rePost::Sabah as the last gold coin

Sabah as clutch
Sabah became their clutch when their own Sulu was sinking, so to speak, from the heavy weight of bloodshed that spiraled into poverty. Sabah became the vision of the last gold coin that could win back the possibility of rising again, getting back the worth of a name, the venerable House of Kiram. Many in the family have dispersed from Sulu and quarrels abound.
It seems rather ironic that many of those who followed Datu Agimodin Jamalul Kiram in last Thursday’s standoff in Sabah came from the island-town of Simunul in Tawi-Tawi province, a hop away from the Malaysian state of Sabah. Tawi-Tawi had separated administratively from Sulu province in the 1980s; this and the other islands of the southern archipelago, as far as Palawan, had formed the sultanate’s domain.
It was there where the Philippine military had secretly recruited mostly illiterate Muslims to stage allegedly an internal disturbance that was meant to give the government the upper hand in reclaiming Sabah, by force if necessary. This blew up into a political scandal known as the “Jabidah Massacre,” an event the military has not owned up to until today, but it has remained an open secret, a stigma on the deaths of some Muslim recruits who tried to mutiny.
This was said to be the crucial factor that sparked the Muslim separatist rebellion in the early 1970s, whose leaders were a brand of ‘activists’, as the Moro National Liberation Front was called, that did not want anything to do with the influence of the royal structures of the past and received clandestine support from Malaysia. The Sulu capital of Jolo was burned to the ground when the military quashed an uprising 39 years ago this month, and the island has sunk even further more, with peace hardly reached in the running insurgency since then.
As it goes, it’s a tale of one army after another; this time we hear of this, the Royal Sulu Sultanate Army – but it’s nowhere near the warriors of the sultanate’s golden age in the 17th and 18th centuries. What we have these days underlies, sadly, the foretold misery of Sulu. – Rappler.com
via Sabah as the last gold coin.