DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang has insisted that he has no personal grudge against former Sabah chief minister Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan, adding that if anything, his grudge against the latter is that he had not contributed to the long-standing issue of Sabah illegal immigrants with voting rights.
The Iskandar Puteri MP’s response came after Pairin had clarified via a statement on Tuesday (July 5) that the Committee on Illegal Immigrants established by the Barisan Nasional (BN) government, of which he was the appointed chairman is merely a technical committee.
According to Pairin, the main and decision-making committee was under the chairmanship of the prime minister and the Sabah chief minister as the deputy chairman.
Lim had previously urged Pairin to come clean on his role as the chairperson of a working committee on the royal commission of inquiry (RCI) investigating Sabah’s long-standing problem with undocumented immigrants who were granted Malaysian citizenship in return for votes.
“I would have thought that the resolution of the issue would have been one of the main conditions for PBS’s return to BN in 2002 but clearly it was not – can Pairin explain why?” Lim said in a statement today (July 6).
“It is unfortunate that although Pairin has responded to my statement, he has failed to speak up as to what he had done since PBS’s return to the BN fold in 2002 to resolve the long-standing nightmare.
“He had conspicuously omitted to answer why the RCI did not release the over 5,000 missing pages of report containing the memorandum, notes of evidence, the statutory declarations and exhibits which were submitted to the RCI and whether he and the Working Committee had access to these 5,000 missing pages.”
Lim further questioned the lack of political will among PBS leaders to resolve the issue pertaining to the presence of illegal immigrants in Sabah with voting powers.
“I remember when I visited Sabah in 1978, I had warned that Sabah faced three grave problems – the illegal immigrant problem which I had cited had reached 140,000, the crime situation and the grave problem of corruption,” he recalled.
“I said in 2015 that all these three problems had gone from bad to worse in the past four decades, with the illegal immigrant problem mushrooming to 1.5 million to 1.9 million making native Sabahans foreigners in their own land while crime and corruption had worsened by leaps and bounds.
“Next year, Sabah would be commemorating the 60th anniversary of the formation of Malaysia in 1963 but the nightmare of the illegal immigrants in Sabah with voting powers continues unresolved.” – July 6, 2022
