Sarawak’s State-Federal Relationship and Project Monitoring Assistant Minister Sharifah Hasidah Sayeed Aman Ghazali led a team to London to scour for documents related to the formation of Malaysia. — Picture by Sulok Tawie

KUCHING, Aug 9 — The legal team despatched to London has unearthed new and substantive documents written by the UK government to the United Nations concerning Sarawak and the formation of Malaysia, Chief Minister Datuk Amar Abang Johari Openg announced today.

He said some of the documents have never been seen before, adding that the legal team will brief him further about their findings later today.

“[The documents] seem to be very good. They must be so because they must be substantive,” he told reporters here after opening an International Conference on Language Studies organised by Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.

Abang Johari said the findings were important because they were communications between the UK government and the UN prior to the formation of Malaysia in 1963.

“No, we have never seen these documents before,” he said, adding that there were so many things which the Sarawak government had no access to previously.

Abang Johari, whose father Tun Abang Openg was one of the signatories to the Malaysia Agreement from Sarawak, said the state government needed to have substantial evidence in its pursuit to reclaim its rights from Putrajaya.

“When we negotiate, we don’t shoot wildly,” he said.

The London trip was undertaken to retrieve documents from the British National Archives and led by the State Law, State-Federal Relationship and Project Monitoring Assistant Minister Sharifah Hasidah Sayeed Aman Ghazali.

The Sarawak research legal team included former state attorney-general Datuk Fong Joo Chung and State Assembly Deputy Speaker Datuk Gerawat Gala.

They spent a week in London to scour for documents related to the formation of Malaysia with the signing of the Malaysia Agreement by Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore.

Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965.