9. 'Don't view it as political issue'

'Don't view it as political issue' 

Published on: Tuesday, January 15, 2013

http://www.dailyexpress.com.my/news.cfm?NewsID=83967

Kota Kinabalu: ANOTHER noted historian, Prof. Datuk Ramlah Adam, suggested that the issue of illegal immigrants in Sabah must be viewed as a national issue and not political.
She said that if it was viewed as a political issue then it meant they were not sincere in resolving the problem.
She testified that there was a possibility that the Filipinos came to Sabah due to several factors among them similarities in terms of heritage, works, religion and the thin border.
"I believe that this unwritten relationship existed due to religion, relationship and heritage," she said.
In the old days there was no political boundary and the population was free to move around the Malay archipelagoes, hence it could be that Filipinos from Mindanao still believed that Sabah was part and parcel of them, she said.
To the question of who was the original inhabitant of Sabah, she raised the Wave Theory, which suggested that migrations from Southern China came in waves with the first wave to Borneo and Philippines and subsequent waves to other regions.
But a new theory by local experts based on archaeological findings believed that the inhabitants are natives who had built their own civilisation since the Stone Age with evidence such as in Niah Caves and other locations in Sabah.