The nine monarchies of the Malay Peninsula were cast in an entirely unpredict- able historical role, indirectly, by the Japanese occupation. One or two of the Sultans were found – by the returning British, after the war – to have entered
into relationships with the Japanese which went beyond the ineluctable necessities of survival, and which could be branded as ‘collaboration’. This was held against them by a celebrated agent of British plans for a more centralized and racially egalitarian post-war Malaya, which had been hatched in Whitehall while the British officers of the Malayan Civil Service were mainly ‘guests of the Japanese’. The ‘agent’ was Sir Harold MacMichael. He browbeat the offending royalty into signing away their sovereignty to the so-called ‘Malayan Union’, under threat of trial and losing their thrones altogether.
This high-handed move was utterly contrary to the spirit of the original British treaties with the Malay States, which had served as a bulwark not only of the Sultans’ sovereignty but also of the status of the Malays as the legitimate, indigenous people amidst massive Chinese and Indian immigration. A nationalist party sprang into existence to fight this ‘Malayan Union’ – the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). Unlike the typical nationalist activity across the water in Indonesia, the struggle of UMNO was led by aristocracy and elite civil servants, and set monarchy at the centre of its vision for constitutional development. At the same time, UMNO was nothing if not a highly democratic organization, whose grass-roots activists and mass following were every bit as important as the more ‘ceremonial’ Sultans. Some rulers felt that their prestige was being manipulated in a cause which did not bode well for their own political future in the long run. The leader of UMNO, Onn Jaafar, indeed already had to threaten some of them with the ‘wrath of the masses’ if they did not cooperate with him to force the British to abandon their plan. This, presumably, ‘confirmed their worst fears’. But anyway, they bowed to browbeating yet again. Thus were the British forced to abandon Malayan Union and negotiate with a joint committee of UMNO and the rulers, which led to the establishment of the ‘Federation of Malaya’ in January 1948. It was as if the Malay elite had combined their energies to force the British to continue with ‘Indirect Rule’, but with a nationalist mass party (or its elite leaders) now the main beneficiary of the Sultans’ prestige, not the colonial power.
The Federation of Malaya had many features of an embryonic unitary nation–state but its components were given authority in a number of spheres, for instance land and religion. The Sultans continued to be head of religion in their respective States but control of land would be devolved to the elected State politicians and become their foremost asset within a few years – indeed, rather fewer years than was expected in 1947, since the process of democratization was speeded up in the early 1950s in order to pre-empt the militant Independence campaign of the Malayan Communist Party. The accelerated advent of democracy once again put the Sultans, or at least the more conservative of their number, on the spot. There were some notable tensions between rulers and elected Chief Ministers (Mentri Besar), whose appointment was no longer in the gift of the Sultan, except purely formally, under the democratic State Constitu- tions.76 The royal assent to laws passed in the new legislatures was also, of course, a pure formality. This was part of the background to certain cases of
Post-war developments 61 rulers showing opposition to Malayan Independence, which, like democracy, came about much quicker than was originally anticipated, in 1957.77
Between 1948–57 the de facto ‘Head of State’ (and First Minister until 1955) was the British High Commissioner. But under the Independence Constitution a novel institution was inaugurated, whereby the rulers would elect one of their number to act as ‘Yang Di-Pertuan Agong’ (‘Supreme Lord’) of the Federation for periods of five years each, subject to mortality. By this means, ‘Malay supremacy’ was symbolized for the Malayan Federation as a whole, including the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca.78 In the Federal Constitution, the Agong was in fact accorded some powers which appeared to go beyond symbolism. Thus, apart from upholding Islam as the official religion – a counterpart role to that of the Sultans in their own States – he was required and empowered to give effect to special provisions for protecting ‘the Malay position’, such as racial quotas for civil service appointments and the status of Malay as the official language. But in practice such powers were exercised on the advice of the Prime Minister.79 The Conference of Rulers – their collective conclave – was given a veto over any legislative derogation from ‘the Malay position’ (including their own general rights and privileges as royalty!), but how could any such derogation occur, given that a two-thirds majority of the Lower House was requisite for any Constitutional Amendment in the first place? It is also striking that in this federal structure, unlike some others in the world where the protection of ethnic rights was an essential part of the exercise, the individual States were not represented in a powerful Upper House endowed with responsibilities in this regard. Thus in place of effective (or imaginable) mechanisms involving royalty, it was the dominant Malay party, UMNO, that guaranteed the perpetuation of Malay rights – working through the Alliance Party, which harnessed the support of compliant Chinese and Indian partners to the Malay interest in return for economic accommodations. ‘Royal politics’ was practically dead in the 1960s.
