Lahad Datu

On 9th of March I wrote about the "invasion" of Lahad Datu in East Sabah by a group of armed Filipinos.  Things seem to have gone fairly quiet since then.  The death toll now stands at around 70 and a couple of hundred people have been arrested for helping the "invaders".  There is still some kind of security cordon around the area where the Filipinos landed and a big military presence, including naval patrols.  The British Council withdrew their staff from East Sabah in March and they are not going back.

In the welter of claims and counter claims by the various parties involved I guess we may never know the full truth of what actually went down.  I suspect the biggest losers in all this are the local people of East Sabah and the nearby islands, which are part of the Philippines.  They have been used to dropping in to see one another by small boat for family weddings and the like, without the bother of going through border controls and presenting passports.  That I would guess is a thing of the past.

For an outsider like me some of the rumours and even news reports from the regional press have been truly bizarre.  These include that the US was behind the invasion, because they are "jealous" of Malaysia's economic growth and that the leader of the opposition was involved for his own nefarious political purposes.  The text below is from the New Straits Times (a major Malaysian newspaper) of 21st March.

According to sources in the security forces, some of the terrorists who were shot dead, wore amulets and had tattoos of Koranic verses on their bodies:   

"They might be immune to bullets but not all the time. In fact, a mortar explosion can kill them even if their skins were impenetrable," he said.  "Strangely, the bodies of practitioners of mysticism are quick to decompose and covered with maggots within an hour.  The corpse of a normal person will only be covered with maggots if left exposed for more than two to three days."

You live somewhere for a few months and you start to feel you are beginning to understand the culture, then you realise you are just scratching the surface.  Underneath the veneer of modernity this is an ancient land with a culture and values whose roots go way deeper than Islam or Christianity.