Sabah: Taking cake and eating it too!

Commentary
By Atty. Bertini C. Causing

TAKING ARGUMENT AND EATING THE SAME ARGUMENT!

MALAYSIA HAS ADVOCATED THAT MUSLIMS IN THE PHILIPPINES BE GIVEN SOME SORT OF INDEPENDENCE. So that it even participated in the drafting of the GRP-MILF deal.

BUT MALAYSIA REFUSES TO HONOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MUSLIMS WITHIN THE SULTANATE OF SULU.

Malaysia thus takes it cake and eats it too.

This means that while Malaysia argues that Muslims in the Philippines must be given some degree of independence, it eats its argument when the same line comes to Sabah.

Shame on you, the children of landgrabber, the first Prime Minister of Malaysia, DATU TUNGKU ABDURAMMAN.

When Datu Abduramman organized the Federated States of Malaise, he courted the British government to allow the federation to annex North Borneo or Sabah. The British agreed to his proposition on a condition that the Federation also take Singapore as part of Malaise.

Despite knowledge of their lack of right and the rebuke from the USA twice in 1906 and 1925 warning London that Sabah is part of the Philippines that the US acquired from Spain by the Treaty of Paris, the Brits came up with an official instrument handing sovereignty over Sabah to the Federation of the States of Malaise in 1963. Probably, England was not afraid because the USA already relinquish hold over the Philippines on July 4, 1946.

The Brits merely acquired the use and enjoyment of Sabah from Overbeck, but not the sovereignty.

Overbeck, for his part, rented Sabah from the Sultan of Sulu in an instrument that did not allow Overbeck to lease or sell the same to another. So that even the lease by the British over Sabah was VOID, not legal from the beginning.

So that if Britain did not have authority to sell or lease the territory of Sabah, it did not have any right to sell or lease or give the same to another.

Now, the use or enjoyment of Sabah does not carry with it the right of sovereignty. The right of ownership or possession does not include the right of sovereignty.