The most that anyone might find to write about80 was the system of rotation in the top office, which was scarcely elective at all. That is, it went strictly by the precedence of each Sultan’s succession to his State throne, though with two provisos in practice: (a) a lifestyle which went beyond the bounds of propriety even in the eyes of his peers could cause a Sultan who had manifest precedence to be passed over; (b) a Sultan might indicate that he himself did not wish to be considered – and when this did happen, again lifestyle seems to have been a consideration on the part of one manifest candidate unwilling to change his ways and submit to the discipline of high national office. Nevertheless, by the time seven States had taken their turn, in the early 1980s, it became clear that it would not be possible to pass over the two remaining and let the series start all over again, before they had all had their turn. This conviction was held, whether the candidate this time round was the same man as the last time, who had not tangibly reformed himself, or the son of the candidate previously passed over, but tangibly a chip off the old block.81 Clearly, also, by this time, precedence in terms of succession date was no longer relevant, for two States were being given
their turn because they had missed it before. Subsequently, the original sequence has begun to be replicated, without reference to dates of State succession.
However, this account anticipates the 1980s and 1990s. The point that has to be emphasized in relation to ‘racial politics’ in the 1960s is that the monarchs were essentially above the fray. And nearly all of them acted perfectly constitu- tionally all the time, in the context of democracy. But that decade was not politically placid. Democracy also brought the turbulent Lee Kuan Yew on to the scene, and this left racial tensions in the air, and a deepening polarization, even after Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. Malay nationalists felt a growing sense that ‘Special Rights’ had left the Malays deprived of any economic foundation for their constitutional supremacy: the ‘immigrant races’ (plus – less visibly – foreign capital) still ‘owned’ the economy. A stinging slap in the face came from the ‘Father of Independence’, Tunku Abdul Rahman himself, when Malay was not given recognition as the sole National Language where this would have really counted – in the law courts, and especially in education – when the original time limit for English expired in 1967. Then the general elections in May 1969 saw the desertion of UMNO’s client party, the Malaysian Chinese Association, by part of a generation of more assertive Chinese voters, with the possibility of a non-Alliance government and Chinese Chief Minister taking over in Selangor State. This sparked off Malay attacks on Chinese, followed by widespread mayhem, with hundreds of deaths in Kuala Lumpur: the incident known ever since as ‘May 13’. Malaysia’s vaunted system of racial harmony under democracy was at an end – at least on the terms established between 1955–57.
