Historical Sabah

Sabah or North Borneo was part of the Sultanate of Brunei around the early 16th century. This was during the period when the Sultanate's influence was at its peak. In 1658 the Sultanate of Brunei ceded the north-east portion of Borneo to the Sultan of Sulu in compensation for the latter's help in settling a civil war in the Brunei Sultanate. In 1761 an officer of the British East India Company, Alexander Dalrymple, concluded an agreement with the Sultan of Sulu to allow him to set up a trading post in the region. This together with other attempts to build a settlement and a military station centering around Pulau Balambangan proved to be a failure. There was minimal foreign interest in this region afterward and control over most parts of north Borneo seems to have remained under the Sultanate of Brunei.

After centuries as a pawn in various Indo­nesian and Southeast Asian power games, Sabah was neatly carved up by enterprising British business in the late 19th century, when it was known as North Borneo and administered by the British North Borneo Company. After WWII Sabah and Sarawak were handed over to the British govern­ment, and both decided to merge with the peninsular states to form the new nation of Malaysia in 1963.

However, Sabah's natural wealth attracted other prospectors and its existence as a state was disputed by two powerful neighbours - Indonesia and the Philippines. There are still close cultural ties between the people of Sabah and the Filipinos of the nearby Sulu Archipelago and Mindanao, not always manifested positively: several small islands to the north of Sabah are disputed by the Philippines, there's a busy smuggling trade, Muslim rebels often retreat down towards Sabah when pursued by government forces, and pirates based in the Sulu Sea continue to raid parts of Sabah's coast.

After independence, Sabah was governed for a time by Tun Mustapha, who ran the state almost as a private fiefdom and was often at odds with the federal goverment in Kuala Lumpur (KL). Even when the Kadazan-controlled Sabah United Party (Parti Bersatu Sabah; PBS) came into power in 1985 and joined Barisan National (Na­tional Front), Malaysia's ruling coalition party, tensions with the federal government were rife.

In 1990 the PBS pulled out of the alliance with the National Front just days before the general election. The PBS claimed that the federal government was not equitably re­turning the wealth that the state generated, and in 1993 it banned the export of logs from Sabah, largely to reinforce this point. The federal government used its powers to overturn the ban, and despite ongoing dis­cussions, to this day nothing has changed - a mere 5% of revenue trickles back into state coffers.

As a result of this imbalance and its bad relations with the federal government, Sabah is the poorest of Malaysia's states, with an unemployment rate of twice the national average. Although it's rich in natu­ral resources, 16% of the population lives below the poverty line. Part of the problem is a bizarre rotation system that forces a change of political administration every two years.

Just to compound the economic difficul­ties, Sabah has experienced an extraordi­nary population boom over the last couple of decades - in 1970 the total number of in­habitants was under 50,000, whereas today it's a staggering three million. The govern­ment puts the blame squarely on illegal immigrants, claiming there are around 1.5 million foreigners in the state, but whatever the truth, a solution will need to be found in the next few years for Sabah's stretched resources.