Limbang Rebellion

Seven Days in December 1962

Eileen Chanin

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473831957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

In early December 1962 there was a surprise rebel uprising in northern Borneo. The leader of the anti-colonialist North Kalimantan National Army, Sheikh Azahari, mounted the insurrection that became known as the Brunei Revolt. It aimed to thwart Britain and Malaya's plan to combine the British territories of Borneo into a new Federation of Malaysia.The river town of Limbang, an administrative centre in the British colony of Sarawak, became the pivot of the rebellion that was to be the opening act of the military and diplomatic conflict known as 'Konfrontasi'.Combining eyewitness accounts with thorough research, Limbang Rebellion reveals what it was like to be thrown into this intense and unexpected conflict in which hostages were taken and threatened with execution. It describes the involvement of the Royal Marines under Captain Jeremy Moore, MC, and the daring rescue mission he led under challenging circumstances, which included being vastly outnumbered by the rebel forces. The result is a gripping account of seven dramatic days when a small town in northern Borneo suddenly seized the world's attention.

1

1962: COUNTDOWN TO EMERGENCY

Straddling the equator, Borneo is the world’s third largest island. It is situated strategically, at the centre of South-East Asia’s maritime region and main sea routes, and has been a crossroads for centuries.¹

Long commercial rivalry between the Dutch and English led to colonial territories in Borneo, and eventually saw the island divided. What was Dutch Borneo, occupying the southern part of the island, is now Kalimantan, since 1945 part of the Republic of Indonesia. In the northwest of the island, two former British colonies are now the states of Sabah and Sarawak, which since 1963 have been member states of the Federation of Malaysia.

Set between Sabah and Sarawak is the small Malay sultanate of Brunei. The island’s name, ‘Borneo’, is a Portuguese mispronunciation of Brunei, from when the centuries-old sultanate became known to Europeans in the 16th century.² The name ‘Brunei’ may be derived from the Sanskrit word for ‘land’.³ In the 19th century, Brunei became the smallest of the British protectorates in Borneo.

The Dayak people of Borneo’s Sarawak call the jungle interior ulu, the end of the world. That is how, at the start of the 1960s, most people outside Borneo generally looked upon the island. Distance from major world centres, and the difficulty of getting through its uncharted jungle, meant that the world remained largely ignorant about and indifferent to Borneo. It generally overlooked the pivotal position, for centuries, that Borneo held in the region’s trade routes. It overlooked the remarkable ways in which a Stone Age culture and the modern world came together in Borneo. It overlooked the fact that, like so much in the post-war era, Borneo was on the cusp of change. The colonial world and the jet age met in Borneo and, inevitably, tradition and development collided.

The Federation of Malaya achieved independence in 1957, and its Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, proposed in 1961 that a larger federated state of Malaysia be formed, embracing Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo. The creation of an independent Malaysian federation caused considerable dissension and unrest in Brunei and Sarawak. It was immediately opposed by Indonesia, which did not want Sarawak, Brunei or Sabah to join the new nation.

Four main actors were caught up in the post-colonial drama that unfolded. They mirror aspects of the changes that were then sweeping across northern Borneo as the forces at play pulled between tradition and development, diplomacy and war, empire and nationhood, colonial paternalism and political self-determination.

From the circumstances of these four men we can gain insights into the issues that form the backdrop and feature in the story of the assault on Limbang.

In 1962 Sir Omar Ali Saifuddin III ruled the minute Malay sultanate of Brunei. The seventh of ten children, his elder brother’s sudden death saw him proclaimed Sultan in June 1950, at the age of 36. Up to then he had enjoyed a courtly upbringing, and lived a largely sheltered life.

He ruled over the remnant of a sultanate, from his palace in Brunei Town (today’s Bandar Seri Begawan). The sultanate, at its height in the 15th to 17th centuries, encompassed all of Borneo and parts of the Philippines, including the island of Luzon. In 1962 Brunei was a sparsely populated, British-protected ministate of 83 000 people. It covered a total area of 5765 square kilometres (2226 square miles) that consisted almost entirely of dense equatorial rainforest. It was a fraction of its past size, but rich in oil and natural gas. Extraction of these reserves was only begun in the first half of the 20th century.

