INTERNATIONAL laws do not recognise the use of history to advance one’s claims. Period. If history can be used as an antecedent, the whole of South China Sea, which China is claiming based on sheer historical right, would have been an open and shut case.
However, the United Nations International Tribunal on the Laws of the Seas, of which the Philippines’ government is a litigant, successfully claimed that “history”, indeed cannot form the basis of China’s claim in 2017.
Indeed, with “living” civilisation traversing 5,000 years, so the Chinese often likes to claim, augmented further by the scholar Zhang Wei Wei, who referred to China as a “civilisational state”, there isn’t a single part of Asia, for that matter Africa, even the entire arch that forms the Silk Road, that is untouched by Chinese “history”.
Heck, even the computer bears the imprint of the famous Chinese abacus.
By this token, one of the most outrageous arguments of the “historical claims” comes from the clan of Sultan Qiram, whom some believe has further sub divided into eight different clans, by some accounts a galling “sixteen”, and that the Malaysian Government is legally obliged to pay the whole Qiram clans a total of US$15 bil.
Failing to do so would risk Malaysia being imposed a compound interest rate of 10%, which would be added to the above amount each year.
This is akin the court acting as an illegal loan shark. That the adversarial French legal system can stoop so low is, for the lack of better word, abysmal.
What is most unique is the nature of the “Qiram family’s” claim. Rather than reclaiming Sabah, they targeted Malaysia’s most valuable asset: Petronas. If the legal claim is built on grounds that the family “owned Sabah”, shouldn’t the case revolve entirely on the region?
Enemies within?
Yet it was not. The Qiram family does not want the onerous responsibility of taking back one of the poorest regions of the Federation of Malaysia. Goaded and shepherded by its money grabbing legal sherpa – Letheum Incorporated in London – the Qiram family was coached, perhaps even coerced, into cherry picking on the law.
Thus, Petronas became its target. Should this act of helping the enemy of Sabah come from within elements of the state, the laws of treason should abidingly apply without fail for aiding and abetting an enemy.
To be sure, the national oil and gas entity is indeed responsible for up to 11% of the fiscal revenue of the Malaysian Government. Should all the operations of Petronas be crippled, it is not a tall stretch to wonder that there are certain higher colonial forces that are fanning the amber to trigger a fire that would burn Malaysia to a crisp.
As such, all parties must be careful of the foreign machinations that are working in cahoots in some elements of Sabah to either reap a financial pay out or to seek a plea bargain to come to a price that Petronas will be asked to agree to.
Either way, the enemies within and without have won a handsome windfall! – July 19, 2022
Dr Rais Hussin is the President and CEO at EMIR Research, an independent think tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Focus Malaysia.
