KOTA KINABALU: Sabah Progressive Party president Yong Teck Lee is urging the authorities to reopen investigations into the June 6, 1976 air crash which killed chief minister Fuad Stephens and the core of his cabinet so that all doubts about the true causes of the crash are removed.
He added that the new revelation by senior Umno leader Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah here last Friday that the Usno-led state government under the late Mustapha Harun had refused to sign the petroleum agreement in 1975 has revived the issue of Malaysian federalism and the crackdown which followed on uncooperative state governments.
"Prior to Tengku Razaleigh’s revelation, the people in Sabah had relied on word of mouth and other indirect sources (for the truth about the puzzling handover of Sabah's oil wealth to the federal government in 1976)," said Yong, which included a 1976 book 'The Politics of Federalism, Syed Kechik in East Malaysia' that revealed the intrusion of the federal government into state politics.
The late Syed Kechik had described Tengku Razaleigh in the book as the point-man in engineering and funding the defeat of the Usno alliance by Parti Berjaya in 1976.
Syed Kechik said that Mustapha “felt that future generations of Sabahans might later criticise his surrender of the state’s wealth to the federal government, and he wanted the clause 'in perpetuity' be removed from the petroleum agreement”.
"Now that this fact has been corroborated by a surviving, credible leader (Tengku Razaleigh), Sabahans will gain a better understanding of the political and economic relationship between Sabah and the federal government," said Yong.
He added that although the then alliance government consisting of Usno, ex-Upko leaders and the Sabah Chinese Association (SCA) had been autocratic and had its weaknesses and wrongs for several years, it was only when the alliance state government refused to sign the petroleum agreement with Petronas that the federal government acted to change the state government.
"As we know, the majority of Sabahans supported Parti Berjaya at the time but for reasons other than surrendering our oil to KL,” he added.
Politics of divide and rule
Within two months after the fall of the state government and days after the June 6 air crash that killed the new Berjaya Chief Minister Fuad and other top leaders, Syed Kechik’s book asserted: “The federal government had what it really wanted: the signed Petronas agreement that would give Kuala Lumpur 95 percent of the profits from Sabah oil; and Mustapha’s removal from the levers of autonomous powers”.
"The collective wisdom that we Malaysians in Sabah must learn out of this chapter in Sabah’s history is to steadfastly reject the politics of divide and rule by Putrajaya," Yong said.
Yong (photo) said Tengku Razaleigh’s first hand account last Friday of how his life had been saved when he left the ill-fated aircraft at the very last moment when he was invited by former chief minister Harris Salleh to board another aircraft reopens speculation about the crash."How we remember the past shapes how we look at today’s Sabah. It is for this reason that Sapp repeats our call for the lifting of the ban on the book 'Golden Son of the Kadazan' about a prominent victim in the crash Peter Mojuntin."
The others who perished in the crash were state ministers Salleh Sulong, Chong Thien Vun and assistant minister Darius Binion.
Others killed were the then Secretary of State for the Ministry of Finance of Sabah Wahid Peter Andau, Director of Economic Planning Unit of Sabah Syed Hussein Wafa, Isak Atan (private secretary to Tengku Razaleigh), corporal Said Mohammad (bodyguard to Fuad Stephens), captain Gandhi Nathan (the pilot of the aircraft), leaving only Fuad's son Johari alive.
Harris, the then deputy chief minister of Sabah had asked Tengku Razaleigh, the then Chief Minister of Sarawak Rahman Yaacob and a senior Pahang official to disembark from the ill-fated plane and to fly with him on another Nomad aircraft to Pulau Banggi to see a cattle farming project.
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