MP SPEAKS I express my grave concern with the plans by Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi to issue birth certificates to stateless children in Sabah so as to give them education opportunity – allegedly based on “humane” grounds.

While it is admitted that Malaysia is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child and must be humane in considering giving education opportunity to all stateless children, this must be done with a specific guideline.

The government is urged to be very careful with this proposal, as issuing the birth certificate to these stateless children for the purpose of education must be very specific only for education purposes and not as a means for citizenship or a covert method to eventually grant them citizenship.

We have seen how disastrous it has been for Sabah, up to today, when under “humane” reasons tens of thousands of refugees from the Philippine Crisis  of the 70s were issued with the IMM13 – and which the government admitted sometime in 2011 that 81,000 IMM13 have been issued.

We cannot deny the feelings and suspicions of many genuine Sabahans on how these IMM13 have been abused and re-abused by many immigrants to eventually obtain citizenship, besides the much abhorred Project IC in Sabah.

With this new proposal to issue birth certificates to stateless children, I cannot help but to express the fear and concern of the genuine people of Sabah that another round of demographic engineering will take place.

So, this government must guarantee to the people of Sabah that those given the proposed ‘birth certificates’ can never be citizens of Sabah and that the abuse we have seen with IMM13 will never happen again.

RCI on illegal immigrants remains a secret

It is already shocking enough that the completed Royal Commission of Inquiry on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah has not been publicsed to the public up to date despite the same having had been handed over to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong in May 2014 and the assurance that the government will table the RCI Report in Parliament during the current Parliament session.

I have also been reliably informed that among the many problems identified in the Royal Commission of Inquiry is that these illegal immigrants with identification cards and who have been here without any control now far outnumbered the genuine Sabahans.

If this is true, this is indeed a serious security threat and we have even been informed publicly by the East Sabah Security Command (Esscom) that there are those so-called citizens of Sabah, who have abetted and are working together with the foreign intruders.

Yet, despite all this, we are now discussing the government’s proposal to grant birth certificates for education purposes to children of illegal immigrants.

In the same context, I ask, is it not inhumane to deprive the genuine Sabahans of the truth and to have allowed the demographic engineering all these years?

Thousands of Sabahans are denied BCs

I also put it to the government that there are thousands of genuine Sabahans, especially those from the interior, who have been deprived of proper birth certificate and education because the government never reached out to these genuine Sabahans in the interior.

It was of course a relief to us all to know that through the initiative of Justice Richard Malanjun ( left ) and his team of judges and court officers, many of these genuine and legitimate Sabahans were reached out for birth certificate processing via the Mobile Court.

It is for these reasons that I seek the assurance from the government that the same methodology, via the Sabah judicial officers ,should be utilised if the government’s plan to issue birth certificate takes off.

And, at the same time, this government should immediately seek a diplomatic solution with the country of origin of the biological parent of these stateless children, so that these countries will eventually absorb back these immigrants.

We can see everywhere in Sabah today that there are schools run by foreign missions, especially the Indonesian run schools, which are providing education to the children of illegal immigrants.

That seems to indicate that these countries of origin have acknowledged these people are their citizens and that should be the basis for the Malaysian government to put a firm commitment that these countries repatriate back their citizens, especially these stateless children.

In summary, I warn the government not to rush into this without using conscience and without first considering the security aspects of such a programme to grant birth certificates loosely while we in Sabah are now facing a sheer number of new citizens and illegal immigrants flooding in Sabah!

Make a clear guideline and policy clearly that this ‘birth certificate’ that this government is about to launch will never be a path to citizenship.

God save Sabah.

DARELL LEIKING is Penampang MP and PKR vice-president.