It was nine years ago, while on a working visit to Japan, that then prime minister Datuk Seri (now Tun) Abdullah Ahmad Badawi received news that Malaysia had lost Pulau Batu Puteh to Singapore.
He was at a private dinner function in Tokyo when acting president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the case, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh, delivered the judgment in The Hague, the Netherlands.
Reporters covering Abdullah’s working visit received instructions from their editors in Kuala Lumpur to get the prime minister’s comment for the final edition of their respective newspapers.
It was 15 minutes to midnight that we got to see him.
As soon as he arrived at the hotel, we were ushered into his suite. He had been briefed on the judgment.
I remember him sitting at the head of the dining table, face downcast.
He expressed sadness over the decision, but nevertheless, accepted it, saying that it was based on hard facts and evidence. He thanked the Malaysian legal team and officials who prepared the case.
“I know they did their best,” he said back then.
Geography may tell us that Batu Puteh (which is actually a reef of granite rocks half the size of a football field), by virtue of its location on the map, is in Johor waters (located 7.7 nautical miles off Johor’s coast at Tanjung Penyusoh).
But history, according to the ICJ ruling, dictated that it belonged to Singapore.
Then, there’s Middle Rocks which, the ICJ ruled, is Malaysia’s, while South Ledge can either be Malaysia’s or Singapore’s, depending on whose territorial waters it is in.
History also showed that Britain, and later, Singapore, maintained control over the island since the 1850s. Malaysia staked its claim to the island in a 1979 map, which was disputed by Singapore a year later. The dispute saw both countries referring the case to the ICJ in 2003.
This week, however, Malaysia applied for a revision of the ICJ ruling, citing three documents recently declassified by the United Kingdom — an internal correspondence of the Singapore colonial authorities in 1958, an incident report filed in 1958 by a British naval officer, and an annotated map of naval operations from the 1960s.
The documents were discovered in the UK National Archives between Aug 4, last year and Jan 30.
Could one of the documents be the letters that the governor of the Straits Settlements, William John Butterworth, wrote to the sultan and temenggung of Johor regarding the construction of the Horsburgh Lighthouse on Pulau Batu Puteh?
The ICJ was told that his letters had not been found, but there were English translations of the replies to those letters.
It is timely that these documents were found as the rules of the ICJ allow a case to be reviewed within 10 years if new evidence was adduced.
This also goes to show that the government continues to work towards appealing the ICJ ruling.
Furthermore, the Sultan of Johor Sultan Ibrahim had, in 2014, ordered the state government to study the appeal, in line with the wishes of his late father, Almarhum Sultan Iskandar, who said Pulau Batu Puteh belonged to Johor and the island should remain a part of the state.
But, more importantly, did we learn anything from this episode?
Then foreign minister Datuk Seri (now Tan Sri) Dr Rais Yatim was reported as saying that there were at least 110 islands within Malaysian territory near Sabah, Sarawak, Johor and Kedah that required mapping and determination of status.
Some of these islands are located in strategic, resource-rich areas. There is bound to be overlapping claims and dispute.
Besides the islands, there are outcrops and rocks that we haven’t even heard of until recently.
Fishermen and divers know of these sites. Have there been any efforts to ensure that these islands, outcrops and rocks are identified and determined as ours?
Following the ICJ ruling on Pulau Batu Puteh, there were concerns over the status of Pulau Pisang, also located off the coast of Johor.
There is a lighthouse, called Pulau Pisang Light, on the highest point of the island, which was built in 1914, and remains functional as an aid for maritime navigation.
The lighthouse, however, is operated by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, the result of an agreement signed in 1900, in which Sultan Ibrahim of Johor granted the British government of Singapore (part of the Straits Settlements) rights in perpetuity to the plot of land on which the lighthouse stands and to the roadway leading to it, so long as the Straits Settlements operated the lighthouse.
There had been calls by various quarters for the Federal Government to take over the management and administration of the lighthouse from Singapore, for fear of us losing sovereignty of yet another island.
Rais had said back then that the Federal Government would consult the Johor government before engaging with Singapore on the matter. There had been no other press reports following this statement.
We hope there is work in progress towards this. After Pulau Batu Puteh, we certainly would not want history to repeat itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment