Burning bridges

The current issue about British Overseas Citizens is not difficult to comprehend. I am very surprised why the Bar Council of Malaysia felt that it is the Malaysian Government’s responsibility to take these people back. It is like saying “I can disrespect you and turn my back against you but if I don’t get what I want, you should take me back unreservedly”. Utter nonsense!

The Editorial from The New Straits Time was able to articulate this point precisely.

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EDITORIAL
Burning bridges

2009/10/14

"CITIZENSHIP is not a right but a privilege" -- a much-debated axiom. In seeking the fulcrum of this oscillating argument, perhaps the premise should be parsed more finely: citizenship is a privilege granted as a right on meeting certain criteria. All countries offering citizenship to immigrants require from them at least a pro-forma declaration of loyalty to their adoptive nation and a pledge to abide by its mores and laws. When this transfer of allegiance requires the renunciation of a previous citizenship -- as it would for emigrant Malaysians, because this country does not recognise dual citizenship -- there can be nothing equivocal or ambiguous about the decision. Hence, the plight of the "hundreds" of erstwhile Malaysians now stateless in Britain after "tearing up" their Malaysian passports in the mistaken belief that they were eligible for British citizenship for having been born in Penang or Malacca.

These former Straits Settlements were among the outposts of what used to be the British Empire that fell into a shadow-zone on the signing of the Federation of Malaya Agreement in 1948 and every national surge thereafter towards independence and the formation of Malaysia. Britain took pains to maintain its sops to "imperial guilt" for decades after the end of empire, not least because of the special case of Hong Kong's reversion to China in 1997. There, Hong Kong citizens not recognised by the People's Republic of China's jus sanguinis -- those of Armenian, Turkish or Indian descent, mainly -- were granted "British Overseas National" passports as one of several mechanisms installed by Britain to mop up its historical residue worldwide.

Those Malaysians who thought they too would qualify as "British Overseas Citizens" may have been grievously misled, but it had to have been their decision to seek emigration by this means. They must have known they would be burning their bridges to their ancestral homeland, and now that the British government has slammed the door firmly shut on their hopes, they are in limbo. True, they can re-apply for Malaysian citizenship. After long decades of inertia, the authorities are at last rationalising the roster of Malaysians who have waited all their lives for citizenship or identity papers. But with these now-stateless former Malaysians struggling to survive between the cracks of Britain's society and in the gutters of its economy, there is that question of "loyalty" to a homeland abjured. We sympathise, but they made their bed and will have to sleep in it.