Malaysia Tightens Its Border With Philippines

When times have gotten tough in the past for Muslim extremists in the southern Philippines, where the army has been on the offensive for a week in search of 17 kidnap victims, the rebels have always had a nearby haven.

That refuge was Malaysia’s Sabah state on Borneo, not much more than an hour’s speedboat ride from some of the hundreds of islands and islets that make up the Philippines’ Sulu province. So many Filipinos have ended up in Sabah over the years that Manila finally posted a diplomat there to handle consular affairs.

But those days may be over.

This month, Malaysia sent a battalion of soldiers to nine outlying islands off Sabah and authorized it to shoot Philippine trespassers on sight. And on Wednesday, the government in Kuala Lumpur announced that it would no longer welcome refugees fleeing the fighting on the Philippines’ Jolo island.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, angered and embarrassed by the kidnappers’ abuse of the open border, said he had simply run out of patience. The reason: On April 23, the rebel group known as Abu Sayyaf seized 21 hostages from the Sabah resort island of Sipadan and took them by speedboat to Jolo. Then, on Sept. 10, a day after releasing for ransom the last four Westerners from that group, the rebels returned to another island in Sabah and snatched three Malaysians who are among those still being held on Jolo.

“We cannot accept them [refugees from Jolo] as illegal immigrants, but as war refugees who will be placed in a special camp,” Mahathir, a Muslim, was quoted by the state news agency, Bernama, as saying. “If they come, we will treat them like we treated the Vietnamese [boat people escaping communism in the 1970s and ‘80s].”

Philippine Muslims make up 1 in 4 of Sabah’s 1.8 million inhabitants. The vast majority are innocents who fled war and poverty, not combatants.

“People from Mindanao pretty much had free access to Sabah,” said Rodolfo Biazon, chairman of the Philippine Senate’s committee on national security, in reference to the nation’s predominantly Muslim southern district. “They came and went as they pleased. It gave the troublemakers a comfortable out. And it offered safety to refugees, particularly during the civil war in Mindanao in the 1970s.”

Still, only about 11,000 of the migrants are properly registered with officials in Sabah, a resource-rich but poor state that has traditionally been at odds with the government in Kuala Lumpur over economics and politics.

“This is an important regional security issue,” said Asiri Abubakar, a professor of Asian studies at the University of the Philippines. “Malaysia questions the loyalty of the Filipinos in Sabah, and the Philippines government is put in an uneasy position because people it considers terrorists are given refuge there.”

Tensions between the Philippines and Malaysia over Sabah date back nearly 40 years. Sabah, known as North Borneo in the colonial era, gained its independence in 1963 and became part of the new nation of Malaysia. Both Indonesia and the Philippines disputed Sabah’s incorporation into Malaysia, in Manila’s case, partly because of the strong cultural and economic ties that existed between Sabah and Mindanao. To this day, the two entities are linked by an active smuggling trade.

With the Philippine armed forces pressing their offensive in Jolo to rescue the 17 hostages--including Jeffrey Schilling of Oakland--and destroy Abu Sayyaf’s military capabilities, many of the island’s 400,000 residents have been caught in the cross-fire.

The military says only two civilians have been killed, but officials confirmed Saturday that the operation has destroyed at least two villages and forced more than 14,000 people from their homes. Many have tried to escape the island, but the navy has blockaded it and the government has closed the port to prevent any rebels from fleeing.

Losing access to Sabah is a serious blow to the potential refugees, especially since no province in the Philippines seems prepared to offer them shelter. A boatload of refugees that reached the city of Zamboanga in Mindanao on Wednesday was turned back by municipal officials.

“We don’t want them bringing their problems here,” one official was quoted as saying.