Wasit to Paradise

His Highness Padukka Mahasari Manaluna Hadji Mohammad Jamalul Kiram II, Sultan of Sulu, gave up the ghost last June. Only independent sovereign reigning under the U. S. flag for some years, he had legally surrendered his sovereignty in recognition of his place as head of the Moslem Church in the Philippines. He had a pension from the Philippine Government, a $5,000 annual tribute in the form of land rent from the British North Borneo Company and he was in fact the leader of 500,000 warlike Moros who have always despised their neighbors, the Filipinos, have never been licked by any nation except the U. S.

The old Sultan had many wives but no son. His adopted daughter, dumpy, 40-year-old Princess Dayang Dayang Piandao tried to seize the throne for herself or her husband (TIME, June 29). As a suffraget and a good friend of matronly Aurora Aragon Quezon, wife of the Commonwealth President she had the support of the Philippine Government which wants to bring the Moros under its thumb.

The old Sultan's grand vizier and the majority of the chiefs or datus of Sululand wanted no truck with a female ruler or the strutting little Filipinos. A month after the Sultan's death, they met and elected his brother Rajah Muda Mawalil Wasit Kiram to the throne. But that did not settle the matter. The Philippine Government refused to recognize him, thereby saving itself a pension. The North Borneo Company withheld its land rent until the succession should be clarified. A Filipino judge appointed Dayang Dayang administrator of the dead Sultan's estate. Afraid of being poisoned or having his throat cut to make way for Dayang Dayang, Sultan Wasit retired to his ramshackle palace at Maimbung behind a heavy guard. It was well he did so for several armed thugs broke in one night to get him.

Last week trouble was coming to a head. The will of the late Sultan was at last about to be probated. Sultan Wasit's loyal followers were sure that the Filipinos would try to ditch him to make the Moros, who are practically excluded from representation in the Commonwealth Government, into a completely subject people. In recognition that open hostilities were at hand, the Government constabulary in the Sulu Islands was reinforced and for the first time Moros were forbidden to wear their traditional arms, krises, barongs, kampilans. Many Moro datus, maharajahs, panglimas and imams retired to their secret strongholds to prepare for the struggle.

Fortnight ago Dayang Dayang returned from a visit to Manila and Sultan Wasit went to see her. Then he went home and a few days later suddenly, like his brother before him, was called to Paradise. A "doctor" said he died of heart disease, but speculation was rife as to the cause of his opportune death. Opportune it was for Princess Dayang Dayang because Sultan Wasit, like Edward VIII, had not yet been crowned, and not having been crowned, his son, Ismale, had neither the formal title of crown prince nor a clear right of succession. Thus Dayang Dayang had another chance at the throne.

Peace in the Archipelago hung in the balance. Sultan Wasit was popular with the great majority of his people. If they once come to believe that Dayang Dayang or her Filipino friends conspired to poison him, Moros from Borneo, Celebes and Java can be expected to come to the aid of their brothers in the Sulu Archipelago. Then the day of the Moros' inevitable revolt against the masters they despise will be at hand, a struggle which the Moros, outnumbered and unarmed, cannot win, but in which they as born fighting men will doubtless take heavy toll of cocky Christian Filipinos.

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