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.]

Sultan Vows to Keep Sulu Islands out of Philippines’ New Bangsamoro Statelet

Now that the vest-pocket war between the military Malaysian in its eastern province of Sabah and a rebel group loyal to the Philippine islands’ defunct Sultanate of Sulu has largely died down, the Republic of the Philippines is beginning to grapple with the resurgent sultanate’s implications for its southern Moro insurgency.

On August 2nd, a spokesmen for the unrecognized Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo announced that the Sulu archipelago, a small, predominantly-Muslim island group in the southern Philippines, cannot be part of the new autonomous region to be called Bangsamoro which the Philippine government has been negotiating into being with Muslim Moro rebels.

The royal spokesman

Like much of the rest of the southern Philippines, Sulu is dominated by indigenous peoples grouped under the larger category Moros—a name derived from the Spanish word for Moors, because they had already been Islamized by the time the Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the 16th century.  In 1924, the Sulu islands petitioned to remain under United States administration while the rest of the Philippines were being ushered to independence.  The U.S. had conquered the Philippines from Spain in the Spanish-American War, and Sulu’s Muslims feared oppression and marginalization in a newly independent Catholic-majority nation-state.  Today, Moros are only 5% of the Philippine population.  In the 1960s, Moros in Sulu and other provinces founded the Mindanao Independence Movement (MIM).  During the 1970s and ’80s, the Moro insurgency became a proxy conflict in the Cold War—with the U.S.-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos cracking down on Communist-backed Muslim rebels—but after Marcos’s fall in 1986, an Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) was formed.  The Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.) and other hardliners continued the struggle for full independence and also made alliances with global jihadists, but in 2012 more moderate nationalists of the unfortunately named MILF rebel group (it stands for Moro Islamic Liberation Front) negotiated the creation of a larger and more autonomous region, with the old ARMM at its core, to be called Bangsamoro.

Attempts to hammer out the details of the creation of the region were complicated in March of this year by the sudden invasion (reported on at the time in this blog) of nearby Malaysia’s Sabah province by a ragtag army of several hundred men loyal to Jamalul Kiram III, one claimant to the throne of the Sultanate of Sulu, which, on paper at least, ceded its territory to United States sovereignty in 1898.  That, however, apparently does not include the sultanate’s non-Philippine territories, namely Sabah, on the island of Borneo.  Suluans never saw an 1851 treaty with the Spanish Empire as a cession, and thus they believe that Spain’s transfer of Sabah to the British Empire in 1885 was invalid.  Moro activists had long clamored for successive Philippine governments to press their claims against Malaysia and try to take back Sabah.  At first, it was not clear if Sultan Kiram wanted Sabah for himself or was merely trying to prod Manila to taking a stronger irredentist stand (which is quixotic, since Manila and Kuala Lumpur have become solid partners in the post-Marcos era).  But then the sultanate allied itself with the radical M.N.L.F., who regard the MILF’s Bangsamoro plan as a shoddy compromise on independence.

The current Sultan of Sulu

Now, the royal spokesman, Abraham Idjirani, declared August 2nd that Mindanao island’s Zamboanga peninsula and the islands between it and Borneo will not come under what it calls MILF administration.  In a clear statement of the sultanate’s sovereignty, Idjirani said, “The territory known as Archipelago of Sulu belongs to the Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo.  It was recognized by the United States in the Introductory Statement of the 1915 Kiram–Carpenter Agreement as an independent political sovereignty for more than 400 years prior to an American occupation and rule which begun in 1900, including England, Spain, Germany, [the Netherlands], France, and China in 1405.”

The MILF is more moderate, but it uses the same flag.

And if you think that it complicates things that the MILF, the M.N.L.F., and the Sultanate of Sulu all have their own ideas of who should administer these territories, consider this: the Sultan has also declared that his territory includes the minuscule but geopolitically crucial Spratly Islands, which are also claimed by the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan), the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, and two squabbling British-derived micronations which claim the Spratlys as their home: the Republic of Morac–Songhrati–Meads and the Kingdom of Humanity.

[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.]

Sulu’s Return: The “World’s Poorest Sultan” Invades Sabah, Threatens Southeast Asia’s Fragile Geopolitical Balance

The Republic of the Philippines, which just last year brought its civil war with southern Muslims closer to an end with an agreement for a new autonomous region, has a new headache to complicate its relationship to the Moro minority.  Details emerged slowly last month as 200 or so Filipino paramilitaries made a quiet amphibious landing on the shores of the neighboring Malaysian state of Sabah.  The porous marine border between far-eastern Malaysia and the far-southwestern Philippines has long been a conduit for contraband arms, linking the Moro separatist insurgency on Mindanao to other Muslim minority struggles such as that of southern Thailand’s Malays, as well as fundamentalist terrorists in Indonesia.  One entity plying these waters is the Abu Sayyaf Group (A.S.G.), a Moro-aligned militia which is considered an arm of al-Qaeda.  But these new intruders on the beaches of Sabah turned out to be the self-proclaimed Royal Army of the Sultanate of Sulu and were claiming Sabah for their monarch.  An ensuing standoff with Malaysian troops became violent on March 1st.  An unknown number have died, and the governments in Kuala Lumpur and Manila are trying to contain the diplomatic fallout.

