On this website recently, a view of the Dayak leader Leo Moggie anak Irok is offered that lauds his political guile, ministerial longevity, administrative ability, and capacity to survive in the teeth of defeat to his party's goals.
Now that he has announced his intention to retire from leading the Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS), his 19-year-old presidency is said to be a hard act to follow.
These claims sit uneasily with what was apparent at recent branch meetings of the PBDS. A few score branches have met and the consensus appears to be that they cannot wait until the party's triennial delegates conference in Aug 2003 to see Leo Moggie go: They want him out fast. In these quarters he is seen as no more than a seat-warmer.
There is restiveness in the Dayak community in Sarawak, particularly among the Iban who constitute 29 percent of the Sarawak population of 2.2 million people. Dayaks, taken as comprising the Iban, Bidayuh and Orang Ulu, compose 43 percent of the overall population. The Chinese are 27 percent, the Malays 22, the Melanau six and others two percent.
Dayak restiveness is traceable to their being left out in the development process. As the majority community, they feel they are not found in the numbers and that if the chief minister is not from their community, then the governor ought to be.
They say these are unwritten understandings, forged in the struggle for a formula for inter-ethnic harmony in Sarawak in the period from before the merger with Malaysia till the early 1970s.
Leaders conscious of the need for ethnic balance and equity would be inclined to adhere to them. Hegemons, however, are apt to pretend there never were such understandings and so ignore them.
The Dayaks attribute their lagging behind other communities to the malevolent designs of certain political leaders and to the feebleness of Dayak leaders in pressing the community's claims.
About the first factor, the Dayaks feel powerless to do anything. Also, many of them know that blaming others for their condition does not invite sympathy from non-Dayaks.
As to the ineffectiveness of their leaders, the Dayaks now feel they can and must do something. So when Moggie announced in late January that he would not be standing for re-election, several PBDS branch stalwarts wasted no time in making it known that Moggie ought to go now rather than wait another 18 months. These people see Moggie as someone who has done well for himself but not for the community.
Ming Court Affair
The Dayak lag in the development of the various ethnic groups in Sarawak began with the removal of Stephen Kalong Ningkan, the secretary-general of the Sarawak National Party (Snap) in the mid-1960, as chief minister.
It is said his abrasiveness grated on then Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj, a patrician politician not inclined to take lightly lapses from decorous conduct.
Also, Ningkan's tardiness in acquiescing to the federal government's behest that English colonial remnants in the civil service be replaced by federal officers was seen as obstinacy. Ningkan dragged his feet because several native Sarawakians, then being educated in Australia and New Zealand, had not returned. He wanted the returnees to replace the colonials.
Ningkan's sidelining created a vacuum which saw Rahman Yaakob manoeuvre to seize the advantage and the chief minister's post which he held throughout the 1970s.
The conspiratorial Rahman made sure that things were fluid in the other component parties so that his party would hold the edge in the inevitable intramural tensions and disputes. Encouraged from without, internal strife in Snap led to the splinter PBDS in 1983.
The chief minister's baton was passed to Rahman's nephew, Taib Mahmud, in 1981. All was reputedly not filial between uncle and nephew.
In 1986 the infamous Ming Court Affair created a schism in the state Barisan Nasional. Not a lot is known about what really led to the rebellion against Taib but there was talk that his style did not sit easily with those who had known and preferred his uncle's.
Battle over lumber lucre
How much the apportionment and management of Sarawak's most valuable resource s Party (SUPP), ensured the state BN's grip on power didn't loosen. The most recent polls, in September last year, confirmed that hold to be more formidable than ever.
Throughout the struggles in the period from 1986 till 1995, Moggie chose to talk the talk of Dayakism but not walk the walk.
He elected to keep his PBDS ministerial seat in the federal cabinet (a seat Kuala Lumpur protects as a check against adventurism by Taib) rather than go for a state seat in the elections of 1987, 1991 and 1995. His role was akin to the special forces officer, parachuting in and out, and leaving the guerilla work to Tajem, James Masing and other PBDS stalwarts.
When PBDS crawled back to rejoin the state BN after the 1995 polls, Masing, who was given a ministerial position, turned from eloquent former exponent of Dayakism to political quietism, seen as ingratiation for opportunistic gain.
Tajem, in genteel exile as Malaysian envoy to New Zealand from 1996 to 2000, was summoned back by disappointed party members to check a Masing attempt at the deputy presidency in the Aug 2000 polls.
Moggie, despite a long personal friendship with Tajem going back to secondary school days in Kuching in the 1950s, disdained the advice of party insiders that he not back Masing against Tajem. Masing was beaten but Moggie, again disregarding insider pleas, re-appointed the losers in the party polls to positions in the supreme council.
Belated, bitter pill
By then Moggie was seen as a leader whose years in Kuala Lumpur (from 1978) had rendered him remote from PBDS and Dayak concerns. This realisation was a belated and bitter pill for the PBDS faithful to swallow. It is possibly the reason many a branch met in recent weeks to call for his immediate evacuation of the president's post.
Now that Mogggie has announced his intention to quit well in advance of the party polls, he is seen as trying to enhance the chances of protege Joseph Salang, member of parliament for Julau, in the long run-up. But Salang has scant support. As for Masing, he appears now to think that a Tajem presidency is unavoidable and that his safety lies in backing the obvious candidate.
The obvious has become evident to Masing. But the obvious has ceased for a long time to be so to Leo Moggie, for whom distance had bred an unreal detachment and fortuitous circumstance has feathered a Brahminic assumption of superiority that flies in the face of the egalitarianism that he better than most knows is a singular feature of the Dayak character.
J TERENCE NETTO is a journalist of nearly 30 years' experience consisting of spells spent in the mainstream papers interspersed with bouts of freelancing. All that time he found that the main attraction in journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.
