DAP's Arrogance Typical of Peninsular Parties - Jeffrey

KOTA KINABALU: The Democractic Action Party (DAP) is beginning to show its true color by bullying Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP), a local Sabah party, the United Borneo Front (UBF) said, Its president, Datuk Dr Jeffrey Kitingan, expressed his disappointmentth that DAP advisor Lim Kit Siang had started on a wrong footing with its arrogant attitude by pitting local parties to each other.

"Judging from this new development among the opposition parties, we can see clearly that there is not much difference between DAP and Umno," he said.

Definitely they are not thinking of the Borneo agenda, I expected DAP to be more understanding regarding our dream as Sabahans, but obviously DAP is too much engrossed with trying to get the Sabahans' votes to the point that it feels it can come to Sabah and push us around although we are all in the opposition," he said in a statement yesterday.

Jeffrey called on Sabahans to reject this attitude and remind themselves that only local parties can best serve their interests. "Let's do away with relying on Peninsular parties to defend our rights," he added.

"The people of Sabah and Sarawak have been tolerating this problem for 47 years now, and have been hoping that the federal leaders would change their attitude but they never seem to change.

"We can see that the Peninsular leaders and parties are in Sabah to serve their own Peninsular agendas, pushing their own political games at the expense of Sabahans," he stressed.

"And the worst thing is that the Pakatan Rakyat component parties are obviously trying to outdo each other in Sabah and Sarawak. Recently DAP had bullied SNAP in Sarawak and now it is bullying SAPP in Sabah."

He said the best thing for Sabahans and Sarawakians to do now under this circumstances is to take charge of our own future rather than relying on Peninsular parties.

"We need to form the Third Force, the coalition of local parties outside the BN and the PR," he said.

"This is the best approach because this will enable us to pursue our own agenda. We must also beware of the current trend in which BN is bent on moving towards extremism to perpetuate its hold on power, at all cost.

Even the PR is using extreme measures to fight the BN, and both are not too concerned about what all this will do to the country."

Jeffrey called upon the leaders in Sabah and Sarawak to be very careful with what they do.

"They may make the grave mistake of destroying the country instead of steering it to progress and prosperity.

"We need to formulate better policies and draw up more effective programmes. Our most important objective here is to save Sabah because we can clearly see that Sabah is going fast down the drain."

On the Home Ministry's move to investigate former ISA detainee Datuk Mohd Akjan Ali Muhammad's citizenship, Jeffrey applauded it but the Minister of Home Affairs must do a comprehensive solution by making a sweeping clean up of the illegal immigrants and heal the state from the effects of the Project IC.

Recently, SAPP president Datuk Yong Teck Lee claimed that he was publicly ridiculed by Lim.

Yong said Lim ridiculed him during the DAP harvest festival celebration few days ago. SAPP was invited to the gathering by Sabah DAP chief Jimmy Wong.

Yong claimed that Lim had described SAPP as unrealistic and gave the party an ultimatum to join opposition coalition because it is the only alliance that can beat BN.