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But it was Abdul Rahman who sold the scheme. The Tunku wined and dined a continuous stream of Borneo delegations in Kuala Lumpur, warmed up Borneo leaders cool to the federation with promises of favored political positions in the new nation. He shrewdly offered the Borneo territories 70 seats in the federal parliament, against only 15 for far more populous Singapore and 104 for Malaya. He promised tax concessions and a $12 million dollop of Malayan aid annually to the territories, agreed to keep federal hands off Brunei's oil reserves. It was the Tunku's fondest hope that the new nation come into being on Aug. 31, 1963, the sixth anniversary of Malaya's independence.
Then last December came a blow that threatened to destroy the Tunku's timetable. It was the uprising in Brunei.
"Just Too Much." Discontent with the Sultan of Brunei's corrupt, inefficient and autocratic regime had long been festering in the tiny, Delaware-sized territory. Last year the Sultan's government spent only $50,000 on drugs and medicine for its people, while laying out $47,000 for electrical illumination on the Sultan's birth day; action on requests to the government usually took from six months to three years. The dominant but powerless People's Party was also dead-set against Malaysia; the party's erratic, goateed, onetime veterinarian leader, Sheik A. M. Azahari, 34, wanted instead to align Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo into a single independent state—with himself as its leader.
When it finally erupted, the revolt was poorly organized and badly led. Four battalions of Britain's tough little Gurkha troops landed on Brunei, inside of a week sent the shattered remnants of the 3,000-man rebel army scuttling back into hiding in Brunei's steaming jungles.
But the Brunei revolt at last gave the Philippines and Indonesia, for different reasons, an excuse to display their opposition to the scheme. Oblivious to Malaya's success against Red infiltration, the Philippines feared that leftists would ultimately take over the new nation, thus putting a Communist neighbor right on their doorstep. Dusting off an old claim to North Borneo, the Philippines maintained that in 1878 the Sultan of Sulu had only "leased," not sold, the territory to the British. London stiffly rejected the Filipino claim to the region.
Indonesia shouted that the turmoil showed the deep dissatisfaction with Malaysia in the Borneo territories, and that the federation was only a plot to extend Britain's colonial influence in Asia. Rabble-rousing President Sukarno knew that a British-backed, economically viable Malaysia would not only derail his ambition to extend his influence over the Borneo territories, but might also serve as an inducement to rebellion for the people of depressed Indonesian Borneo. Moreover, Abdul Rahman has ignored every "revolutionary principle" for which Sukarno stands, has in the process created a conservative, prosperous nation, while revolutionary, leftist Indonesia, with its 100 million people, has slid to the edge of economic ruin. Says a diplomat: "To have a little country like this extending its influence in Southeast Asia was just too much for Sukarno."