Early Sulu Sultanate rebels (during American rule?), with an early version of the royal flag

Sabah, the northeastern quadrant of Borneo (whose south is Indonesian and whose north is Malaysian) once belonged to the Sultan of Sulu, at the time the most powerful ruler in the Philippines.  In 1851, as the Spanish Empire was encroaching in the region, Jamalul Alam, Sultan of Sulu, signed a treaty with Spain, which Madrid interpreted as a cession but which the sultanate regarded as an alliance between equals that preserved the sultan’s sovereignty over the small Sulu archipelago, Sabah, the Philippine islands of Palawan and Basilan, and part of the large island of Mindanao.  When Spain turned Sabah over to the United Kingdom in 1885, it was without the sultan’s approval.  Nor was he consulted when his other territories, the de facto Philippine ones, were stripped from Spanish control at the start of the Spanish-American War in 1898, in a local independence struggle that quickly became superseded by the Philippines’ new status as a protectorate of the United States.  (A Republic of Zamboanga existed very briefly on Mindanao’s west coast during the war).  The sultan acknowledged U.S. rule in 1915 and reluctantly agreed to allow his territory to be incorporated into the U.S.’s newly declared commonwealth of the Philippines, but the details of that agreement did not deal with the tricky matter of Sabah, now being run as a British colony.  The U.S. was not interested in pressing a claim against the British, but the independent Philippine government which took power in 1949 was, and claimed it owned Sabah as well.

Proposed territories of a future Bangsa Moro Republic

In fact, one could argue that the self-determination movement among the southern Philippines’ Muslim began in Sulu.  During Sabah’s brief independence (1957-1963), between the end of British rule and incorporation into an independent Malaysia, the Philippine president, Diosdado Macapagal, who had family ties to Sulu, invoked the Sultanate of Sulu so often in asserting his territorial claims on Sabah that he was even suspected of wishing himself to become the new sultan.  (Though a Roman Catholic from the north of the country, near Manila, Macapagal was a descendant of a prince of Tondo, a northern-Philippine monarchy which was once a vassal state of the Kingdom of Brunei, whose lands included Sabah as well.)  A declaration of autonomy in the Sulu islands was quashed in 1961, and soon afterward the Moro people began demanding a separate state consisting of the island of Mindanao and the smaller islands formerly under the Sulu sultanate’s rule.  This helped spark a bloody Muslim-vs.-Catholic civil war in the south through the 1970s and ’80s, with demands for a Bangsa Moro Republic (B.M.R.).  (The Moro are not one ethnic group.  The name derives from the early Spanish traders who considered all Muslims “Moors.”  Today the term covers a variety of groups speaking different languages, the Philippines being one of the more ethnolinguistically diverse areas in the world.)

Flag of the Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.)

Macapagal’s successor, Ferdinand Marcos, coveted Sabah as well.  The awkwardness of a Catholic president using Muslim royal history to extend his mini-empire proved too difficult to manage: in 1968, a secret élite military unit on the northern island of Corregidor became notorious when recruits from Sulu were massacred (according to one version of events) by their Christian officers.  It turned out the men had been training for an imminent invasion of Sabah.  This did not help already bad relations between Malaysia’s left-leaning government and the right-wing Marcos dictatorship.  After Marcos’s removal in a 1986 “people power” revolution, Malaysian–Philippine relations warmed, an Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) was created, and Malaysia acted as a third-party broker in negotiations between Manila and southern insurgency groups such as the Mindanao Independence Movement (MIM), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and the Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.).  Surely, Malaysia partly wanted to make sure not only that an increasingly Islamized insurgency would not spill over into Borneo but that no Sulu-based territorial conflicts arose between the two nations.  However, that is what happened this February.

Jamalal Kiram III, current Sultan of Sulu

The “royal army” currently at large in Sabah is led by a younger brother of Jamalul Kiram III, an elderly invalid in a Muslim slum neighborhood of Manila who ordered the invasion and calls himself “the poorest sultan in the world” (though he is only one claimant).  Kiram’s aim at first seemed merely to goad the Philippine government into a more aggressive irredentism against Malaysia, but as Manila has disavowed any support for the invaders and scrambled to repair its relationship with Kuala Lumpur, the Sultan has begun to sound more radical.  The Sultanate of Sulu’s shadow government now includes a minister for foreign affairs, and it is suddenly calling itself the Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo.

Abraham Idjirani, royal spokesman, at a recent press conference

What Moro separatists in the Philippines make of this is as yet unclear.  The M.N.L.F. first said it regarded Malaysia’s defensive actions as a war on all Moros, but then it tried to squelch rumors that M.N.L.F. fighters were on their way to Sabah to support the Sultan.  One complication will be some territorial overlap between the Sultanate and not only the M.N.L.F.’s proposed Bangsa Moro Republic but also the more moderate MILF’s planned Bangsamoro autonomous region (a subset of the desired B.M.R. territory).

The Sultanate of Sulu’s current flag

What are the chances that the Sultanate of Sulu will become an independent state?  Approximately nil.  Western governments are already worried that a more autonomous Bangsomoro will turn the Philippine–Malaysian border region into a murky no-man’s-land where al-Qaeda can flourish.  The West would never tolerate the establishment of a separate Muslim statelet that would be ripe for Islamist radicalization.  The former colonial master, the U.S., has always stood squarely with Manila against the Islamist rebels of the south.

Poster for The Sultan of Sulu, a 1902 Broadway play that mocked the monarch

But could the world’s poorest sultan throw a politically sensitive region on the boundary between the Christian and Muslim worlds into bloody turmoil?  Well, they already have.  Everyone’s trying to figure out now what this new player wants.

[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.]