TAMPARULI: Angkatan Perubahan Sabah president Datuk Seri Panglima Wilfred Bumburing has taken exception to Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Datuk Seri Panglima Masidi Manjun’s alleged statement that the Kadazandusuns belong to the Malay race.
The Tamparuli assemblyman said that the statement by Masidi about the Kadazandusun race as belonging to the Malay race is highly questionable.
“I believe the majority of Kadazandusuns in Sabah will not agree that they are Malays as suggested by Masidi,” Bumburing opined.
The term ‘Rumpun Melayu’ is only a topographical term used to denote the various people living in South-East Asia or in what is called the Malay Archipelago, which according to anthropologists would include the Filipino tribal people, Bumburing said.
Socially and culturally, the Kadazandusuns are not Malays in the real sense of the word. Politically, they are not Malays either. Umno Sabah has provided a very convenient definition of the Malay ethnicity to include the Kadazandusuns in order to accept them into Umno Sabah and enable Malaya to colonise Sabah, he claimed.
“The most important issue we need to consider is the constitutional definition of a Malay, which states that a Malay is one who habitually practises the Malay culture and must be a Muslim. How in the world could Masidi group together all the KDMs, including those non-Muslim KDMs as Malays? The Umno constitution states that the party is a Malay party and Umno only relaxed the provision to enable it to enter Sabah.
On Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s contention that there will never be a true Malay, Bumburing said: “The former prime minister needs to elaborate further on what he really meant as what had happened is as far as race relation is concerned, and about there being no true Malay, Mahathir has only himself to blame.”
Mahathir, he pointed out, had been the Prime Minister for two decades, long enough to have created a true Malaysian identity.
The imbalance in the economic progress among the various races had not helped to foster a strong sense of belonging to Malaysia, Bumburing claimed, adding that regional development imbalance had also resulted in deep resentment among the people of Sabah and Sarawak.
Mahathir should have emulated the true spirit enshrined in the Indonesian Pancasila, as he stated that the current situation in Indonesia is the result of a consistent non-discriminatory policy of the government insofar as creating a true identity is concerned, he stressed.
“Although the Chinese minority was somewhat discriminated during the Suharto regime, common identity development, formulated during those years, has, however, enabled Indonesia to emerge as a society that is truly multiracial where no one race made itself ‘The Tuan’ over the other races.
“To cap it up, firstly Widowo, a commoner with no attachment to any previous national administration, was a big milestone in the maturity of Indonesia as a democratic nation. Secondly, the election of a Chinese Christian as governor in predominantly Muslim Jakarta speaks loud about Indonesia’s multi-racial society in spite of the fact that the Chinese population comprised of the smallest minority in Indonesia. I wonder if such scenario is remotely possible with the political culture in Malaysia,” he opined.