History
Left-wing and communist cell groups had grown rapidly among Sarawak's urban Iban and Chinese communities since the 1950s and later became the nucleus of the anti-Malaysia North Kalimantan People's Army (PARAKU), which was the armed wing of the party.
The party supported and propagated the unification of all Borneo territories under British control to form an independent leftist North Kalimantan state. This idea was idea originally proposed by A. M. Azahari, leader of the Parti Rakyat Brunei (Brunei People’s Party), who had forged links with Sukarno's nationalist movement, together with Ahmad Zaidi, in Java in the 1940s.
The North Kalimantan (or Kalimantan Utara) proposal was seen as a post-decolonization alternative by local opposition against the Malaysia plan. Local opposition throughout the Borneo territories was primarily based on economic, political, historical and cultural differences between the Borneo states and Malaya, as well as the refusal to be subjected under peninsular political domination.
In the aftermath of the Brunei Revolt, possibly fearing British reprisals (which never eventuated), many Chinese communists, possibly several thousand, fled Sarawak. Their compatriots remaining in Sarawak were known as Pasukan Gelilya Rakyat Sarawak (Sarawak People’s Guerilla Force). Soebandrio met with a group of their potential leaders in Bogor, and Nasution sent three trainers from Resimen Para Komando Angkatan Darat (RPKAD) Battalion 2 to Nangabadan near the Sarawak border, where there were about 300 trainees. Some 3 months later two lieutenants were sent there.
The PGRS numbered about 800, based in West Kalimantan at Batu Hitam, with a contingent of 120 from the Indonesian intelligence agency and a small cadre trained in China. The PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) was strongly in evidence and led by an ethnic Arab revolutionary, Sofyan. The PGRS ran some raids into Sarawak but spent more time developing their supporters in Sarawak. The Indonesian military did not approve of the leftist nature of the PGRS and generally avoided them.
Read more about this topic: North Kalimantan Communist Party
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