North Borneo dispute

The North Borneo dispute, also known as the Sabah dispute, is the territorial dispute between Malaysia and the Philippines over much of the eastern part of the state of Sabah. Sabah was previously known as British North Borneo prior to the formation of the Malaysian federation.

The Philippines, presenting itself as the successor state of the Sultanate of Sulu, retains a "dormant claim" on Eastern Sabah on the basis that the territory was only leased to the British North Borneo Company in 1878, and the sovereignty of the sultanate (and subsequently the republic) over the territory was never relinquished. However, Malaysia considers this dispute a "non-issue", as it interprets the 1878 agreement as that of cession, and it deems that the residents of Sabah (including Eastern Sabah) exercised their right to self-determination when they joined to form the Malaysian federation in 1963.

1878 Agreement

The 1878 agreement was signed on 22 January 1878. It was written in Malay using the Jawi script and contained an ambiguous word (highlighted in bold):

sudah kuredhai pajakkan dengan keredhaan dan kesukaan kita sendiri kepada tuan Gustavus Baron von Overbeck yang tinggal dalam negeri Hong Kong dan kepada Alfred Dent Esquire yang tinggal dalam negeri London... sampai selama-lamanya sekalian perintah dan kuasa yang kita punya yang takluk kepada kita di tanah besar Pulau Borneo dari Sungai Pandasan di sebelah barat sampai sepanjang semua tanah di pantai sebelah timur sejauh Sungai Sibuku di sebelah selatan.

British translation with disputed interpretation in bold:

We hereby [grant and cede/lease] of our own free and sovereign will to Gustavus Baron de Overbeck of Hong Kong and Alfred Dent Esquire of London... for ever and in perpetuity all the rights and powers belonging to us over all the territories and lands being tritutary to us on the mainland of the island of Borneo commencing from the Pandasan River on the north-west coast and extending along the whole east coast as far as the Sibuco River in the south.

The keyword in the agreement is the ambiguous term pajakkan, a Malay term which was translated by Spanish linguists in 1878 and by American anthropologists H. Otley Beyer and Harold Conklin in 1946 as "arrendamiento" or "to lease".