New Moderate Sultan of Sulu Wants Peace but Turns to Malaysia for a Deal

When Ismail Kiram II became, at age 73, the new Sultan of Sulu in October 2013, he inherited a mess.  For more than a century, since an 1851 territorial cession to the Kingdom of Spain and an 1898 one to the United States occupying force in the Philippines, his family line has been regarded by authorities as a ceremonial royal family only.  For decades, the Sultanate had been quiet about the fact that its original territory included Sabah, the northeast part of Borneo, in Malaysia, even though it wished the Philippine government would some day press Malaysia over its never-settled claim on the province.

Future sultan Ismail Kiram II (left) and then-sultan Jamalul Kiram III (right) last year.

That all changed nearly a year ago, when the previous Sultan, Ismail’s even more elderly brother Jamalul Kiram III, ordered over 200 volunteer fighters from the Sultanate’s predominantly-Muslim Moro ethnic group in the southern Philippines to launch a mini-invasion of Sabah, just across the little bit of the Sulu Sea that separates the two countries (reported at the time in this blog).  It was a little bit like The Mouse That Roared, but it ended up a lot more like the Bay of Pigs, with a bush war between Malaysian forces, Sabanese villagers, and a self-styled Royal Army that led to a protracted cat-and-mouse game for months.  In the end, over 80 people were killed, and even the Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.), a Muslim rebel group from the southern Philippines, got involved at one point.  The episode was a disaster for all concerned.

Jamalul claimed that he merely wanted to goad Manila into pressing its legitimate claim on Sabah, its legitimacy underpinned, he felt, by the Sultanate’s precolonial ownership of it.  After all, the Sultanate never regarded the 1851 treaty with Spain as a cession, and when Spain sold Sabah to the United Kingdom in 1885 the Suluan position was that it wasn’t Spain’s to sell.  Ditto when the British allowed its protectorate of North Borneo, as Sabah was then called, to become part of the new republic of Malaysia in 1963.  Nor did the U.S. Congress ever ratify the 1898 cession of Sulu territories within the Philippines.  So in the Sultanate of Sulu’s eyes, it is still an independent state straddling the border of two illegal occupiers.  Jamalul was willing to set aside the sovereignty issue so long as the original territories of what he was now carefully calling the Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo (Sulu is a small but strategic group of southern Philippine islands) were united under one flag, with him as a symbolic monarch.

Sultanate of Sulu fighters in the Philippines in 1933

By one measure, Jamalul wasn’t even in charge.  He had much earlier, in 2001, handed the reins of power to his younger brother, Ismail, making him regent, while he himself moved to Manila to undergo kidney dialysis.  In fact, Jamalul commanded the whole invasion of Sabah from his sickbed in a Muslim slum in Manila, telling reporters he was “the poorest sultan in the world.”  Through all of that, Ismail, though officially the political leader of the little monarchy, was apparently cut out of the loop.

A sultanate spokesman at a press conference during last year’s Sabah crisis

After Jamalul died in October, Ismail took over.  He quickly forswore violence and moved to reassure the Philippine government—which had just seen its decades of precarious cordiality with its neighbor Malaysia now dashed into pieces by a nutcase—that he had no desire to use anything but negotiations to advance any agenda to reunite Sabah with the Sulu Islands.

The current flag of Sabah (as a province of Malaysia)

The new Sultan’s shift to a more moderate position was welcome news to nearly everyone except the most hardened Moro nationalists.  But now it is appearing that it is not as if Sultan Ismail is, you know, actually reasonable or anything.  He has now decided that he won’t talk to the Christian-dominated government in Manila about this.  The question of who rules Sabah is a problem to be hashed out Muslim to Muslim, he feels.  So this past week the Sultanate’s representatives and legal counsel approached the Malaysian government and made a proposal.  They want to distinguish between sovereignty over Sabah—which they are willing to concede Malaysia holds—and the underlying proprietary ownership of the territory, which they claim the Sultan of Sulu still holds.  The sultan’s new offer to the government in Kuala Lumpur is that if they will acknowledge that Malaysian sovereignty over Sabah derives from the Sultan of Sulu’s original sovereignty and that it is still part of the Sultanate, then, according to this deal, the Sultan “will not withdraw Sabah from the Federation of Malaysia.”

Philippine rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (ahem, MILF)

The Sultan calls it a “win–win solution,” but Malaysians can be forgiven for hearing it more as a threat.  No response yet from Kuala Lumpur.  But the fact that the Sultanate feels that it can play the card of a threat to unilaterally “withdraw” a territory out of Malaysia suggests that belligerency might be creeping back into the Sultanate’s official policy.

The “world’s poorest sultan”

Will Malaysia merely shrug off such negotiating moves as unworthy of notice?  After all, its military, which has never faced serious threats since independence, took an embarrassingly long time finishing off an invasion by a couple hundred amateurs, so perhaps it cannot afford to adopt such a posture of invincibility.  Will the Philippine government act to constrain or warn the new Sultan?  Perhaps they don’t think they need to quite yet, since so far the new Sultan is all talk.  But, more importantly, is the idea of a sovereign Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo something that other Moro militants in the vast, civil-war-torn jungles of Mindanao and other parts of the southern Philippines might rally around?  Especially now that their transition to an enlarged autonomous zone seems a bit shaky and still unable to satisfy the hardline rebels in the bush?  That seems a lot less outlandish after (as reported on at the time in this blog) the M.N.L.F. declared, in Sulu in August, an independent United Federated States of Bangsamoro Republik, whose territory potentially includes not just Sabah but all of Malaysia’s territories on Borneo, and then followed it up by briefly taking over Zamboanga City, the Philippines’ sixth-largest metropolitan area.

