Cobbold Commission
The Cobbold Commission was a commission of inquiry of the British and Malay governments to clarify the question of whether the British colonies of Sarawak and North Borneo wanted to join the planned new state of Malaysia or not. Another task was the preparation of a draft constitution for Malaysia.
The commission was appointed on January 16, 1962, under the appointment of Lord Cobbold , who had previously been Governor of the Bank of England . The following people also worked:
- Wong Pow Nee, Chief Minister of Penang
- Mohammed Ghazali Shafie, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- Anthony Abell, former governor of Sarawak
- David Watherston, former General Secretary of Malaya
The commission finalized its report in July and delivered it on August 1, 1962. The results were:
- The state of Malaysia is to be formed.
- All partners should enter the Union on an equal footing.
When it was drafted, the ambassadors on both sides agreed on most points; However, there were differences in a number of areas - religious affairs, the head of state, the judiciary, public institutions, the federal constitution, finances, education and the regionalization of public services. The greatest controversy, however, was the question of the right time to restructure the administration. While the British proposed a transition period of 3 to 7 years, the Malay ambassadors insisted on a quick change within 12 months.
Some of the particularly controversial points were therefore deleted from the final version of the report and prompted Lord Cobbold to write a series of letters to the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Tunku Abdul Rahman and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Reginald Maudling, in which he wrote the deleted passages explained in detail.
literature
- Full text report of the Cobbold Commission ( Memento from September 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- Michael Leifer: Dictionary of the modern politics of South-East Asia . London: Roztledge 1996. ISBN 0-415-13821-3 . Keyword: "Cobbold Commission".
- Regina Lim: Federal-state relations in Sabah, Malaysia: the Berjaya administration 1976-85 , Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008, ISBN 978-981-230-811-5