for a period of between 100 to 150 years, before the agreement of cessation was signed.

Perhaps the Sulu sultanate on east coast Sabah constituted a fluid rather than hierarchical form of government. And yes, slave trading and slave raiding were extensively practised in the Sulu sultanate. However, the existence of “bases” – whether piratical or not – offers the first clue that there might indeed have been “administrative centres”. Shari and Avtar themselves admit here that “the Sulu Sultanate…collected tribute from some native villages”, which opens up the distinct possibility that there were communities, even “administrative centres”, operating under Sulu suzerainty on east coast Sabah.

This is, however, not a theme that Avtar chooses to pursue. The presence of some Sulu “pirate” bases on east coast Sabah does not lead him to suspect there might actually be a system of government and administration, albeit a rudimentary one. Instead, he implies that the destruction of local villages coupled with the practices of slave-raiding and slave trading is proof that the Sulu sultan did not actually own the territory. He thus asks rhetorically: “Which sultan who claims to own a territory would then go and conduct raids on the same villages of the people he claims to rule over, destroy the villages and kidnap them to sell as slaves? Does it make sense for a person that rules a place to do that to his own people?”

It would therefore be necessary to consider the view of the Sulu sultanate given above against the backdrop of the view of nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, who, enamoured with the power of the modern state in Europe, triumphantly dismissed Sub-Saharan Africa to be a place where history is in fact out of the question. Life there consists of a succession of contingent happenings and surprises. No aim or state exists whose development could be followed, and there is no subjectivity, merely a series of subjects who destroy one another.

This view is similar in principle to the attempts to dismiss the notion of Sulu suzerainty on east coast Sabah as little more than an endeavour in piracy and slave-raiding. While it may be true that the Sulu sultanate on east coast Sabah may not have resembled a settled form of government, neither was it so anarchic as to merit no consideration at all as a system of governance.

Avtar, and those who have consistently argued against the territorial claims of Sulu to Sabah, need only to consult Ranjit Singh’s chapter on the “The Datu System on Sabah’s East Coast” in his book “The Making of Sabah”. Ranjit offers a detailed discussion of the Sulu system of governance on certain river basins in east coast Sabah. James Warren’s detailed historical reconstruction of the “dynamics of eternal trade [and] slavery” in his work “The Sulu Zone” also points to the existence of a system of governance rather than a situation merely akin to Hegel’s series of subjects who destroy one another.

The dynamics of Sulu governance reconstructed by Ranjit and to a lesser extent by Warren therefore do justice to Leopold von Ranke’s time-honoured historiographical principle of “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (how things really were). Some of the data upon which their models relied have been significantly reinterpreted by later researchers in favour of the argument for an independent Sabah polity rather than one operating under Sulu suzerainty. The Marudu polity on the northern coast of Sabah – the subject of Bianca Gerlich’s “Marudu 1845: The Destruction and Reconstruction of a Coastal State in Borneo” – was one such independent polity.

Still, Marudu was not the only polity on the north-eastern coast of Borneo. There were other polities that bore witness to Sulu systems of governance, loosely modelled by the historical reconstructions of Ranjit and Warren. These models reveal a much more nuanced situation on Sabah’s eastern coast, beyond just the contemporary political interest of whether Sabah belonged to Sulu or not.

Historical models of power on the eastern coast of Sabah are far more nuanced. A system of governance existed almost right up to the time of the Sulu-British treaty. Sulu and its agents ingeniously assumed a set of rights and privileges without instituting an elaborate system of administration. So what if a substantial or even overwhelming part of the Sulu economy was based on the slave trade? There are several examples of polities both in the past and in the present that have trampled on the rights of their peoples and are still considered states in their own right.

But in fact, the Sulu zone did not just facilitate the slave trade but enabled the continuance and even the expansion of markets into the hinterlands. Sulu-instituted trade and taxation – though increasingly disrupted by the Spanish blockade – kept the relations going between the different communities on the rivers of east coast Sabah.

This might not interest some politicians, lawyers and journalists, consumed as they are by the task of utilising history for the purpose of defending Sabah from the Sulu claim.

However, it remains the cultural heritage of some communities in Sabah and in the Sulu archipelago. Sulu-Sabah historiography is not only, nor even largely, for the purpose of winning legal disputes. If it were, it would be better to consign this entire subject of academic inquiry to the proverbial dustbin of history. – September 1, 2023.

*Sanen Marshall reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.