North Kalimantan Communist Party

Malaysia

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North Kalimantan Communist Party was a communist political party based in the Malaysian province of Sarawak in northern Borneo. It was founded on September 19, 1971. Before that, the group had been operating under the name Sarawak Communist Organization. The chairman of the NKCP was Wen Min Chyuan. He had been a leading member of the Sarawak United People's Party 1960-1964.

The membership of NKCP was predominantly ethnically Chinese. The armed wing of NKCP was Pasukan Rakyat Kalimantan Utara (PARAKU).

History

Left-wing and communist cell groups had grown rapidly among Sarawak's urban Iban and Chinese communities since the 1950s and later became the nucleus of the anti-Malaysia North Kalimantan People's Army (PARAKU), which was the armed wing of the party.

The party supported and propagated the unification of all Borneo territories under British control to form an independent leftist North Kalimantan state. This idea was idea originally proposed by A. M. Azahari, leader of the Parti Rakyat Brunei (Brunei People’s Party), who had forged links with Sukarno's nationalist movement, together with Ahmad Zaidi, in Java in the 1940s.^[1]

The North Kalimantan (or Kalimantan Utara) proposal was seen as a post-decolonization alternative by local opposition against the Malaysia plan. Local opposition throughout the Borneo territories was primarily based on economic, political, historical and cultural differences between the Borneo states and Malaya, as well as the refusal to be subjected under peninsular political domination.

In the aftermath of the Brunei Revolt, possibly fearing British reprisals (which never eventuated), many Chinese communists, possibly several thousand, fled Sarawak. Their compatriots remaining in Sarawak were known as Pasukan Gelilya Rakyat Sarawak (Sarawak People’s Guerilla Force). Soebandrio met with a group of their potential leaders in Bogor, and Nasution sent three trainers from Resimen Para Komando Angkatan Darat (RPKAD) Battalion 2 to Nangabadan near the Sarawak border, where there were about 300 trainees. Some 3 months later two lieutenants were sent there.^[2]

The PGRS numbered about 800, based in West Kalimantan at Batu Hitam, with a contingent of 120 from the Indonesian intelligence agency and a small cadre trained in China. The PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) was strongly in evidence and led by an ethnic Arab revolutionary, Sofyan. The PGRS ran some raids into Sarawak but spent more time developing their supporters in Sarawak. The Indonesian military did not approve of the leftist nature of the PGRS and generally avoided them.^[3]

Current status

In 1974 a break-away group led by Bong Kee Chok signed a peace treaty with the state government. The Bong Kee Chok faction was larger than the remaining Wen Min Chyuan faction.

The NKCP gradually declined. In 1989 CIA estimated that the group had around 100 fighters. On October 17, 1990, the NKCP signed a peace-treaty with the state government and dissolved. Several guerrilla fighters were reintegrated into civilian life.

References

1. ^ Pocock p. 129
2. ^ Conboy p. 93-95
3. ^ Conboy p. 156