Hungry for more, Part 3

April 24, 2014

Links to Parts 1 and 2 can be found in the main article.

Dateline 2014-03-19, Energy Global:

Sabah crisis sharpens focus on regional territorial disputes over oil and gas reserves

Following last year’s invasion of Malaysia’s Sabah state by a Filipino militia group, another quiet corner of the world risks being sucked into renewed territorial and ethnic disputes fuelled by a growing regional race for oil and gas reserves.

The Malaysian government responded by ordering its military to bomb the group of more than 200 members of the self-proclaimed ‘Royal Army of the Sulu Sultanate’ who briefly holed up in a village near the port of Lahad Datu. At least 70 people, including nine Malaysian security personnel, were killed in the conflict to expel the group linked to the descendants of a former royal family in southern Philippines with claims over Sabah state.

The conflict has the potential to grow as it involves groups with long-standing territorial claims, separatist ambitions and ethnic grievances now enmeshed with the US-led global war on terror, Sabah’s increasing importance as an oil and gas producer and the area’s 600 km proximity to the disputed hydrocarbon-rich Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

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King of the past reaching for Malaysia oil reserves

March 28, 2013

Yeah, baby. Someone else said it, not me. Dateline 2013-03-19, from RT (what the heck is RT?)

Malaysia, boasting the third-largest oil reserves in the Asia-Pacific region, finds itself on the verge of a military fight over its richest region.

Malaysia has been in the midst of an ongoing security crisis since early February, when a group of 235 rag-tag militiamen from the neighboring southern Philippines slipped into the eastern state of Sabah and began occupying several villages. While engaging police in multiple firefights, the insurgents beheaded and mutilated several captured Malaysian security personnel, prompting Malaysian forces to deploy fighter jets in an unprecedented air assault over the area in an operation to flush out the intruders. The gunmen call themselves the “Royal Army of the Sulu Sultanate,” representing the heirs of a long-defunct kingdom which once controlled the territory up until the late nineteenth century. The so-called Sultan of Sulu, Jamalul Kiram III, who is believed to be directing the militant incursion from Manila, insists that Sabah is rightfully part of his kingdom and has vowed not budge on his claims even if his personnel are killed in the standoff.

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