16 OCTOBER 1964, Page 15

THE WAR THAT CANNOT BE WON

SIR,—Mr. Hashim B. Ambia in hi S letter on 'The War That Cannot Be Won' (in North Borneo) says he is surprised that there is much speculation about the UN 'referendum' held in Sabah and Sarawak. The Philippine and Indonesian argument here is that the whole affair was a 'guided tour' organised by the British local authorities.

The UN team were forced to depend only on these authorities for the machinery of testing people's opinion, and in this way they were unable to fully implement the Manila agreements, to which Malaya was a co-signatory. Neither could the Malayan Government fulfil its pledge given in those agree- ments, which called for the ascertainment of the wishes of the North Borneans within the context of UN General Assembly Resolution 1541, which contained a principle that integration should be the result of the freely expressed wishes of the people

in the territorY, and that in doing this they should act with full knowledge of the change in their status, their wishes having been expressed through informed and democratic processes.

The UN team could not be expected to accom- plish this huge task within ten days, which is the actual time they took. What they did was limited to handling four questions relating specifically to the recent North Borneo elections, covering: 1. Whether Malaysia was a major issue, if not the main issue, in the elections; 2. Whether electoral registers were properly com- Piled; 3. Whether the elections were free and there was no coercion; 4. And whether the votes were properly polled and counted.

Even on these questions, the team's findings were based on information provided by relatively few spokesmen—selected or otherwise prepared by the local authorities—and thus the outcome could not but be dubious. The UN Secretary-General, U Thant, could not disavow but had to sanction the final findings of the UN team he had set up, though he himself added some remarks with a view to reducing the shortcomings and weaknesses of the assessment.

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