special report Even as Tajem was meeting with Dr Mahathir, serious cracks began to appear in the faade of the anti-Taib coalition. SNAP president James Wong, despite having two aides present at Ming Court who were furiously trying to get the party's assemblymen and parliamentarians lined up with the Rahman camp, was dithering in Kuching. Wong held no love for Rahman who was suspected of being behind the accusation that the SNAP founder had colluded with Brunei to get its claim to Limbang, a chunk of Sarawakian territory that sits awkwardly athwart the tiny oil-rich kingdom, recognised by the Malaysian government.

Wong, parliamentary Opposition Leader after the August 1974 general election in which SNAP became the biggest party in the federal opposition, was detained under the Internal Security Act in November that year for a period of 18 months. Lawyer Tajem made the trip to Kamunting several times during Wong's incarceration, trying to get the ISA Advisory Board under Justice Goode to look favourably on the SNAP leader's appeal for release. This mission of solidarity with his leader would earn Tajem scant gratitude in 1982 when Wong turned on him for allegedly helping independent Edwin Tankun win against SNAP's Wellington Rufus Nanang in the Iban stronghold of Simanggang in the parliamentary elections of April that year.

Despite Wong's aversion for Rahman, he was willing to join his faction but Taib threatened to cancel the SNAP financier's licenses to huge logging concessions in Limbang and, additionally, dangled the carrot of a seat in the cabinet for the veteran should he steer clear of the Rahman camp. While doing nothing to stop SNAP strongmen Edward Jeli and Joseph Balan Seling from bolting the Taib stable, Wong took care to stay put, extracting the renewal of his logging licenses and a place in Taib's post-victory cabinet as reward.

By the time petition carrier Noor Tahir left Kuala Lumpur for Kuching, it was clear to Tajem that a good number of the disaffected who were gathered under Rahman's umbrella were time-servers, playing fast and loose with the pros and cons of a still fluid situation. This enabled Taib to exploit the situation through deploying a mix of threats and enticements to slow the stampede of his supporters for the Rahman camp to a gallop. In the event, when Noor Tahir arrived with the petition carrying the signatures of a majority of the State Assembly's 48 members, the PBB renegade found that Governor Tun Ahmad Zaidi had been spirited away from his residence, the Astana, and was nowhere to be found. Soon Taib was on television announcing the dissolution of the state assembly. Stealth and pork barrel sorcery saw the wily Taib to nip a constitutional coup de'tat in the bud.

Daniel Tajem, a relative oasis of conviction in a desert of opportunism, wasted no time in preparing PBDS for the election that was scheduled for early April. PBDS formed an electoral pact with Persatuan Rakyat Malaysia Sarawak (Permas), led by Tun Rahman that styled itself as Kumpulan Maju (Progress Group), and was touted as the alternative BN Tiga (BN3). In other words, the Rahman faction would replicate the state BN government of Taib Mahmud, save that the leader would be someone other than Taib. That strategy was aimed at garnering the support of the federal BN led by Dr Mahathir but as it turned out, the PM wasn't falling for the BN3 gambit. Despite being engaged in a high-stakes battle with Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah for the Umno presidency in the last week of April, Dr Mahathir plumbed for Taib in the Sarawak state polls. This was the signal Kuala Lumpur sent out to the Malay-Melanau-Muslim voters in Sarawak, the third largest after the Dayak and Chinese that it should stay with Taib.

Strongest link

Meanwhile, PBDS had more than the usual quota of trouble, having to field defectors from SNAP, such as Balan Seling and Edward Jeli, even as it strove to give a chance to party loyalists. The resultant wrangle produced another edition of the long running Sarawakian saga of the dropped candidate resurfacing to fight as a vote-splitting independent. When it became clear that party president Leo Moggie was not willing to walk the talk by contesting a state seat, Tajem led the party's fight for electoral primacy in Sarawak by facing BN's Donald Lawan in Lingga.

The heavy artillery of the BN was trained at him, knowing that he was the strongest link in the chain that held the PBDS together and, through the party, the Dayak cause. The BN began to spread the word that Tajem was anti-Chinese, a desperate gambit by opponents who knew that they could not paint him as corrupt or incompetent. Hence to tag him a racialist, with animus towards the Chinese, was the best way to tar an otherwise difficult to reproach adversary. It did not help Tajem's cause that a couple of PBDS candidates, particularly the Bidayuh firebrand Wilfred Nissom, had made inflammatory speeches with anti-Chinese overtones.

