An Interview with Dr. Hj. Zaini Ahmad, Kuala Lumpur, 1985 (Research Notes) (Interview‪)‬

I first met Zaini Ahmad in Kuala Lumpur in 1985 when he was in charge of the hostel for Sabah students in Jalan Ampang while working for PERKIM, the Muslim Welfare Association of Malaysia. As executive secretary of Partai Ra'ayat Brunei (PRB), he had been in Manila en route to New York to present a joint memorandum to the United Nations on behalf of the three Borneo territories' major political parties when the Brunei Rebellion erupted on 8 December 1962. The memorandum suggested that in place of the Malaysia proposal there should be a Borneo Federation with Sultan Sir Omar Ali Saifuddin as its Head of State, but all this was overtaken by events. Detained by the British authorities in Hong Kong, where he had sought asylum, he was returned to Brunei in early 1963 and subsequently spent more than ten years at Jerudong prison camp. Efforts by the Commonwealth Relations Office in London, Amnesty International and the United Nations Committee on Human Rights to have him released were made in vain. He was subsequently reported in 1966 to have offered to renounce his Brunei citizenship if he was allowed to go into exile and to have been offered political asylum in Malaysia in 1968, but the Brunei authorities did not respond. On 12 July 1973 (which happened to be Sultan Sir Omar All Saifuddin's birthday), Zaini, Secretary-General Jasin Affandy and six other senior PRB detainees escaped by sea to nearby Limbang in Sarawak in an operation orchestrated by PRB leader A.M. Azahari's brother, Sheikh Saleh Sheikh Mahmud, and his nephew. Reportedly, the "springing" had covert support from the Malaysian government in the person of Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie who was then Minister for Foreign Affairs. At this point the Malaysian government, still irked by the Sultan's refusal to join the new Federation in 1963 and by the treatment of some of its senior civil servants who had been seconded to Brunei, was committed to supporting free elections in Brunei. The freeing of Zaini and the others was probably intended as a warning to the Sultan to be more liberal or bear the consequences.