As for the rulers, they were passive spectators to these events. However, in the aftermath, their position was strengthened in the Constitution. The Conference of Rulers’ formal veto on any reduction in the rights of the Malays was extended to a broader range of provision than before.82 Previously, apart from having the right to be consulted about any change of administrative action concerning the Malays, the Conference had had the power of veto over any derogation from a constitutional privilege of the Malay race (as was mentioned above). But now (1971), the veto itself became ‘entrenched’, namely, as a Malay privilege which could not be retracted without the consent of the Conference; besides, under amendments both to the Constitution and the Sedition Act, it became illegal to even raise such a question in Parliament. The embarrassed contortions of a UMNO General Assembly later in the decade (1978), when it humbly petitioned the Conference of Rulers to consider the coordination of the religious affairs administration of the States, were suggestive of a shifting balance of power. In the State of Kelantan the Sultan demanded and was granted a new palace in return for his indulgence towards certain questionable dealings in timber and other concessions, by which the Chief Minister (Mohamed Asri of the Pan- Malaysian Islamic Party) had attempted to generate funds for the State budget, party coffers and private pockets simultaneously.83
Post-war developments 63
3.4
Brunei
As we saw in Chapter 2, section 2.2, events in Brunei after 1950 were signifi- cantly shaped by the new Sultan, Omar Ali Saifuddin. There had been an embryonic nationalist movement in the late 1940s, called Barisan Pemuda (‘Youth Front’), but it was dedicated to a repossession of Bruneian sovereign rights by the ruler, not a usurpation of monarchical prerogatives by non-royalty, as was happening on the Malay Peninsula. If one looks to Malaya for comparisons, one will be most of all struck by the fact that Brunei experienced no challenge to the position of the Malays of the type represented by Malayan Union. There was a lurking danger in the fact that the Governor of Sarawak (a Colonial Office appointee since the abdication of the Brooke dynasty) became the British High Commissioner for Brunei from 1 May 1948. But the royal circle were extremely alert to any signs of ‘Sarawak expansionism’ under the new guise of colonial bureaucracy. Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin in the 1950s doggedly resisted most moves tending towards the propagation of federalism in British Borneo, even under his own ‘leadership’ as Sultan. Thus there was no issue on which the Brunei educated elite could feel that the monarchy was being browbeaten, or ‘bought’, into accepting an antithetical British perspective. Consequently, in turn, the social ‘fault line’ in Brunei politics in the 1950s, after the rise of the radical Brunei People’s Party (Partai Rakyat Brunei – PRB), followed old class divisions in an almost pure form, i.e. on one side the aristocracy-cum-educated elite, grouped round the Sultan, resisting on the other side a challenge from socialist-minded spokesmen of the non-elite strata. The fundamentally contrasted situation in Malaya was that the aristocracy-cum-educated elite there had mobilized a mass following, in the name of the Sultans ostensibly but in fact autonomously from the Sultans, whose old position was not secure against democratic inroads, and whose future ceremonial position could only be sustained if UMNO was content with the balance of mutual advantage in their symbiotic relationship.84 No doubt, even in the absence of a threat to Brunei Malay priorities, the unity of elite and Sultan could have become extremely strained if the unedifying and self-centred Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin had remained on the throne. But that is hypothetical and academic. In the event, Brunei in 1950 got itself an activist Sultan, who was able to seize the initiative and start setting domestic agendas before the rise of any mass political party, let alone an elite-led party. This head-start, and the accompanying unity of monarchy and elite, have conditioned Brunei’s characteristically non-democratic political development ever since.
In 1959, thanks mainly to the strong will and dynastic vision of this royal activist, but in part because of British fears of the Indonesian-style radical nationalism of PRB, executive power was yielded to the monarchy by the Colonial Office – under a ‘Constitution’ perhaps misleadingly thus called. This was contrary to original intention and totally in contrast, obviously, to the democratic development sponsored in the Federation of Malaya and Singapore. But it was in keeping with another piece of British legal drafting, the one probably closer to the Sultan’s heart: the Law of Succession, which spelled out
the right of his line alone to occupy the throne after his death. In point of fact, the Constitution included a Legislative Council, and provision was made for elections two years later. But when these were eventually held (three years later), the victory of PRB was so overwhelming that it placed the party in a position – even in a Legislative Council only partly elected – to be able to stall the merger of Brunei with the other territories of ‘British South-East Asia’ as the ‘Federa- tion of Malaysia’, on which the Sultan had fairly clearly, at that point, set his heart.85 Indeed, the party had won the elections essentially on an anti-Malaysia platform. The Council remained unconvened for over three months, as if to forestall the passing of an anti-Malaysia resolution.