In the event, the Chinese vote, like the Malay one, went to the BN, with the result that Permas was thrashed, winning only four seats in the 48-member assembly. PBDS won 15 seats but Tajem was defeated by 59 votes in Lingga, the consequence of his rejection by the small Chinese and Malay presence in his constituency. Thus, in the aftermath of BN victory that assured the survival of Taib Mahmud, Tajem, one of the brightest names in the Dayak political firmament between 1974 and '87, was now quite shorn of lustre.

With just his parliamentary seat of Batang Lupar in hand, Tajem returned to private legal practice but the sinister powers saw to it that the return would be travail-laden. A raft of bank guarantees he stood for loans taken by PBDS supporters engaged in small business were folded in with the losses suffered by the borrowers. This resulted in the wiping out of a personal fortune of RM7 million he had accumulated from his lucrative legal practice that had begun in 1966 and ended in 1980 when he became a state cabinet minister. Two break-ins at his law office in Kuching, the obvious object of the second being to destroy or take away important files, and the scattering of pornographic material in the mess, added to the dispiriting vexations he had to endure. Paralleling this course of woe for Tajem, within a year of the April 1987 state elections, the PBDS slate of 15 representatives in the State Assembly was whittled to seven through defections, Balan Seling, Edward Jeli and Gramong Juna among the crossovers to SNAP and Taib's PBB.

Not one to submit easily to adversity, Tajem returned unbowed to the fray, retaining the Sri Aman (formerly Batang Lupar) parliamentary seat in the October 1990 general elections and regaining Bukit Begunan (formerly Lingga) in the 1991 state elections. After the 1991 state elections in which PBDS had unsuccessfully aimed to capture the most seats in the state assembly in order to claim the CM's post, it was clear that rejoining the ruling state BN was the alternative to oblivion for the party as it barely held on to the seats it retained after being hit by defections in 1988. By 1994 PBDS was back in the state BN as a coalition partner.

For Tajem there was to be more bitters from the cup of defeat in the news that he had been recommended to be member of the newly created (in 1991) Court of Appeal. In 1974, after eight years in private practice, he had appeared in a raft of cases before Tun Suffian Hashim, the then Lord President. In Kuching, Suffian invited him have a cup of coffee in chambers and inquired if Tajem would like to join the bench. A modest Tajem expressed doubts about his ability to perform on the bench. "We are better judges of that," commented Suffian.

A retreat from S'wak politics

In 1991, Tajem's name came up for elevation to the Court of Appeal, presumably as the Sarawakian representative on the court. In 1996 and again in 2000, while he was Malaysian High Commissioner in New Zealand, Tajem was told in the first instance by a vacationing Taib Mahmud and in the second by a visiting Tan Sri Ahmad Sarji, then Chief Secretary to the Malaysian government, that indeed he was recommended for elevation to the Court of Appeal in 1991, but that two Sarawakians had interposed with Prime Minister Dr Mahathir to say that Tajem had always been in politics and not in the practice of law. In the event no Sarawakian was elevated that year.

Tajem's acceptance of the Malaysian High Commissioner's post to New Zealand in 1995 was intended as a retreat from Sarawak politics to smooth the PBDS re-entry into the state BN they were never out of the federal BN and his standing down from the parliamentary elections of 1995 and state elections of 1996 was part of the requisites of that accommodation. But when the land code was amended by the Sarawak state assembly in May 2000, with the concurrence of PBDS representatives, an amendment seemingly to the detriment of Dayak interests under the Native Customary Rights code, an alarmed Tajem returned to the political fray by defending his deputy presidency of the PBDS against Dr James Masing in the party elections of mid-2003. Masing, who had turned from Dayak firebrand to Taib toady, had become Taib's preference to lead PBDS.

Party president Moggie, ignoring PBDS supreme council members Edmund Langgu and Frank Apau's advice to stay above the fray, backed Masing against Tajem. The latter won handily but Moggie retained Masing in the supreme council by appointment. Masing was thrown a lifeline by Moggie and today the state minister and Taib favourite to lead the Dayaks is the object of much loathing for the reason of his divisiveness in Dayak politics.

Daniel Tajem anak Miri, the Dayak politician with the least tenuous hold on principled politics, has now, 19 years after the Ming Court affair, become the most credible Dayak politician just by enduring the longest against a disproportionate share of the adversity that others had brought upon the community by their misjudgments and the evasions they contrived as shield against its consequences. If Bukit Begunan elects him in today's polls, it would be the start of a recrudescence of legitimate Dayak aspirations in Sarawak politics, espoused by a man much tempered by adversity and disciplined by a long exile that has left little residue by way of recrimination or resentment.