Sebatik Island
Sebatik Island is an island off the eastern coast of Borneo, split between Indonesia and Malaysia. It is one of the 92 officially listed outlying islands of Indonesia.
Geography
Sebatik has an area of approximately. The minimum distance between Sebatik Island and Borneo is about.Sebatik Island lies between Cowie Bay to the north and Sibuku Bay to the south. The town of Tawau, Sabah, is just to the north. The island is bisected at roughly 4° 10' north by the Indonesia–Malaysia border – the northern part belongs to Sabah, Malaysia while the southern part belongs to North Kalimantan, Indonesia.
The Malaysia side of Sebatik has a population of approximately 25,000; there were 47,571 people in Indonesian side of Sebatik as of the 2020 Census.
History
The demarcated international border between Malaysia and Indonesia stops at the eastern edge of Sebatik Island, so that the ownership of Unarang Rock and the maritime area located to the east of Sebatik is unclear. This is one of the reasons why the Ambalat region waters and crude oil deposits east of Sebatik Island have been the centre of an active maritime dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia since March 2005. The ambiguity of the border at the eastern edge also caused a dispute over two nearby islands of Sipadan and Ligitan, both south of 4° 10' N but administered by Malaysia. The territorial dispute was resolved by the International Court of Justice in 2002 which awarded the islands to Malaysia. As of 2026, there are still outstanding border issues on Sebatik Island that remained unresolved.While there are border guards on the island, there is no immigration office, no customs house, no barbed-wire fence and no walls demarcating the border. Instead, the only evidence of a border are the concrete piles buried every kilometre from east to west.
When the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation happened between 1963 and 1966, the island was heavily contested between Indonesian troops, and Malaysian and her Commonwealth allies. Naval ships, such as HMS Manxman, were sent to take part in the defence of Malaysian territories and waters.
The North Borneo Timbers company operated a logging concession on the island until the 1980s and its mostly expatriate employees lived in a self-contained community in Wallace Bay. Sebatik Malaysia is within the administrative division of Tawau. For electoral purposes, Sebatik falls within the parliamentary constituency of Kalabakan and the state assembly district of Sebatik.
Sitangkai Indonesia is approximately to Sitangkai, Tawi-Tawi, Philippines, the second-closest point between the two countries after the Miangas island in North Sulawesi.