In Konfrontasi’s Wake: Indigenous Subjects as Illegal Immigrants in Malaysian Borneo

While indigenous communities in upland central Borneo have had long histories of migration, state representatives started viewing their mobility with suspicion from the late 1950s onwards. How and why did Orang Ulu—recognized as “natives of Sarawak” by the Constitution of Malaysia—get disproportionately cast as illegal immigrants and had their claims to Malaysian citizenship denied? This paper proposes that anticommunism was central to bureaucrats’ preoccupation with “indigenous illegal immigrants.” In particular, Konfrontasi (1963–1966), Indonesia’s undeclared war against Malaysia on the eve of its formation, compelled the militarization of a border that was notoriously difficult to police. In the eyes of the state, communities that straddled this border were at best out of place, and at worst threats to national security. While the scholarship on the Cold War in Maritime Southeast Asia has focused on how anticommunism shaped social life in diasporic communities like the overseas Chinese, this paper argues that anticommunism had more broad-based effects that cut across the settler/indigenous binary that canonically structures histories of race and racialization. Combining oral history with archival research, it also demonstrates how statelessness in Malaysian Borneo today sheds light on the long shadow that Konfrontasi has cast.