by a unitary Republic of Indonesia. On 28 September 1950 Ambon was invaded and incorporated into the Republic of Indonesia. Between 1950 and 1962 Sukarno made preparations for an invasion of West New Guinea under the euphemism of a liberation after the Netherlands had made preparations for self-determination for the area of West New Guinea. After the New York Agreement, Dutch New Guinea was handed over to the United Nations in 1962. Sukarno strongly opposed the British decolonisation initiative involving the formation of the Federation of Malaysia that would comprise the Malay Peninsula and North Borneo. That hostile political stance led to the Indonesia–Malaysia Confrontation in the early 1960s that was manifested in an undeclared war with small scale trans-border battles and military infiltration in Borneo. Sukarno accused the new nation of Malaysia of being a British puppet state aimed at establishing neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism in Southeast Asia, and also at containing Indonesian ambition to be the regional hegemonic power. However, it was also suggested that Sukarno's campaign against the formation of Malaysia was actually motivated by a desire to unite the Malay Peninsula and the whole island of Borneo under Indonesian rule and to complete the previously abandoned idea of Greater Indonesia. In British Malaya, the ‘Malays’ were perceived to have established relatively favourable relations with the Japanese during the Japanese occupation had implications after the Japanese surrender. ‘Chinese’ groups which engaged in the anti-Japanese resistance movement took revenge on ‘Malays’ whom they believed had been informers, or had just cooperated with the Japanese. After a few months some stability returned, partly because the British military administration had begun to encourage the sultans to calm their subjects. A second and equally serious threat to ‘Malay’ interests was the formulation by the British government to introduce a political structure, known as the Malayan Union, in which the sultans would no longer hold sovereignty and ‘Malays’ would lose their privileged status over ‘Chinese’ and other citizens. The campaign against the Malayan Union – portrayed as a common threat to ‘Malays’ right across the Peninsula – was also a time when the bangsa Melayu concept was much strengthened. It was not the radical elite – people in the Malay Nationalist Party, for instance, who sought unity with Indonesia in a ‘Melayu Raya’ or ‘Indonesia Raya’ – who gained leadership of this campaign, but rather the more conservative United Malays National Organisation (UMNO),