Mahathir said that Singapore once belonged to the state of Johor and that Malaysia should have reclaimed it, just as it did when it won its claim against Indonesia over the Sipadan and Ligitan islands off Borneo at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2002. Instead, Malaysia gave up a rocky island “the size of a table” to Singapore at the same court in 2008.

The two-time prime minister was referring to Pedra Branca, which was among the several islets to the east of the Singapore Strait that had been the subject of a territorial dispute between Singapore and Malaysia since 1979. The dispute was largely resolved by the ICJ, which ruled that Pedra Branca belonged to Singapore.

“We should demand not just that Pedra Branca, or Pulau Batu Puteh, be given back to us, we should also demand Singapore as well as [Indonesia’s] Riau Islands, as they are Tanah Melayu [Malay land],” Mahathir said in a speech delivered in Malay and recorded by local media.

The statement elicited a prompt backlash from both Singapore and Indonesia.

Jakarta issued a particularly firm response, as the 96-year-old former premier had just visited the capital last week to deliver a rousing speech on the two countries’ close neighborly ties at the NasDem Party’s national congress.

A Foreign Ministry spokesperson dismissed Mahathir’s statement that alleged a Malaysian claim over the Riau Islands, stressing that Jakarta saw neither legal justification nor reasoning behind it.

“In the midst of a global situation riddled with challenges, a senior politician should not be offering baseless statements that could chip away at [our] friendship,” Teuku Faizasyah said in a statement on Wednesday.

“It bears repeating that the Riau Islands is part of the NKRI [Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia], and will remain so until whenever,” the statement continued.

Separately, Riau Islands Governor Ansar Ahmad said it was “very clear” that the region belonged to Indonesia, highlighting that it remained vastly distant from the neighboring country, even at its closest point to Johor in southern Malaysia.

“Indonesia is Indonesia and Malaysia is Malaysia,” Ansar said in response to Mahathir’s remarks.

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Mahathir, who currently represents Langkawi in the Malaysian parliament, made the statement while speaking on Sunday at an event in Selangor organized by the Congress for Malay Survival, a nativist movement in Malaysia.

He also claimed that Tanah Melayu used to stretch from as far as north as southern Thailand and as far south as the Riau Islands, but that most Malays were now confined to the Malay Peninsula. Mahathir added he was worried that the peninsula would soon be overrun by non-Malays buying poor locals out of their land.

In a later statement, Mahathir said he was not actually calling on Kuala Lumpur to reclaim Singapore or the Riau Islands.

“I am trying to point out that we are so concerned over losing a table-size rock [Pedra Blanca] but never about bigger parts of Malaysia when they were taken from us. Losing Pulau Batu Puteh is no big deal,” he said on Thursday as quoted by local news portal Free Malaysia Today (FMT).

He also reportedly blamed the Johor government for denying sovereignty over the outlying island, thus ending any potential dispute over it.

“We should be thankful that Indonesia has not disputed” the ICJ’s ruling on Sipadan and Ligitan, he added. “Really, we are not grateful for our gains,” he told FMT.

Mahathir is no stranger to controversy. In 2020, the former premier tweeted that Muslims had a right “to kill millions of French people” following the Oct. 29 stabbing attack at a Roman Catholic church in Nice.

Three people were killed in the incident, which was widely reported as an Islamic terrorist attack.

Twitter flagged and then deleted the tweet from Mahathir’s account @chedetofficial, saying the post had violated its policy on “the glorification of violence”.

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Mahathir has also made controversial remarks on Jewish people and the LGBTQ community.

Muhammad Febriansyah, a senior social sciences lecturer from Universiti Sains Malaysia (Science University of Malaysia) in Penang, pointed out that Mahathir was speaking at an “exclusive” event with a targeted audience comprising conservative Malays, whom the politician was courting for votes. He also noted that the former premier often sold the narrative of disenfranchised native Malays.

Febriansyah added that Mahathir no longer represented the Malaysian government, and that his political influence had been waning since he stepped down as prime minister in 2020.

“His statements are not taken seriously by the Malaysian government, nor are they a hot topic in Malaysia, as it should be. We also shouldn’t take the matter too seriously,” he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.