The PRB’s military wing rose in revolt (December 1962) – but thereby played into the hands of conservative interests, as it soon transpired. British forces from Singapore crushed the revolt. After this, a Gurkha battalion of the British Army was stationed in the Sultanate – more precisely, in the middle of the oilfield – and this has become a permanent security fixture, extending even beyond Independence in 1984 down to the present day, and paid for by Brunei. Democracy has remained in suspension until now, apart from the tentative restoration of a partly elected Legislative Assembly between 1965–70. The consolidation of royal power has been constantly facilitated by a rolled-over ‘State of Emergency’, under which, for instance, even the fully appointed Legislative Council was removed from the Constitution in 1984.
As the backward-gazing eye will so easily pick out the key events and turning points which brought this situation to pass, we must beware the temptation to regard the whole progression as ‘inevitable’. Bruneian ideologues have a version of ‘inevitability’ – the manifest destiny of monarchical absolute rule in the light of supposed ancient precedents, which left the present little choice but to emulate the past. However, the personal historic role of Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin cannot be too much stressed, even when he could not have foreseen the consequences of his actions, or lacked a very clear direction. In 1962 he often seemed adrift. But in 1965–66 he set a self-consciously anti-democratic course, resisting by hook or crook British pressure to allow a cabinet to be formed from the elected group in the legislature (still a minority of the members, as in 1962, but in 1965 directly elected). It is widely believed that the Sultan’s abdication in favour of his son, Hassanal Bolkiah, in 1967, was a diversionary manoeuvre to take the steam out of pressures for democracy – from Brunei politicians as well as the protecting power. Once the local democratic activists had become demoralized by lack of popular support, the government quietly amended the Constitution to abolish elections to the Legislative Council. This was in April 1970, even before the British Labour Government had been replaced by the ‘Brunei-friendly’ Administration of Edward Heath.
It may be wondered whether British governments could bring any leverage to bear whatsoever, to cajole the Sultan of Brunei in the direction of democracy. After all, was Brunei not self-governing and the Sultan sovereign under the Constitution negotiated with the Colonial Office in 1959? The fact is that practically the only threat that London could wield was the threat to withdraw its
Post-war developments 65 protection before Brunei was ready to defend itself. (In contrast, British withdrawal from Malaya was conditional on local leaders establishing a working democracy. In Brunei the British had to threaten to withdraw in order to pressure the government into establishing a working democracy – and eventually, in the 1980s, would admit ‘defeat’ and leave behind a Brunei that was neither undefended nor demonarchized!) When the Wilson Government, unmoved by the 1967 abdication, threatened a unilateral renunciation of the Treaty of Protection the ex-Sultan does not seem to have been deterred. Was he so inured to British pressure, or so perceptive of fundamental British strategic interest, that he could dismiss all such threats as bluff ? He may well have been fortified in his icy sang-froid and brinkmanship by private British advisers close to Shell, the Conservative Party or the ‘Gurkha lobby’. At any rate, his luck held and the Conservatives were re-elected. In 1971 Britain handed over control of internal security, previously a joint responsibility, to the Brunei Government. External defence and foreign relations remained the responsibility of Britain, however, until 1984.86 Under this protective umbrella externally, and working ‘behind the throne’ internally (not to speak of the invisible Police Special Branch, which worked ‘behind’ him in every sense), the ex-Sultan was able to pursue his programme of royal consolidation throughout the 1970s. In place of democracy and ministerial posts, the ambitious were charmed or entrapped by bureaucratic careers, and a plethora of appointments to traditional ranks, each of which entails a solemn, ancient oath of loyalty to the monarch.
Of all this, Hassanal Bolkiah, today’s Sultan, must probably be counted the pre-eminent beneficiary – aside from the fact that the oaths of loyalty just referred to were to himself, not his father.87 The late Sultan passed away in 1986, towards the end of the third year of the ‘Full Independence’ for which the ideologues give him credit retrospectively, but which he would dearly have put off for ever if Britain had not in the end washed its hands of the affair. And yet,