Things that this country needs to let go of (part 1)

(I've always meant to write something like this but I just kept on postponing and/or forgetting all about it.  Now that I've come back from the self-imposed hiatus from all the Batanes blogs I've been making, I'm making it a point to write about this topic and get it over with.)

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There a number of things that keep holding us back as a country from moving on to more relevant concerns.  These are actually dead issues that are somehow resurrected for political purposes, which serves absolutely no one's interest but our politicians' (who, if anything, are jackasses).  Here's the first in a hopefully ongoing series of those things.

The ownership of Sabah

The fact that successive Philippine administrations have done practically nothing to advance our claim (and that a Filipino needs a friggin' passport to enter Kota Kinabalu) serves notice to the fact that we will never get this chunk of Borneo, which was never really ours in the first place. 

Consider this: Sabah was once part of the Sultanate of Sulu, which at one time was a political entity (i.e. a country).  We will probably never know the exact reason why Sultan Jamalul Kiram and his advisors did the unthinkably brainless deed of leasing out to a westerner (the British) a mind-boggling 90% of their territory, but they did.  So they sat on their asses while the British tried to make Sabah productive.  The Sultan meanwhile encouraged his heirs to do some more ass-sitting because, hey, they're royalty.

that's Junior sanctimoniusly ass-sitting at the middle

Fast forward to the mid-20th century. Nationalism and self-determination was all the rage, and the people of Sabah, who were probably unaware that they were still nominally subjects of the Sultan of Sulu, simply voted in a U.N.-supervised referendum that they wanted to be Malaysians.  (To be sure, the British did have a hand in railroading Malaysia's statehood, but that's no excuse.)  Meanwhile, a few decades back, the Sultanate of Sulu ceased to be a political entity - no doubt brought about by a legacy of mind-boggling incompetence (see previous paragraph) - and got absorbed by the fledgling Philippine republic.

[Now this deserves a bit of digression: Why, oh why, did Sulu become part of the Philippines when it was not even conquered by the Spanish according to our grade school history books?  Apparently our grade school history books were filled with bullshit (especially if the author had "Zaide" as his/her last name), because if they were never conquered by the Spanish, then what the hell was a Spanish garrison doing at the main island of Jolo up to the last day of it's Philippine occupation?  By the way, the Spanish was able to force a "peace treaty" with Sulu during the term of Sultan Jamalul Kiram - remember him?]

an impressive genealogy of royal incompetence

Now, the new Philippine state, then as now, didn't really give a fart about what was happening in Mindanao.  That was until probably some lowly bureaucrat somehow found out about resources-rich Sabah once belonging to the Sultanate of Sulu ("Wow, we have a province named 'Sulu'?" - Philippine bureaucrat).  At about this same time, the new Sultan (Mawallil Wasit Kiram) wanted to do away with his predecessors' dismal legacy and set out to prove his decisiveness on the Sabah issue - by giving all authority and decision-making to recover Sabah to the Philippines through President Diosdado Macapagal.  (He then proceeded to perform the very noble and royal act of doing more ass-sitting because, damn it, he's royalty!)

"What do you mean Sabah is not a banana?"

Lowly bureaucrat probably informed Pres. Macapagal on the value of such a "delegation of authority".  What subsequently followed was the most long-winding and lameass legal attempt to get land without fighting for it - interrupted only by Operation Merdeka, which was a failure before it even begun. 

So at best, we have been trying to claim ownership of a piece of land that the original owner effectively lost ownership of even before our government entered the picture.

I don't really want to go through the indignity of enumerating all the reasons why Malaysia will never give us Sabah on a silver platter (which seems to be the manner we are expecting them to.)  I'll just end with this - do you think Sabahans (i.e. the people of Sabah) would trade their first world we've-got-the-Petronas-Towers-beat-that citizenship with a festering American-wannabe third-world one?  I don't think so.

So let's just forget about the whole thing and move on.

Sabahans, truly Asia!

(In related news, the heirs of the Sultan of Sulu claim that they are ready to reconquer Sabah by force of arms if the Philippine Government continues to drag it's feet on the Sabah claim.)

(Idiots.)