FEB 5 — In “Farewell Ramadan, truly a madrasah” I shared at length the explanation by former Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Islamic Religious Affairs) and former Mufti of the Federal Territories Dr Zulkifli Mohamad Al-Bakri of the concept of tabayyun.

I referred to the explanation in light of media reports of the scuffle along Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman (TAR) following an alleged dispute between Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) enforcement officers and unlicensed street vendors.

Two viral videos circulating on social media showed a purported scuffle between uniformed DBKL officers and a group of traders.

Condemnations against the DBKL officer have come in thick and thin without verification or validation of the incident. There was even a call for the Minister concerned and the Mayor of Kuala Lumpur to resign and be posted elsewhere respectively.

DBKL eventually explained the alleged scuffle resulted from unlicensed vendors ignoring orders for them to leave a pedestrian walkway at Jalan TAR.

DBKL said one trader — the balloon seller — had acted aggressively towards its enforcement officer, and that the situation was later defused with no one reported being injured.

The lesson from the incident is simple: verify and validate before condemning.

If we had learned such a lesson, we could have verified and validated whether the country had ceded 5,207 hectares of land to Indonesia.

The allegation that Malaysia gave away 5,207ha of land to Jakarta first appeared on Tempo, an Indonesian-based media that claimed Malaysia agreed to cede the hectares of land in return for three villages — Kampung Kabulangalor, Kampung Lepaga, and Kampung Tetagas — in Pulau Sebatik, along the Sabah-Kalimantan border.

The Tempo report in English can be read here.

The Tempo report may be compared with a report in the Indonesian language which can be read here.

According to the above report, the “loss” of the villages to Malaysia is untrue. Negotiations over the Malaysia-Indonesia land border remain ongoing.

Pulau Sebatik or Sebatik Island is a disputed territory between Indonesia and Malaysia. The island was divided into two parts by their respective colonial masters – that is, the Dutch and the British – based on the 1891 Boundary Convention and the 1915 Boundary Agreement.

The 1915 Agreement referred to the Dutch and the British placing 18 boundary pillars between June 8, 1912, and January 30, 1913.

In 1983, a joint survey with Indonesia and Malaysia revealed that most of the 18 boundary pillars erected by the two colonial powers were incorrect.

Since then, the Sebatik Island boundary dispute has never been resolved. This despite a 2018 re-demarcation agreement which was reached between the two neighbours leading to a 2019 memorandum of understanding (MOU) on the demarcation and survey of the international boundary between the two countries.

The results of the re-demarcation have not been agreed upon. Any agreement will be complicated in terms of international law, as it will have to be ratified by both Indonesia and Malaysia.

Territorial clarity is important in international law. The consequences of the lack of it include legal and jurisdictional ambiguity, difficulties in law enforcement, and violation of sovereignty, such as illegal trespassing, drug smuggling, human smuggling, and conflict over natural resources management. (See Amin Nurdin et al, “Examining the Negotiation Model of the Disputed Boundary Between Indonesia and Malaysia on Sebatik Island,” Indonesian Journal of International Law: Vol. 21: No. 2, Article 7)

I am able to share all of the above for the simple reason that they are readily available on the internet – at the click of the mouse.

To verify and validate, one needs to read and not be “lazy” – to borrow the word from Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in his speech at the Temu Anwar@TAR UMT dialogue with students at Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology (TAR UMT).