In the course of the 19th century, Brunei’s empire had been eroded down to a tiny enclave under British protection. In 1846, Brunei still covered most of West Borneo from Jesselton to Kuching and Labuan Island, but the territorial aspirations of the White Rajahs of Sarawak during the latter half of the century swallowed up most of this. Brunei became separated physically into two distinct parts, split by a finger of Sarawak, about 6 kilometres wide at the coast, jutting into Brunei Bay. The enclave of Temburong, with its capital in Bangar, encompassing the entire eastern portion of Brunei, was separated from the rest of the country. Brunei split into its two distinct portions when the Sultan of Brunei ceded the intervening Limbang district to the White Rajahs. Limbang is now a part of Malaysia, a point which Brunei disputed until recently.⁴

The key challenges facing the new Sultan were to modernise his sultanate and manage the process of decolonisation. He came to a sultanate that had little infrastructure, a largely coastal-dwelling Malay population (of whom just over 22 per cent were literate) and no defence force, yet held the then fifth greatest oilfield in the British Commonwealth.⁵

He set about rebuilding Brunei into the Abode of Peace. In 1953 he instituted the first of a series of National Development Plans. He set in train a wide-ranging development program, funded by burgeoning oil revenues. Communications that were developed – roads, an airport, a radio station – ended Brunei’s extreme isolation.

Britain encouraged the Sultan to introduce democratic reforms. He began a process that opened Brunei to constitutional change, while stalling its implementation. He prolonged negotiations towards a written constitution. When this was introduced in September 1959, the post of British Resident was abolished, removing Whitehall’s interference in Brunei’s internal affairs. The Sultan established a legislature with half its members nominated and half elected. The constitution strengthened the position of the Malay language and of the Islamic religion. It enshrined the dominant role of the monarchy while making vague promises on ‘democratisation’. Britain remained responsible for defence and foreign affairs.

Bruneians today hail Sir Omar Ali Saifuddin III as the Architect of Modern Brunei. In reality, he was very good at forestalling democratic advances. He kept up Brunei’s protected status with the British for as long as possible, while consolidating an absolute monarchy. He has been described as ‘a political activist without a peer among the royalty of the Malay world in that era’.⁶

The Brunei royal house could trace an unbroken line of descent as far back as the late seventh century. The Sultan’s first marriage was childless. His second marriage, in 1941 to a distant cousin ten years younger, produced ten children. Four sons who survived into adulthood ensured the dynasty.⁷

A pious Muslim, the Sultan performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in September 1951 and in May 1962. He instituted a religious affairs department (1954) and an Islamic religious council (1955), appointed a government mufti (1962), and expanded religious education. His traditional upbringing and religious values gave him a conservative outlook.

He had a sincere concern for his people, but his iron will would not bend to British persuasions to introduce a measure of democracy. Nor would he heed the quickening political consciousness of his subjects. Japanese occupation during the Second World War had left Bruneians with a diminished view of British rule. A nationalist movement arose and in 1956 this saw widespread support go to the Brunei People’s Party (the Parti Rakyat Brunei, or PRB). When the PRB won a landslide election victory in August 1962, the Sultan delayed convening the Legislative Council.

He rejected the PRB’s nationalist project for Brunei and cemented feelings of common interest with the hereditary elite, appealing to their fears about the popularity of Sheikh Azahari, the PRB leader, and the advance of communism in the region. While Azahari and his supporters saw the Sultan as Brunei’s constitutional monarch, he dismayed them by playing along with Brunei’s merger with Malaysia. He would not accept democracy or independence.

He played interests off against each other. He played off the British, with their gradual approach to decolonisation, against the PRB, with their left-leaning but constitutional approach. He invoked British principles of self-determination to the Colonial Office, but frustrated their efforts to lead him to constitutionalism. He achieved absolute power under the self-governing Constitution of 1959, without losing Britain’s defence support to protect Brunei from internal or external threats.

Negotiations at the time signalled potential threats. Between 1959 and 1962, the United Kingdom, Malaya, Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak were involved in negotiations to form a new Malaysian Federation. The unexpected proposal by Malaya’s Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman in May 1961 for a new state, hailed as a ‘Greater Malaysia’ plan, caused alarm in Brunei. It was hoped that the merger would take place in 1963, but the Philippines and Indonesia opposed any move towards unifying North Borneo and Sarawak with the new federation. The PRB favoured joining Malaysia in a North Borneo Federation with Brunei’s Sultan installed as constitutional monarch of the North Borneo Federation so as to resist domination by peninsular Malay states or Singapore. Widespread anti-Federation sentiment existed in Sarawak and Brunei, where an unprecedented growth of political activity was seen during 1962 as a reaction to the ‘Malaysia’ proposal. Ethnic groups faced questions about what it meant for them in the future. Both support for and opposition to the proposal gained momentum.

Brunei’s new-found wealth complicated the Sultan’s position. It promised prosperity for its people but, in light of Brunei’s history, it also suggested insecurity unless guarded. Offshore oil could sustain Brunei in a separate existence. However, protection of the resource was essential, whether from Kuala Lumpur, British interests or nearer neighbours. The Sultan founded the Brunei Malay Regiment, but it would take time to develop into a well-rounded fighting force.