Command headquarters of the United Federated States of Bangsamoro Republik in Zamboanga in September

Time will tell.  Ismail Kiram II is not a hothead, but he’s not burying the hatchet just yet.  And he may have more allies than even his crazy older brother had counted on.

Sultan Ismail says he doesn’t want a resumption of last year’s battles for Sabah—for now.

[You can read more about the Sultanate of Sulu, Bangsomoro, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Introducing the Bangsamoro Republik—but for How Long?

Here at “Springtime of Nations,” we endeavor to bring you the latest declarations of independence, notably in the last couple years the Free Sate of Australia, a tiny Russian Democratic Republic near Moscow, the Independent State of Azawad in Mali, Al-Serw in Egypt, the Sovereign State of Biafra in Nigeria, the Republic of Bakassi along Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, the Sultanate of Sulu in the Philippines and Malaysia, Puntland (almost?), and the State of Palestine’s admission (sort of) to the United Nations.

Added to this mixed list (Palestine thrives and moves forward and Puntland’s greatest hour may come soon, while the Azawadi independence bid has been violently snuffed out and Biafra’s was simply ignored) we can add the newest member of almost-existent nations: the United Federated States of Bangsamoro Republik (with Republik usually, in press reports, spelled with a final k instead of a c).  Its independence was declared, without action, on August 12th on the island of Sulu by the Moro National Liberal Front (M.N.L.F.) and then put into concrete form on September 9th with the M.N.L.F.’s forcible takeover of Zamboanga City, on the island of Mindanao, and the raising of the Bangsamoro flag.

Map showing Zamboanga City on the island of Mindanao

At the time of this writing (September 22nd), the battle has come to a kind of standstill.  The M.N.L.F. still controls parts of Zamboanga (pop.: ca. 800,000) and some nearby villages, but key parts of the city have been retaken by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (A.F.P.), with President Benigno S. Aquino III making a dramatic, defiant stand within the embattled city itself.  The M.N.L.F.’s founder and commander, Nūr Miswāri, who is from Sulu, is in the city as well and is believed to have about 300 remaining supporters.  As far as is known, 113 people have been killed (92 of them rebels), but tens of thousands have been displaced.  111 rebels have surrendered.  Reports depict Zamboanga as an eerily empty ghost town.

Map showing the current Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao

Conflict in the southern Philippines is long-standing.  By the time Ferdinand Magellan claimed what is now the Philippines for Spain in the 16th century, there was already a divide between a mostly Muslim south with close cultural and economic ties to what is now Indonesia and a north, including what is now Manila and the bulk of the islands’ population, more traditionally more tribal and with more ties to China and other Asian cultures.  The Spanish Christianized the north but were never able to fully colonize and subdue the south.  The United States conquered the Philippines in the Spanish-American War but had no intention to keep it on as a fully occupied colony like other new acquisitions such as Puerto Rico.  Zamboanga seized independence briefly as a Republic of Zamboanga during the chaos of that war, in 1899.  As the U.S. began to usher the Philippines toward home rule in the 1920s, leaders in the southern Sulu Islands petitioned to remain under U.S. rule, worried about the fate of a Muslim minority in a new nation governed by a northern Roman Catholic majority.  Moros are only about 5% of the population but cover a much larger share of Philippine territory.  Speaking many languages, Moros are no a unified group—they were dubbed Moros by the Spanish, for whom all Muslims were essentially “Moors”—but a Moro national consciousness gathered momentum with Philippine independence in 1946.

The flag of the original Republic of Zamboango, in 1899

The Muslim Independence Movement (MIM), later renamed the Mindanao Independence Movement, referring to the Muslim region’s largest island, was founded in 1968, aiming to establish an Islamic Republic of Mindanao, Sulu, and Palawan.  Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippine dictator and U.S. ally, was opposed to the rebels’s Communist and Islamist tendencies and cracked down brutally in the 1970s, which only intensified Moros’ desire for independence.  The M.N.L.F., originally a MIM offshoot, became more prominent after Marcos’s declaration of a state of emergency in 1972, with calls for a Bangsa Moro Republic (variously spelled).  After Marcos’s fall in a people-power movement in 1986, the government’s approach to the insurgency shifted radically.  An Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) was established in the following year.  Warfare continued, however, with holdouts still demanding a fully separate state.

An old flag of the original Sultanate of Sulu, of which the modern M.N.L.F. flag is a modification

Last year, Manila negotiated with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (with its unfortunate acronym MILF) to replace the ARMM with an expanded and more autonomous region to be called Bangsamoro.  But the M.N.L.F. was unsatisfied and refused to disarm until independence was achieved.  The M.N.L.F. also threw their weight behind a recent quixotic attempt (reported at the time in this blog) by followers of a self-proclaimed successor to the Sultanate of Sulu to retake Malaysia’s nearby province of Sabah, on the island of Borneo, which was a former possession of the sultanate (and the source, during the Marcos era, of a territorial dispute between the Philippines and Malaysia).

“President” Nūr Miswāri (with microphone)

Miswāri, who styles himself president of the new republic, says its territory includes the islands of Basilan, Mindanao, Palawan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi, while his legal counsel, Emmanuel Fontanilla, says Bangsamoro also includes not only Sabah but also the large Malaysian province to its west, Sarawak, which never belonged to Sulu’s sultan.  That discrepancy has yet to be sorted out.

The claimed Bangsamoro Republik in dark red, with additional possible territories claimed in pink.

But that question may be moot.  Soon, undoubtedly, Zamboanga will be fully retaken, and the cause of Moro autonomy, let alone independence, will have suffered a great setback.  (Or I could be wrong.)  Watch this space for updates.

The Philippine flag still flying over Zamboanga’s city hall,
next to a statue of the Philippine national hero, José Rizal

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2013 or 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]