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Vol. 48 No. 2 (2020)

Divided islands

Borneo: A Difficult Past, Tangled Identities: The Indonesian-Malayan Conflict between 1963 and 1966

DOI: https://doi.org/10.35757/STP.2020.48.2.11
Submitted: September 29, 2020
Published: September 25, 2020

Abstract

Borneo, the largest of the Sunda Islands, was already divided during the colonial period. Its southern part belonged to the Dutch East Indies. To the north, there were the territories of North Kalimantan, part of the British Federation of Malaya. The President of the Republic of Indonesia, Ahmed Sukarno, supported anti-colonial movements around the world. Moreover, in 1962, Indonesia launched a military operation that attached West Irian, a Dutch overseas territory in the eastern tip of New Guinea. This operation gained international support.
When Great Britain revised its Far East policy in the late 1950s, London gave independence to the Federation of Malaya, known as Malaysia since that time. From then on, the country was part of the Commonwealth of Nations. President Sukarno, remembering the success of the 1962 operation, considered newly established Malaysia to be only a new incarnation of English colonial politics. In April 1963, Jakarta began invading northern Borneo to annex these lands to Indonesia. The invasion met with strong resistance from the Commonwealth of Nations. After three years of struggle, the territorial status quo from before the conflict was re-established. The invasion and its high costs shook President Sukarno’s position. As a result, he was overthrown by General Suharto and the previously pursued policy of supporting anti-colonialism ended, although Indonesia remained a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, one of whose spiritual fathers was Ahmed Sukarno.

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