In the early 1960s climate of nationalism and nation-building, the Sultan would steer Brunei on its own nation-building course. Brunei would achieve independence on its own terms. This would not be as part of a Malay Federation; nor as part of the North Kalimantan (Kalimantan Utara) proposal as the PRB wanted, and as was favoured by local opposition against the Malaysian Federation plan; nor as Greater Indonesia (Indonesia Raja), as envisaged by President Sukarno. Brunei would recover its history as an independent sultanate, based on its oil wealth. In his unwillingness to be subjected to peninsular Malaya’s political domination, the Sultan was at one with his people. Brunei would be the only independent sultanate on the island of Borneo.

If the Sultan expected an untroubled passage, without criticism in Brunei of his strategy to court British and peninsular Malay interests while engineering absolute monarchy, he was confronted by the eminent Sheikh Ahmad M Azahari bin Sheikh Mahmud, the charismatic Brunei Malay nationalist leader of Brunei’s Parti Rakyat.

Both leaders were after the same thing: reviving their country. They were close, Azahari being a high-caste Malay whose uncle accompanied the Sultan on the hadj to Mecca.⁸ The Sultan personally nominated Azahari to the Legislative Council. Yet the two of them could not have been more unalike. Nor could their visions of Brunei’s future have been more different. The Sultan was short in stature, moustached, with a high forehead, and slicked-back hair. He wore large-framed spectacles, which gave him an owlish appearance, and bow ties. He was softly spoken (which some, among the British, thought was a deliberate ploy to hold attention). The novelist Anthony Burgess, then living in Brunei, described him as ‘a grave withdrawn figure’.⁹ Azahari was taller, with a broad nose, wore a more thinly clipped moustache and dressed casually. He was persuasive, a riveting speaker, who his followers saw as a ‘prophet’.¹⁰

In 1958 Burgess was teaching at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Brunei Town. He lived opposite Azahari, whom Burgess found ‘wished to make the growing oil-wealth serve a modern state, not a traditional sultanate’.¹¹ Writing in 1987, Burgess described Azahari as hospitable, ‘a civilized man who only accepted riot as a device of political reform’, although he found Azahari’s project unrealistic.¹² You get the sense that Burgess found (and remembered) Azahari, if quixotic, as being likeable, unlike the Sultan.

Whereas the Sultan was autocratic, Azahari believed in the democratic process. The Sultan’s traditionalist views were at odds with Azahari’s belief that hereditary rule was undemocratic and that democracy could not be stopped. Azahari formed the Brunei People’s Party in 1956, modelling it on Malaya’s left-leaning Parti Rakyat Malaya. Independence for Brunei was its main aim. It did not favour dissolution of the sultanate, but sought to democratise the government by shifting the national leadership from the palace to the rakyat (people) through democratisation in the government. In 1961, the PRB’s membership of 26 000 people represented more than a quarter of Brunei’s population.

Azahari and the PRB rejected Tunku Abdul Rahman’s idea of Malaysian Federation. Although the Sultan at the time appeared open to Brunei joining the proposed federation, the PRB maintained that joining Malaysia would end any revival of Brunei’s predominance in the region and result in Brunei losing its unique identity. Azahari ran the Malay-medium newspaper, and harshly criticised Brunei’s reportedly proposed arrangements with the Federation as a ‘back door’ negotiation without reference to the people of Brunei, who might well not like the idea of sharing their oil wealth with, and being governed by, the peninsular Malays. In the estimation of British expatriate Geoffrey Daniels, working for the Brunei Shell Petroleum Company from 1960, it must have been almost without precedent that a Sultan was criticised so publicly.¹³

Alarm at Brunei’s possible incorporation within the Federation saw the PRB gain strength as it voiced popular dread of the proposal. The 33-year-old Azahari was a powerful public speaker. He drew ready listeners among Brunei Malays, who were more aware than before of the world beyond and who were living in what was now a rich country.¹⁴ The PRB became a magnet for dissidents among the truculent Brunei Malays and di...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Foreword by Richard Woolcott, AC
• Introduction by Major General Julian Thompson, CB, OBE
• Prologue
• 1 1962: Countdown to emergency
• 2 Friday, 7 December: Counting the days
• 3 Saturday, 8 December: Black Saturday
• 4 Sunday, 9 December: ‘Highs’ and ‘lows’
• 5 Monday, 10 December: Standing fast
• 6 Tuesday, 11 December: Plans in action
• 7 Wednesday, 12 December: Rescue the hostages
• 8 Thursday, 13 December: Enemies within
• 9 December and beyond
• 10 Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography