What we want now

Letters

by
Steven

Nowadays, by just reading the newspaper and watching TV news, mostly it was related to political news. Well, I admit that most of the Malaysian are kinda shock, surprised or attracted to the past election news. The most important thing is how to improve the quality of life of Malaysians. I really don’t see how these issues were handled carefully in the past. I believe that some people would agree with me. We always know how to compare with others countries, but correct me if I am wrong that the comparison made was always with poorer performance countries. I don’t really understand this. Why we don’t want to improve our nation by comparing to the developing countries? We had already achieved independence by 50 years. Please do not always feel satisfied with what we have achieved nowadays because there is still much room to improve.

Malaysia is a blessed country with many resource like rubber, tin, petroleum, fishes and others. Why we are not utilizing them and make benefits of them for the good of society. Sometimes, I would think that why so many youngsters leave Malaysia and go abroad to work. Of course, the most attractive factor is money, living environment and safety. I still remember that when I was small, our money currency was almost equivalent with Singaporean. But looking at it now, we are much much lower than Singaporean, Euro, Australian and others major countries currency. Please don’t tell us that we are okay nowadays by looking at Malaysia Ringgit vs US Dollar. It was just USD is weak and not Malaysia Ringgit strong. Please awake and do something now before it is too late. I am not financial expert who has the right comment on our Malaysia Ringgit performance. At least I notice that our Ringgit is much depreciated. Please learn it from other countries. I worked in US  before, the costs of buying goods like a comb of bananas doesn’t change much from time to time, it was ~USD1 in 2002 and also in 2007. But for us, everything is up. I can’t deny that there is an inflation factor counted in Malaysia’s economy. We would think that the inflation number reported is not right, every year is also low. Does the inflation number reported is just solely based on the controlled goods? Overall, our Ringgit and Sen is weak?

Knowing that the Malaysian money weakness is one thing, but please don’t ever spend unnecessary money on some projects like sending a guy to the space. This maybe brings some fame to the country, I admit it. However, the money spent is just on one person individually only. It will be wiser to spend the money on the society, like improving the city infrastructure, nation’s traffic, cleanliness and crime issues. I know that we want to be famous and it is using a lot of our money. Please don’t come and tell us that this would lead to invention of science in medical line. If this program is sponsered, it will be great. What we want is everyone happy and not individual. Please think of the basic necessity first. A person will have good quality of life no matter he or she is rich or poor if the city is developed, clean, good and no crime. Talking about the cleanliness, I know that this is hard to deal. We have to change our attitude as well but things will

 improve if there is more litter bins prepared.

Crime is serious issue also. Is there anyway we can handle this more wisely? Having more policemen is not enough. We should either review it in different manner. Like maybe setting up intelligent computer eye at the lamp posts or setting up radar scan for detecting suspicious movements. I don’t deny that some crimes in Malaysia is attributed by the imported workers. Maybe it is time for the government to review the law and impose heavier penalties for them.

If all this things is not going to change, I would think that people would just surrender it after fighting for the changes through election. They would probably leave Malaysia and go to other countries for better life and living. And then the government would complain of running short of special talents, and no investors want to come to invest.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 30 March 2008, 8:57 am and is filed under
Letters
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Who runs the Ministry of Health?

Letters

by
EJB

I refer to the newspaper report “Doctors to be disallowed from dispensing Medicine” NST 29th March where the DG of Health has apparently agreed to a pilot proposal where doctors seeing patients at their clinics only prescribe and patients will then have to locate a pharmacy where they will have to purchase their medications separately. Don’t ask when these negotiations started and who were at the discussions who finally agreed to this proposal.  In all likelihood doctors’ representatives were either kept away or presumably threatened with the OSA (Official Secrets Act)

It seems the ruling party has learnt nothing from the last elections. More pertinently one must ask. Is this a dying priority for the Ministry of Health now especially when it reported only these last 48 hours about the lethal outcomes of the dengue scourge which it has repeatedly shown it is unable to control and the rising incidence of resurgent tuberculosis? We will not even discuss about waiting time for patients who queue up to see doctors at 4 am in the morning or of parents begging in the media for financial help to save their sick children.

The DG of Health, one would have thought, would have his hands full trying to pool his resources without digging further holes he cannot cover. But there you are. He appears to have caved in to the pharmacy lobby. This debate is not new. It is ancient in terms of healthcare provisions in Malaysia. The basic contention. Why should General Practitioners or other doctors prescribe when there are pharmacists around? Answer, for the convenience of the patient especially in the rural areas or in locations where pharmaceutical chains open ten stores to show a 30 million ringgit turnover so that they can get into the second board while employing only 5 pharmacists to cut costs. These pharmacists will only be in during shift hours and usually not available after 9pm where the rigors of a 24 hour practice will call upon the dedication and commitment of a medical doctor where treatment and prescription come hand in hand.

Was this proposal also the result of a pow wow discussed quietly and clandestinely in a remote backroom of the Ministry? Or could the flashing of this sudden pilot proposal headlined in the NST’s frontpages an attempt to improve Merican’s rather sagging image recently. However, if Merican and co have proposed this truly in the belief that it is for the benefit of patients, then they cannot even possibly fathom the inconvenience they will now inflict on patients who will have to hop off two different locations for medical treatment especially if they are a distance apart.

It appears that Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi is essentially saying it’s business as usual and may have indeed missed a point what the electorate was trying to point out to him in the last elections.  Cost of living has boomeranged out of control for much of the middle and lower income groups in this country. The idea is to reduce costs and keep them down if you can, not increase it. This maneuver by pharmacists with the tacit approval of the DG of Health doesn’t point in that direction. This pilot project appears to be directed to enhance or further secure the business interests of pharmacists rather then a genuine calling to help patients.  The Malaysian Pharmaceutical Society president John Chang Chiew Pheng’s statement that this move will not necessarily cost patients more is decidedly less then assuring. Hopefully the new Health Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, doesn’t have a hand in this considering the fact that he denied the statement later the same evening. If he has, then clearly lessons of the past have not been learnt.

The Ministry and Malaysian healthcare in general face some serious problems, especially the lack of doctors, accessibility to specialists, waiting time and rising incidences of some serious illnesses both infective and degenerative. The Minister and his DG with their limited resources must focus on this rather then pander to businesses such as the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries. It was bad enough during Chua Soi Lek’s time when for some mysterious reasons best known to him; he appeared focused on traditional medicine when the nation was having problems even running its conventional medical services properly. Shouldn’t the MOH be trying to make services more convenient for patients instead of fragmenting them and making patients run all over the place for consultations, tests and now prescriptions? Who runs this Ministry anyway?

EJB

                This entry was posted on Monday, 31 March 2008, 8:42 am and is filed under
Letters
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


International Muslim Media has to look at the Bigger Picture

By
Farish A. Noor

As someone who studies the phenomenon of political Islam, I have, understandably, been reading much of the international Muslim press over the past few years. In particular I have focused on the International Islamist media- and by this I am referring to the newspapers, websites, journals and magazines produced by the many Islamist organisations, NGOs, political parties and social movements all over the world.

One factor that comes to mind immediately is how parochial and narrow the worldview of much of the international Islamist media has become. More often than not the reportage of world affairs, particularly by Islamist media in the non-Arab world, is focused more on the goings-on in Muslim societies and Arab-Muslim societies in particular. Reading through the material produced by the Islamist media in Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia for instance one learns more about the developments in Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, the Gulf states and Iran than anywhere else.

This does not mean to imply that the developments in these countries are not important, or that they are of no relevance to the development of Islamist movements in Asia or Africa or even Europe. But one does wonder how Islamists in Asia view the rest of the planet, and whether they realise that so much else is going on beyond the narrow frontiers of the Muslim world.

More troubling is that the view of the West is often shaped by the Islamist lens that they wear, and here again the ethnocentric and religio-centric biases of the Islamist press stands out in bold relief. We are all well acquainted by now with the controversy over the recently-released film Fitna by the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. But how many Islamist papers reported the fact that during the protests against the recent Gulf War more than half a million Berliners came out into the streets of Berlin to protest against the invasion of Iraq? And what about the other civil-society led demonstrations organised in London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Barcelona?

But perhaps the most troublesome thing about the Islamist media today is the impression it gives of being primarily and solely concerned with the affairs of the Muslim world alone; to the point where the overwhelming majority of the rest of the human race remains neglected and their stories remain untold. Yet if we were to look at the developments in the world since 11 September 2001 it should be clear to us all by now that many of the major geo-political shifts we have seen reflect and mirror many of the developments that we also see in the Muslim world.

Two examples stand out:

The first has to do with the latest scramble to re-colonise Africa in no uncertain terms. If we were to cast our minds back to the late 1990s, some of us may recall that it was even trendy in some Western technocratic circles to mumble the mantra of ‘saving Africa from itself’. Since the publication of Basil Davidson’s ‘The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-state’ (1993) there was much spurious talk of how post-colonial Africa was a disaster zone and that the nation-state model was not applicable there. The subtext of this constant attack on the performance of the nation-states of Africa (which did not come from Davidson, though) was that Africans were not able to govern themselves and were not culturally or essentially adapted to modern modes of governance. The other subtext was that if Africans could not govern themselves then perhaps the time has come for a new mode of colonialism that would rescue Africa (and by extension Africans) from themselves.

Today what we see is the rush to gather and monopolise the oil and gas fields of Africa in the most blatant manner. Already American, European and Chinese companies are all over the continent, cutting deals with corrupt African despots in order to secure the gas and oil resources of countries like Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Yet why isn’t any of this being reported in the Islamist press? Surely the parallels with the developments in many Muslim countries, that are likewise hostage to the oil industry, are clear? Or is it because many Islamist intellectuals and journalists still think that Africans are not important to deserve such reporting because many parts of Africa (like Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania) are not Muslim?

Another striking example that comes to mind is the politics of Central and Latin America, that has gone unrecorded and unrecognised for so long. Venezuela for instance has been threatened with numerous embargoes, has experienced several attempts at toppling its government and has been cast as a Pariah state by the American government. Yet the country’s President Hugo Chavez has been attempting nothing more than an economic reform project aimed at giving the Venezuelan economy back to its people, complete with land reforms and nationalisation of key industries as was the case in Egypt during the time of Gammel Abdel Nasr.

Surely it should strike many of us as obvious that this is a case of history repeating itself, and the parallels with developments in the Muslim world; from Egypt under Nasr to Iran under Mosaddeq, are obvious too. And surely there is so much that Muslims can learn today by looking at the Venezuelan struggle against hegemony and comparing that to their own geo-political plight under present circumstances. But again, Venezuela seems entirely off the map for the international Islamist press. Why? Is it because Hugo Chavez and the people of Venezuela are not Muslims?

One cannot help but come to such conclusions when the contradictions and blind-spots seem so painfully obvious. But if prejudice and ignorance of the world of the other is the only thing that is stopping Muslims from looking beyond the frontiers of their own community, then perhaps the time has come for them to serious ask themselves what it means to be Muslim in the first place. Surely one of the principle tenets of Islam is the notion of Tauhid – the unitary nature of God and creation – which reminds us of the fundamental unity we share with the entire human race. The editors, writers and journalists who serve the machinery of the international Islamist press should therefore get their respective acts together and begin to look closer at the rest of the world around them. If they do so, they may realise that Muslims today have more in common with their struggling brothers and sisters in Venezuela, Cuba and the African nations that with the rich elite of their own countries.

                This entry was posted on Tuesday, 1 April 2008, 7:15 am and is filed under
Islam
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Pakatan Rakyat – logical next step of March 8 political tsunami

Leaders of  DAP, PKR and PAS met in Petaling Jaya today and took  the logical next step of the March 8 political tsunami – proposing the establishment of a new front of the three political parties to be tentatively known as PAKATAN RAKYAT.

A joint statement  issued after the meeting reads:

The leaders of KeADILan, DAP and PAS met today in furtherance of the meeting held on the 18th of March 2008.

Today’s meeting was attended by, among others, Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim, YB Lim Kit Siang, YB Dato’ Seri Tuan Guru Haji Abdul Hadi Awang and YB Datin Seri Wan Azizah Wan Ismail.

In today’s meeting, we have proposed to consolidate the cooperation between the three parties under the name “PAKATAN RAKYAT”. This name has been proposed pending confirmation by the respective parties.

Pakatan Rakyat pledges to uphold the rights and interests of all Malaysians, regardless of religion or race, as enshrined in the Constitution.

With the results of the recent elections, the state governments of Kelantan, Kedah, Pulau Pinang, Perak and Selangor will be known as Pakatan Rakyat state governments. The policies of these governments will be conducted in accordance with the policies of Pakatan Rakyat.

To further mutual understanding regarding such policies, a convention of all Pakatan Rakyat elected representatives of Parliament and State Assemblies will be held on the 27th of April 2008.

We have developed and strengthened the structure of Pakatan Rakyat by creating under the Leadership Council, consisting of the leaders of the three parties, a Joint Secretariat consisting of three leaders from each of the three parties. This joint Secretariat will be tasked with building the foundation and framework of the Pakatan Rakyat for ratification by the Leadership Council.

                This entry was posted on Tuesday, 1 April 2008, 2:37 pm and is filed under
Election
,
Politics
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Hindraf 5 ISA detention – Hamid single-handedly destroying Abdullah’s reputation

Home Minister, Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar is single-handedly destroying the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s reputation that he is belatedly delivering his reform pledges though more than four years behind time by his refusal to immediately and unconditionally releasing newly-elected Selangor DAP State Assemblyman for Kota Alam Shah A. Manoharan  and four other Hindraf leaders, P. Uthayakumar, V. Ganabatirau, R. Kenghadharan and T. Vasantha Kumar from Internal Security Act (ISA) detention.

Hamid’s comment on Samy Vellu’s call for the release of the five Hindraf activists  could be used against the Home Minister himself. Noting Samy Vellu’s claim that his call was not a “publicity stunt”, Hamid  said that was “his right as the leader of the Indian community to fight for the cause” and that “if he was in Samy Vellu’s shoes, he might have done the same thing”.

Clearly, Hamid had done the same thing and was not  looking at the ISA detention of the Hindraf 5 afresh in the light of the unmistakable message of the March 8 “political tsunami” in wanting an immediate end to injustices and  abuses of power like the arbitrary and unjust ISA detention of the Hindraf 5, but was purely looking at the issue in his capacity as an Umno leader who must defend his turf in the upcoming Umno General Assembly, subordinating and sacrificing his   Ministerial oath of office  to give top priority to national interests as the new Home Minister to steer the country from its past history of  human rights violations and abuses of power particularly in ISA detentions.

In obstinately refusing to accede to demands for the immediate and unconditional release of the Hindraf 5, even without calling for an instant review of the ISA detention of the Hindraf 5, Hamid is showing utter contempt of the verdict of the Malaysian voters in  the March 8 “political tsunami”.

Today is the second meeting of the new Abdullah Cabinet. The question is whether other Ministers, particularly from MIC and MCA, had raised in the Cabinet  the issue of the release of the five Hindraf leaders under the ISA as a positive and responsible response to the March 8 “political tsunami” or whether the political culture of subservience and  subordination of Barisan Nasional Ministers in the Cabinet has remained unchanged despite the March 8 political tsunami.

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 2 April 2008, 12:19 pm and is filed under
Hindraf
,
Human Rights
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Linguistic Supremacy and Hegemony: The Roads Not Taken post-1969

By
Farish A Noor

(Below is an excerpt of an essay I am currently writing entitled: “The Many Roads Not Taken post-1969′)

Our failure to develop a Malaysian language for us all:

One of the most glaring failures of the Malaysian nation-building project is our failure to develop a national language that is actually used as the lingua franca of all Malaysians. While the laborious debate over whether BM should be termed ‘Bahasa Malaysia’ or ‘Bahasa Melayu’ has been raging for decades, it is clear that Malaysia’s plural society remains divided along linguistic-cultural lines. The thorny issue of what constitutes the ‘mother tongue’ of so many Malaysians has led to at least one major political conflagration among the component parties of the BN, which in turn was used as the justification for the nation-wide security crackdown called ‘Operasi Lalang’ in 1987. Ironically it is well known to all and sundry that despite the ethno-linguistic posturing of the hot-headed communitarian leaders of the BN over the issue in the 1980s, these very same elites continued to speak to each other in English in private.

The hypocrisy of our leaders – from all parties – on the issue of the national language is something that no mature Malaysian ought to be stranger to by now. In fact, the issue of our national language (or lack of) has been one of the many punching-bags of Malaysian politics and every single communitarian-minded leader has jumped on the linguistic-nationalist bandwagon at least once in his or her political career.

This is perhaps one of the saddest things about Malaysia’s postcolonial politics and the development of Malaysia post-1969: It has been the case that almost every single ambitious and aspiring politician in this country has sought to rise to power by playing the communitarian card, touching on the hot buttons of race and language. It was only recently that BM was re-designated as ‘Bahasa Malaysia’ after it had been re-defined by nationalist politicians as ‘Bahasa Melayu’. The merry-go-round turns until today, and it would be prudent for us to go back to our early history to recover the moment where this country missed the point and went off track for good.

Let us begin by remind ourselves of some basic historical facts: Bahasa Malaysia was and remains a hybrid language very much like Urdu, which was dubbed as the ‘language of the camp’ and which remains an amalgam of Hindi, Persian, Arabic and other languages of Central Asia. The Malaysian language is likewise made up of words that are derived from Sanskrit, Arabic and other languages of the pribumi communities of the Southeast Asian region. Today it also betrays signs of cultural influence from the West, with English, Dutch and Portuguese words thrown into its repertoire as well.

Starting from this premise, it is difficult to understand how the Malaysian language could have been seen and used by those who wished to foreground an understanding of Malay and Malay identity as fundamentally fixed, closed and pure. Yet this was precisely what happened as soon as the debate on the status of the national language began during the 1950s.

Post-1969 witnessed the intensification of the debate over the status of the Malaysian language. The proponents of the pro-Malay policy (who wished to define BM as ‘Bahasa Melayu’ and thus identify the language with one primary racial-ethnic community) came from all the ranks of the Malay-Muslim parties, organisations, NGOs and student movements. As was the case with many other issues that caught the imagination of the Malaysian public then, most of these debates took place on the campuses of the country and were led by right-wing communitarian ethno-nationalist students who were aligned to the various Malay cultural, linguistic and religious student groups on campus, such as the Persatuan Bahasa Melayu Universiti Malaya (PBMUM) and the Malay Students’ Association of UM (PMUM).

In 1974, the student leaders of PMUM and PBMUM protested against the government’s decision to allow the creation of Tunku Abdul Rahman (TAR) College that had been one of MCA’s major demands on UMNO. The Malay students of the local universities were particularly angry over the government’s decision to allow a Chinese college to use English as the medium of instruction at a time when efforts were being made to make BM the medium of instruction in all the other institutions of higher learning in the country. Earlier, the students had defaced most of the campus signboards that were still in English. They also condemned the TAR College project on the grounds that as a privately run institution it would only serve as an additional source of funds for the wealthy MCA leaders. This cycle of protests and demonstrations culminated in the seizure and occupation of the local university campuses by the student unions in September 1974. Universiti Malaya’s campus was taken over by PMUM members led by Kamarazaman Yacob, who then formed the Majlis Tertinggi Sementara (Temporary Supreme Council, MTS).

While right-wing ethno-nationalist students were calling for BM to be seen as the Malay language and elevated to the status of the primary language of the country, other Malay-Muslim organisations and parties followed suit. Both UMNO and PAS were likewise adamant that the Malay language be seen as the language of the Malays, and that the recognition of BM as the national language also meant that by extension the dominance of the Malay-Muslims had to be recognised and accepted by all Malaysians.

PAS in the 1970s was led by the Malay-supremacist Asri Muda, who not only brought PAS into the ruling Barisan coalition but who also was a steadfast advocate for the special position and privilege of the Malay-Muslims. Asri’s constant attacks on the UMNO-led government’s record in the area of cultural and language development was one of the factors that put UMNO on the defensive and forced the government of the Tunku Abdul Rahman (and, later, Tun Razak) to act. In 1970, under pressure from PAS and the other defenders of the Malay language and culture, the government implemented the National Education Policy that made the promotion of the Malay language one of its key objectives. In 1971, Tun Razak followed this up with the Kongres Kebudayaan Kebangsaan (National Culture Congress) that paved the way for the Malaysian National Culture Policy which also privileged Malay culture and identity above others.

A close reading of the history of Malaysia during the years immediately after 1969 would show that practically every single Malay-Muslim leader of note: Mahathir Mohamad, Asri Muda, Anwar Ibrahim, et al. – were positioning themselves as the champions of their race, religion and language. But while Malayness and Islam could not be effectively hegemonised and used as a tool for dominance with a nation-wide impact, language could. By demanding that BM be seen as the language of the Malays and demanding that BM be given the special position that reflected the special position of the Malays, these ethno-nationalist supremacists were working to ensure that the Malaysian public domain and the Malaysian culture that developed in the wake of ’69 would be coloured with clearly identifiable Malay-Muslim hues.

The foregrounding of the Malay ethno-linguistic agenda also meant that the other ethno-linguistic communities were given two stark choices: Either to accept the supremacy of the Malay language as the national language or to opt out of the system and thereby relegate themselves to the margins of their respective ethno-linguistic ghettos. Unfortunately again, many of the leaders, spokesmen and intellectuals of the other communities chose to opt for the latter, and compounded the problem by retreating to their own linguistic enclaves.

From the 1970s to the 1990s we have seen the development of a lopsided Malaysia where one language – Bahasa Malaysia – was singled out to serve as the benchmark and collective marker of one ethnic-racial community. In the process of doing so, a systematic erasure and forgetting of BM’s hybrid and plural past and character was carried out, thereby reinforcing the impression that BM emerged almost exclusively, sui generis, out of the bosom of an undifferentiated and essentialised Malay cultural bosom. Yet all of these nationalists forgot (or chose to forget) the fact that BM was always a hybrid and eclectic lingua franca that bore the cultural traces of other communities, including the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Thais, Indonesians, Europeans and others. Instead BM was essentialised as a unique, pure, uncontaminated language-system that it certainly was not and has never been. (Any more than we can say that any other language in the world, be it Chinese, Japanese, Tamil, English, etc. were ever ‘pure’ either.)

Compounding this situation was the cultural-linguistic impasse that had been reached that forced the other communities of Malaysia to likewise turn to their own ‘mother tongues’ for support and succour. In time, there developed various lobbies calling for the protection of mother tongue education for practically every other racial-ethnic community in Malaysia; and to make things worse many of these linguistic-communitarian advocates betrayed signs of being just as demagogic, exclusivist and even as racist as their Malay-Muslim supremacist counterparts.

Malaysia’s failure was not to create a generation of post-1969 leaders who would have discarded the values and praxis of linguistic nationalism and who would embrace diversity and hybridity instead. What Malaysia needed most of all was a leader who would have been able to say to all the communities of the country: “The Malay language is not merely the language of the Malay people: Look at the vocabulary of BM and you will clearly see the influences of every other community of Asia. So let us accept this pluralism and diversity in our language, let us play with it and expand it repertoire of words, so that it will reflect the pluralism of Malaysian society even more”. But of course such a leader never emerged – instead we were served a host of communal-minded sectarian nationalists whose only penchant was to stand on the stage and demand special rights for their special community on account of their special history and special identity, and who not once took into account the needs of Malaysia as a whole.

Had we taken the opposite path towards the recognition of diversity and pluralism that is already pre-existing in BM, imagine what could have developed? Working from the premise that BM was and is already a hybrid language with no fixed sematic and semiotic frontiers, the vocabulary of BM could have been expanded and deepened further with the introduction and adoption of more words from other languages. As it was, BM remains clearly one of the proto-Indonesian languages with strong traces of Sanskrit and Arabic thrown in. Had the designers of this new national language been given the incentive to adapt the language further, BM today would have more words that are derivative of Mandarin, Hokein, Cantonese, Tamil, Urdu, Javanese, Bugis, Acehnese, Thai, English and others.

Unlike the Indonesians next door who demonstrate an acute understanding of the plasticity of language and discourses, our national language was instead frozen in time and embalmed in official documents. Over the years what has actually developed has been the street ‘bazaar’ Malay which now serves as the real – albeit uncritical and depoliticised – lingua franca of the Malaysian people.

How sad that after half a century of coming into being, we still do not have a national language where every Malaysian citizen can find herself or himself.

End.

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 2 April 2008, 8:57 am and is filed under
Farish Noor
,
nation building
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Abdullah Badawi As “Practise Prime Minister”

by
Bakri Musa

In his novel Gadis Pantai (“The Girl From The Coast”), Pramoedya Ananta Toer revealed a quaint custom in ancient Malay culture.  That is where the lord of the kampong upon reaching adulthood would grab the prettiest village virgin to be his “practise wife.”  Then when he becomes sufficiently well honed in his “husbandly” skills or when he gets bored with her, he would toss her out like a piece of soiled rag.  He with his now enhanced skills would go on to marry a lady of “proper” background.

            I believe that Fate has gifted Malaysians with a “practise prime minister” in the person of Abdullah Badawi.  He is so inept, so spineless, and so lacking in ability to make decisions that he practically invites scorn and contempt.  Or in Tengku Razaleigh’s words, Abdullah showed a “stunning ineptness in managing … straightforward functions of government.”  Today, in the kedai kopi (coffeehouses) even taxi drivers are not hesitant in ridiculing Abdullah.

            Granted, some of the criticisms leveled at Abdullah are crude and clumsy, but then so would the village nobleman’s initial experiences with his “practise wife.”  The concern is less with finesse and artistry, more with getting it done!  With time and practice, rest assured things would only get better!

            Once Malaysians have become accustomed to being critical of Abdullah and are unafraid to criticize or even challenge him, then we would toss Abdullah out, as the village nobleman would of his “practise wife.”  Malaysians would then be ready for a proper leader.

Consequences of Uncritical Citizenry

Fate has blessed Malaysia with capable leaders in the past.  There was Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Father of Independence, who successfully led us out of colonial rule without shedding a drop of blood.  However, as Malaysians had not yet learned to be good followers, we were not sufficiently critical of him.  Thus he got carried away with being the “world’s happiest prime minister” while letting problems fester away until they blew up in his and our collective faces.

            He was succeeded by the able Tun Razak, but his life was tragically cut short by cancer.  As such he was spared from being spoiled by an adoring and uncritical populace.  His reputation remains intact and unblemished.

            His successor Hussein Onn may not have been the most capable but at least he knew his limitations.  He was wise enough to voluntarily relinquish his position.  He also took his oath of office seriously.  Thus he was meticulous and unusually astute in the choice of his successor.

            In Dr. Mahathir Malaysians had a leader of exceptional brilliance, unorthodox convictions, and courageous innovations.  He transformed Malaysia.  Like any other mortal, he too had his share of mistakes.  Unfortunately his uncritical and unabashedly adoring followers were equally blind to his mistakes thus preventing him from recognizing and rectifying them.

            Had Malaysians generally and UMNO members specifically been more critical of Mahathir in his choice of a successor for example, the nation would have been spared the current political muddle.

            This uncritical and sheep-to-shepherd dynamics also characterize other Asian and Third World societies.  Indonesia was blessed with the charismatic and brilliant Sukarno.  He united those polyglot islands into a cohesive nation while bravely taking on the Dutch colonialists at the same time.  China has its Mao.  However, as their uncritical followers did not rein in their leaders’ initial excesses, those leaders got carried away.

Making Malaysians More Critical

Malaysians are excessively deferential to their leaders, rarely challenging or even criticizing them.  Our leaders are always clad in the finest fashion even when all they have on is a piece of tattered, stained loincloth.  The relationship is akin to that of a flock of sheep and its shepherd, of blind obedience.

            That may be fine for a flock of docile sheep but it is hardly the recipe for a progressive society.  Nor is it the recipe for a competitive society, or at least one that would merit the adjective “modern.”  In such a society, leaders must be held accountable, and followers in turn must not hesitate to hold their leaders to exacting standards.  This reciprocal relationship means that followers must be willing and not fearful to criticize and challenge their leaders.  That is the best way to ensure accountability.  It would also discourage these leaders from being led astray by their blind ambition or abusing the trust we grant them.

            Without being unduly Pollyannaish, the only way to make sense of the current political mess is to believe that this is part of a divine design, of Fate providing Malaysians with a “practise leader” in order to better prepare us for a real leader in our future.

            There are two towering personalities in the horizon that fit my characterization of a real leader:  Anwar Ibrahim and Tengku Razaleigh.  In their previous incarnations, these two had their share of fawning followers who egged them on to make unwise decisions.  For Anwar, it led to his imprudently challenging Mahathir.  He (and us) knows only too well the disastrous consequences of that fateful decision.  Tengku Razaleigh, again at the behest of his admiring supporters, left UMNO briefly to form the Semangat Party.

            The problem is not with Anwar or Ku Li challenging Mahathir, rather that we as a society have yet to deal with or learn the art of challenges and criticisms.  Our standard response then was either to split the organization or riot in the streets.  Enter Abdullah as “practise leader;” now we have learned at least not to riot, a significant advancement.

            I believe that Anwar and Ku Li are now wiser.  They would be even better leaders if we let them be, meaning that we should not let our guards down lest they would be tempted to be led astray by their uncritical admirers.

            On the personal side, I note a certain humility and magnanimity in both Anwar and Ku Li.  To them, the travails and weaknesses of Abdullah Badawi truly pain them.  To these two nationalists, challenging Abdullah is not a route for the fulfillment of their personal ambition, rather a patriot’s obligation.

            To young readers who may not yet quite grasp the “practise wife” concept, let me substitute a sports metaphor.  Abdullah is a convenient punching bag for Malaysians to practice on how we should learn to handle future leaders.  For now, his ineptness and incompetence make those lessons easy for us, though not for Abdullah.

            In Pram’s novel, the young nameless lady who is the nobleman’s “practise wife” returns to her village.  Only through her strength of character could she maintain her dignity and respect in her village.

            When Abdullah gets tossed out, as inevitably he would, lacking strength of character, the public scorn heaped upon him would be merciless.  Abdullah’s predictable humiliation would not arouse any pity from

 me, but his destroying what was once a fine Malay institution – UMNO – would.

            The only redeeming part to the whole ugly saga would be that Abdullah would also bring down with him the “practise pundits” and “practise editors” in the mainstream media, as well as the “practise academics” and “practise intellectuals” in our universities.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 3 April 2008, 12:40 pm and is filed under
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
,
Bakri Musa
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


So Is Islam Hadari To Be Enforced By Whipping Now?

By
Farish A. Noor

I am having a tough time writing this particular article as I am absolutely consumed by anger at the moment. In fact, I am livid as I have never been for such a long time.

The reason for this sudden rise in my blood pressure level is that after a two-day seminar organised by the Institute for Islamic Understanding (IKIM) and the Shariah Judiciary Department of Malaysia, it was suggested by some of those who took part that ‘non-Muslims found committing khalwat (close proximity) with Muslims (will) also be held liable’ and that they too will be under threat of punishment. (The Star, Proposal to Persecute Non-Muslims for Khalwat, 3 April 2008) According to the report ‘Syariah Court of Appeal Judge Datuk Mohd Asri Abdullah said the seminar had proposed that non-Muslims committing khalwat with Muslims should also be sentenced accordingly, but in the civil courts.’

Furthermore the participants of the seminar also proposed ‘to impose heftier penalties – of up to four times the current penalties –on Muslims caught for khalwat, prostitution, consuming alcohol and involvement in gambling activities.’

And what might these heftier penalties be? According to the same report ‘Ikim and the department were proposing that the Syariah Courts (Criminal Jurisdiction) Act 1965 (Amendment) 1984 be amended to impose stiffer penalties of RM1,000 fine, or five years’ jail or 12 strokes of the rotan for Syariah Lower Courts and RM20,000 fine, or 10years’ jail or 24 strokes of rotan for Syariah High Courts’. It then added that ‘there was also a proposal for Syariah judges to enforce whipping for these offences’ and that ‘another proposal calls for the establishment of a rehabilitation centre for those convicted of offences related to morals and faith such as prostitution and effeminate men, and enforcement of Section 54 of the Syariah Criminal Offences Act (Act 559) to set up such centres’.

So this, apparently, is what the great minds of IKIM and the religious departments have been cooking up and intending to serve to us, the Malaysian public, all along. While Muslims are angry about the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the film ‘Fitna’ by the right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders, one is left with the question: As long as Muslim leaders and intellectuals remain stuck in their morass of outdated conservative thinking, would it not remain the case that Islam is seen as a religious of violence? How, pray tell, can scholars like me defend the image of Islam and Muslims when Muslim governments like ours allows such outlandish and dangerous ideas to spread, and harbour such proponents of conservative-fundamentalist Islam in the very same institutions that were meant to open up the minds of Muslims and lead us – and Malaysian society – to a more modern, progressive and liberated understanding of Islam and religion in general?

The fact that such proposals could have been made at all speaks volumes about the state of Muslim thinking in Malaysia today. Worse still is the total disconnect between reality and ideals, and the fact that some of these Muslim thinkers fail to see just how unjust, inhuman and dehumanising these proposed punishments are in the eyes of millions of other Malaysians and foreigners alike. Whipping? In this day and age? And what would happen to the image of Malaysia as the so-called bastion of moderate Islam when the international media gets a glimpse of this non-so-moderate Islam at work? Is Islam Hadari to be enforced by the whip today?

The results of the recent general elections have shown that the Malaysian public has reached a level of political awareness and maturity that is unprecedented in our history. It also points to an increasingly urbanised, well-connected, better-informed and more politically-conscious electorate that will not be satisfied with empty slogans of a more ‘moderate’ Islam and theme parks with crystal mosques. Why, even in the ranks of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) there are more and more progressive voices who are calling for real economic and structural reform, and contemplating the possibility of creating a new social contract based on a welfare state model for all Malaysians.

But it is in the ranks of UMNO and the UMNO-led institutions of the state that we see the mental quagmire of the elite at its worst. IKIM and the Shariah Judiciary Department are both institutions that were created under the auspices of the UMNO-led government. Yet the so-called reforms we have been presented are not intended to open up the minds of Muslims, but rather to add yet another layer of moral policing on Muslim society today.

More worrying is the fact that now the scope of UMNO’s Islamisation policy has extended to cover non-Muslims as well, and this can only be read as yet another attempt to impose Islamic legal and political hegemony on the non-Muslims of Malaysia. How and why should a non-Muslim be taken to court for simply being in love with a Muslim? And why, for that matter, should a Muslim be punished for simply loving a non-Muslim? Furthermore the non-Muslim partner in such a relationship may not even regard it as wrong to simply be in love with another. Yet the advocates of this reform are suggesting that he or she has committed a sin even if he or she has not done anything wrong according to his or her belief system.

This in turn points to the slow erosion of respect for diversity and pluralism in Malaysia, where a group of Muslim communitarians do not seem realise the fact that Islam is simply one of many belief-systems in Malaysia and that the values of Islam may not be relevant to those who are not part of that faith community. Yet by calling for these legal reforms, these sectarian leaders seem to be implying that what constitutes an offence for Muslims must also constitute an offence for others too. How does this communitarian slant fit with the universalist and pluralist claims of Islam Hadari then?

That such a conference could have been held so close after UMNO’s disastrous showing at the recent elections would indicate that this UMNO-led government is totally bankrupt of ideas and can only shore up what little support it has left by playing the Islamic card and pandering to the gallery yet again. Moral policing of any kind is just one further layer of policing on society, and this is fundamentally part and parcel of the state’s attempt to remain in power at all costs. The net result would be the further control of Malaysian society as a whole and the costs will be borne by those Malaysians who are Malaysian-minded enough to see beyond race and religion, and to cross these cultural-religious frontiers by falling in love with others. Instead it is those very Malaysian-Minded Malaysians who are under threat now, by laws and regulations that make it virtually impossible for us to love one another and live with one another.

Finally, this is further proof that the so-called ‘moderate and progressive’ brand of Islam that was sold to us as ‘Islam Hadari’ was little more than another UMNO propaganda device; serving to placate the concerns of the international community while in fact serving only to extend the power and hegemony of the state at home. Should these reform measures come to pass, it is our duty to remind ourselves, our fellow Malaysians and the international community that what passes under the label of Islam Hadari is really a conservative brand of statist Islam that promotes imprisonment, detention, moral policing and whipping. Let the cameras of the international media come to Malaysia to film the spectacle of Malaysians being arrested, detained in rehabilitation centres, whipped and injured for life by the morality police and religious authorities. Let the whole world know that ‘Islam Hadari’ has never opened up the minds of Muslims. Let us expose this lie once and for all, and the liars behind the lie as well.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2008, 11:51 am and is filed under
Farish Noor
,
Islam
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Suggestions for more suitable term than Pakatan Rakyat are most welcome

Many suggestions have been made for a more suitable term than Pakatan Rakyat for the proposed co-operation of KeADILan, DAP and PAS as a follow-up to the March 8, 2008 general election results for the common objective to promote  justice, freedom, democracy, integrity and good governance in Malaysia.

When the term Pakatan Rakyat was tentatively chosen, the  consensus was to avoid the use of  the term “Barisan”.

The term Pakatan Rakyat is subject to the confirmation by the respective leadership of the three parties.  Suggestions for a more suitable term than Pakatan Rakyat are most welcome.

Statements issued in the past three days have raised the question whether all the three parties have fully learnt the lessons of the 2001 crisis  of  the  Barisan Alternative, where the DAP had to leave the opposition coalition because of PAS’ insistence to pursue the Islamic State objective, which was not in the common Barisan Alternative manifesto.

These statements include that of the Kelantan Deputy Mentri Besar Datuk Ahmad Yaakub that “Pas wajar menjadi tunjung kepada pakatan itu sekiranya ia mahu merealisasikan impian menubuhkan sebuah Negara Islam”, and the full support given to this statement by Dewan Pemuda PAS Kelantan and the statement by the press secretary to Pas president Roslan Shahir Mohd Shahir that “the values of the Islamic state were already incorporated in the Negara Berkebajikan” and that “In states where Pas is the dominant party, we will try to set up an Islamic state”.

It is clear that the proposed co-operation of the three political parties in a new front in post-March 8 political scenario has to proceed with caution to ensure that all levels of leadership of the respective parties fully understand the basis of co-operation of the three parties which will not lend themselves to inter and intra-party differences and exploitation by political foes, as well as avoid the repetition of the 2001 break-up of Barisan Alternative.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2008, 4:41 pm and is filed under
DAP
,
PAS
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


March 8 “politic al tsunami” is for  change to restore justice,  freedom,  democracy and good governance and not for Islamic state or hudud laws

At the joint media conference on April 1 to announce PKR, DAP and PAS decision  to take the next logical step to  the March 8, 2008 political tsunami with the three parties tentatively agreeing to establish a Pakatan Rakyat (a proposal and term subject to confirmation by the three respective parties), I said that March 8 general election results were a clear and unmistakable message from the people that they want the three parties to work together to bring about changes in the country to restore justice, freedom, democracy and good governance – and not for an Islamic state or hudud laws.

I was asked by a reporter today whether my statement that the March 8 political tsunami was a demand for change to restore justrice, freedom, democracy and good governance and not for an Islamic state and hudud laws applied only to non-Muslims and non-Malays.

I replied in the negative, as I believe that it is not only the non-Malays and non-Muslims but  also the Malays and Muslims who voted solidly on March 8 for justice, freedom, democracy and good governance and not for Islamic state and hudud laws – producing for the first time in 50 years of Malaysian electoral history the national phenomenon of cross-race and cross-religion voting –  DAP voters voted for PAS candidates and PAS voters voting for DAP candidates.

Just as it was a great mistake after the 1999 general election to regard its results as a vote for Islamic state and hudud laws (resulting in the DAP leaving the Barisan Alternative in 2001), it will be an equally cardinal error to interpret the March 8, 2008 general election result as a mandate for Islamic state and hudud laws.

It is pertinent to revisit the reasons why DAP had to pull out of Barisan Alternative in 2001.  The following is an extract from a statement I made on 30th June 2001, entitled:
“BA at crossroads and no more tenable”
:

Barisan Alternative is at the crossroads as it is no more tenable with  PAS leaders openly flouting  the BA common manifesto for “A Just and Democratic Malaysia” and disregarding the opposition of the other three component parties towards an Islamic State.

The Barisan Alternative would not have been formed in the first place to take on the Barisan Nasional as one united front in the 1999 general election  if PAS was not prepared to respect the opposition of DAP, Keadilan and PRM to an Islamic State, focussing on the common objectives of restoring justice, freedom, democracy and good governance in Malaysia.

Barisan Alternative leaders should face up to  the unpalatable fact that in the next general election, whether 2003 or 2004, if the voters are faced with the choice between an Islamic State and a sixth term of Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad as Prime Minister, the choice would be the latter as Mahathir would already be close to eighty and cannot remain at the helm of government for long while voting for an Islamic State would be the start of a journey  which could not inspire confidence and hope from the experience of other countries.

Before the 1999 general election, PAS leaders were at pains to help the other Barisan Alternative parties and leaders to assure the people that the Opposition Front was founded purely on the common objectives of restoring justice, freedom, democracy and good governance and was no agreement on an Islamic State.  PAS leaders even  went out of their way to explain that there was no basis to worry about an Islamic State as PAS was fielding less than one-third of the parliamentary candidates and could not have the  two-thirds parliamentary majority necessary to alter the Constitution for the establishment of an Islamic State.

Of late, however, PAS leaders have decided to openly and publicly disregard the opposition of the other component parties of the Barisan Alternative to an Islamic State and  flout the Barisan Alternative Manifesto “Towards A Just and Democratic Malaysia” by publicly reiterating its commitment to an Islamic State.

For instance, the Selangor Bar Journal May 2001 in an exclusive interview with the PAS deputy president Abdul Hadi bin Awang said that at the top of the agenda of a PAS-led Federal Government once it is returned to power is to commence implementing Islamic law, starting with the amendment of Article 4 of the Malaysian Constitution to enable Islamic enactment which are in conflict with laws passed by Parliament to prevail, such as the death sentence for apostasy.

Hadi said that if Malaysia came under Islamic rule an act against the religion would be construed as an act against the State, which would be tantamount to treason for which the sentence was death.

He said: “The laws on apostasy only bind Muslims and do not affect non-Muslims but a non-Muslim should be aware of the consequences of apostasy before converting because then he would come under the purview of Islamic law.”

PAS leaders should not  expect Malaysians, both Muslims and non-Muslims, to be unconcerned about such a position, not only from the human rights principles of freedom and justice, but also because of the  raging controversy  among Muslims  including a significant body of opinion among the ulama from the earliest  Islamic history that apostasy is not a capital crime as the Qu’ran is completely silent on the death penalty for apostasy.

PAS president Datuk Fadzil Noor from Manchester yesterday urged the DAP not to make a hasty decision by leaving the opposition front over the Islamic state issue or the DAP will be walking right into the Barisan Nasional trap.

DAP will not take the “easy way out” or “walk right into the Barisan Nasional trap” and this was why the DAP had insisted immediately after the last general election  that there should be  Barisan Alternative leadership dialogues to iron out our ideological differences over an Islamic State.  I must say, however,  that the dialogue held on June 16, 2001 to deal with the issue had been most unsatisfactory.

The issue confronting the Barisan Alternative is whether the PAS leaders are prepared to respect the DAP’s opposition to an Islamic State in Malaysia not because of anti-Islam sentiments but because an Islamic State in multi-racial and multi-religious  Malaysia is not compatible with parliamentary democracy, power-sharing in a plural society, human rights and individual freedoms, women’s rights and social tolerance.

DAP respects PAS for its ideological position on the Islamic State, but in a modern, multi-racial and multi-religious society where non-Muslims comprise some 40 per cent of the population, and where it is not only non-Malays but Malays who oppose the establishment of an Islamic State, is  PAS prepared to be realistic and  concede that its Islamic State concept  is not a practical or feasible proposition or option for Malaysia?

The rest is history.  Can we larn from the lessons of history?

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 5 April 2008, 3:29 pm and is filed under
DAP
,
Islamic state
,
PAS
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                Responses are currently closed, but you can
trackback
 from your own site.


Shabery Cheek’s admission of ISA abuses – immediate release of Hindraf 5 and Inquiry Commission into 1987 Ops Lalang?

The present Umno  Cabinet and leadership have admitted that in the past there had been gross abuses  of the Internal Security Act (ISA)  against dissent.

In a new series of attacks against former Umno President and Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad by Umno Ministers the new Information Minister Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek said that during Mahathir’s leadership
“many were detained under the ISA supposedly because they were a threat to national security when in actual fact they were a threat to his leadership…”
in response to Mahathir’s charges that  Umno leaders have become “yes-men”.

Shabery Cheek was clearly referring to the Operation Lalang  mass  ISA detentions in 1987, where 106 people were arrested, representing parliamentarians, politicians, civil/human  rights leaders and  social/religious  activists.

Although a few low-level Umno, MCA and Gerakan political leaders were among the 106 persons detained in the initial crackdown of Operation Lalang  in October 1987 – which included the closure of four newspapers –  none of them were among the 40 who were formally served with two-year detention orders after the 60-day interrogative custody and dispatched to Kamunting Detention Centre  – which included seven serving  DAP MPs at the time, viz: Karpal Singh, Dr. Tan Seng Giaw, Lim Guan Eng, Lau Dak Kee, the late P. Patto, the late V. David and myself.

Is Shabery Cheek prepared to represent the present Barisan Nasional Cabinet and leadership to admit that the entire 1987  Ops Lalang ISA crackdown, both against the 106 persons initially detained as well as the 40 persons who were formally detained after the 60-day custody, had been a gross abuse of power by Mahathir, his Cabinet and government; extend a formal government apology to the victims of Operation Lalang – not only the ISA detainees and  their families and the closure of the four newspapers but also to the country for promoting a “yes-men  culture” for some three decades – and establish a commission of inquiry into the 1987 Operation Lalang to ensure that such gross abuses of power could not  recur in Malaysia  in future.

However, the most immediate and pressing question is why the new Abdullah Cabinet is not prepared to break from the bad habits of the past and stop using  draconian laws like the ISA to clamp down on dissent and promote a “yes-men culture” by unconditionally releasing newly-elected Selangor DAP State Assemblyman for Kota Alam Shah A. Manoharan and four other Hindraf leaders, P. Uthayakumar, V. Ganabatirau, R. Kenghadharan and T. Vasantha Kumar from ISA detention.

The ISA detention of the Hindraf Five is the latest blatant example of the abuse of the ISA to detain persons not because they are a threat to national security but a threat to MIC and Barisan Nasional  leadership as  they refused to be “yes men”  – as happened repeatedly in the past and now admitted by the Information Minister.

Is Shabery Cheek prepared to get the support of other Ministers to raise in the Cabinet on Wednesday for the immediate and unconditional release of the Hindraf Five under the ISA as well as for a Commission of Inquiry into the 1987 Operation Lalang on the mass  ISA detentions and the closure of four newspapers  to purge the country of the “yes-men culture”?

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 5 April 2008, 12:39 pm and is filed under
Hindraf
,
Human Rights
,
UMNO
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Abdullah fires back at his nemeses

Pak Lah has finally retaliated –  firing back at his chief and  unexpected nemesis, his predecessor Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad on all fours.

In his broadsides, the Prime Minister and Umno President Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi also did not spare his other nemeses – Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

However, one snippet of news about yesterday’s “open war” by Abdullah deserves greater attention.

Abdullah announced that Datuk Seri Najib Razak is the natural successor to the Umno presidency, saying: “ I assure you there are no problems between us, and he is the one who will be succeeding me.”

What should  pique interest is not the omission by Abdullah as to when such handing over of power will take place, but Najib’s uncharacteristic silence in  declining any comment on Abdullah’s assurance when approached by the media after the closed-door briefing for Umno grassroots  leaders yesterday.

Does this connote another shifting of power equation in Umno?

                This entry was posted on Monday, 7 April 2008, 9:56 am and is filed under
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
,
UMNO
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Flat Earthers Versus Bad Samaritans

by
M. Bakri Musa

It must be frustrating to be a leader of a developing country.  Just as you are becoming convinced on the virtues of free trade and globalization, there emerges a countervailing viewpoint suggesting that those are nothing more than attempts by the developed world to maintain their economic dominance.

            To me, the differences between the two viewpoints are more apparent than real.  To former Prime Minister Mahathir however, this merely vindicates his conviction all along.  And the man can speak with considerable authority.

            He defied the then prevailing economic thinking – the so-called Washington consensus – and successfully steered Malaysia out of the treacherous 1997 Asian economic contagion.  Mahathir made those brilliant economists at the IMF and US Treasury Department eat more than their share of humble pie with the success of his unique if unorthodox initiatives that were at variance to the accepted wisdom.

            The surprise is that Mahathir’s remarkable achievement is not more analyzed or appreciated.  The 1997 economic crisis and Mahathir’s bold and contrary approaches to solving it provided one of the rare “experiments of nature” in economics.

            It is interesting that with America currently experiencing severe economic squeeze as a result of its sub-prime mortgage mess, many of the solutions adopted by the champions of free market in the Bush Administration bear remarkable resemblance to the methods of Mahathir.  These include the government’s prompt and unhesitating “rescue” of a major Wall Street firm (Bear Stearns), the lowering of interest rates (with scant regards to its negative impact on the dollar), and the priming of the economic pump with generous tax rebates.

            When Mahathir did similar “rescues,” he was accused of bailing out his cronies.  Nobody would dare suggest that Treasury Secretary Paulson, a former major Wall Street figure, of doing the same thing.  As for the decline of the dollar, the direct consequence of lower interest rates, it is deemed acceptable to avoid recession and unemployment!  Exactly what Mahathir had uttered then!

            Malaysia came out of the 1997 economic crisis much faster and with fewer scars than countries like Indonesia that followed the “severe but necessary” prescription of the Washington consensus.  Mahathir was right then; I hope that Paulson would also be right.

Cause Versus Effect

This wind of change is also evident outside the corridors of power.  Consider that a book by the Korean-born Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans:  The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, is fast making the bestseller list.  His provocative point is that the developed countries are preaching the very opposite of what they had practiced, with respect to economic development.

            Unlike other economists who rely on complex econometric models and esoteric mathematics (no equations or Greek alphabets in his book!), Chang is into economic history.  He studied what countries actually did, in contrast to what they now preach.  He also reminds us that many economic conclusions are based on statistical correlations.  Correlations are just that; they do not mean or even infer causation, nor do they differentiate between cause and effect.

            Take the widely accepted notion of the poor:  They are poor because they are lazy, so we are told repeatedly.  This observation is of course made only by the rich, never by the poor.

            Could it be, as Chang challenged us, that they are lazy because they are poor?  The poor are more likely to be malnourished, unhealthy, and thus lack vigor to do hard work.  Even if they are capable of hard work, because of their poverty they could not afford an education and thus their hard work is valued less.  It is callous if not cruel to label those poor hardworking rice planters and fisherman in Kelantan as lazy.  Try spending an hour in their day under the blazing Malaysian sun!

            If we assume that they are poor because they are lazy, then we are dealing with basic human nature, very difficult to change.  However if they are lazy because they are poor, then we are dealing with external conditions, and thus potentially solvable.  It makes more sense to approach the problem from this perspective.

            Today we are told that unfettered free trade and globalization are the recipe for economic development.  We are lectured endlessly of this truism, most persuasively by Thomas Friedman of “The-World-is-Flat” fame.

            Chang concluded that historically, trade liberalization has been the outcome rather than the cause of economic development.  Many of today’s developed nations, in particular America, were once ardent advocates of protectionism.  Indeed Alexander Hamilton coined the term “infant industries” and the need to protect them.

            Chang refers to his own South Korea which made the remarkable transformation from a backward agrarian society to a modern industrialized one by resorting to unabashed protectionism and aggressive state interventions in the marketplace, all anathema to free market disciples.  He remembers as a young man ostracizing those who would dare smoke foreign brands of cigarettes.  Precious foreign exchange should be used to support local industries, not foreign ones!  Of course now that the nation is developed, South Koreans have no compulsion buying expensive Gucci handbags.

            Had South Korea been diligent in enforcing copyright laws as per WTO dictates, Chang would not have become an economist as practically all his textbooks were pirated versions!

            South Korea proves that active participation in international trade does not require free trade.  In economics as in other areas of human endeavors, dogmas should never come in the way of pragmatism.  Extremism in the pursuit of a truism is a vice.  A familiar hadith says it better:  In everything, moderation.

            As Chang wisely noted, “The secret of success is in a judicious mix of protection and open trade, with areas of protection constantly changing as new infant industries are developed and old infant industries become internationally competitive.”

Sifting Concept From Content

Globalization makes the world smaller, with physical distance reduced to irrelevance.  At the same time other distances – cultural, institutional, and linguistic – become more pronounced.  Indonesia is physically, culturally, and linguistically close to Malaysia, while America is far away in all dimensions.  Yet trade between Malaysia and America greatly exceeds that between Malaysia and Indonesia.  Malaysians are more likely to have heard of or even visited San Francisco than Surabaya.

            Trade benefits its participants; we should encourage and facilitate it.  While the benefits may never be equal or perceived to be so, there is no such thing as unfair trade, only that we can make it fairer.  The best way to achieve this is not to discourage trade but to increase it even more.  As the participants get more sophisticated and more engaged, they are more likely to make compromises lest they would lose their now valuable relationships.  Exploitative trade, like other exploitative relationships whether business or personal, rarely endures.

            In the past, jute farmers in Bangladesh were at the mercy of middle men.  Nonetheless both benefited more by trading than by not partaking in it.  Through globalization, specifically modern technology like cell phones, jute farmers now have access to market information.  This liberates them; they are now no longer dictated by the middlemen.  Information makes the playing field more level.

            Technology destroyed the monopoly and monopsony of the middlemen far more effectively than any rigid communist mandate.  The middlemen can still make their profits but not through the ignorance of their clients but by providing better services, as it should be.

            The recent electoral humiliation of Barisan Nasional would not have been possible if not for the Internet, an accoutrement of globalization.  Globalization is liberating.  We should not ignore globalization or discourage trade in our purist pursuit of fairness.  We should instead focus more on preparing our citizens for both.

            Protection maybe necessary but it is only good if you use that opportunity to enhance the competitiveness of your people and infant industries.  Otherwise it would be the surest and quickest route to complacency and mediocrity.  If you cannot provide indigenous competition, introduce some from outside.

            Trade must be actively promoted; it does not happen spontaneously, as revealed by our trade figures with Indonesia.  For this reason, I am optimistic on the future of the Taiwan-China conflict because of the increasing trade and other economic ties between the two countries.

            Globalization also brings the reality of a diverse world closer to each of us.  A plural society like Malaysia is uniquely positioned to prepare its citizens for this new reality than those from culturally and ethnically homogenous societies.  Our diversity is an asset, not a liability in this era of globalization.

            I see no conflict in the truth and wisdom expressed by Friedman and Chang as they both offer relevant lessons for Malaysia.

                This entry was posted on Monday, 7 April 2008, 7:56 am and is filed under
Bakri Musa
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Abdullah found belated political will or just  “reform sloganeering” against Mahathir?

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said in
Kota Kinabalu
 yesterday  that the reforms promised by Barisan Nasional in its election manifesto will be aggressively pursued.

He said it should be noted that the reforms in the judiciary and police began when he was appointed prime minister and there had been no let up since.

Abdullah said he would not run away from his responsibility of continuing with the reforms despite BN not securing a two-thirds majority in the recent general election and that the effort to fight corruption would also be continued.

He said: “I have implemented many things since I became prime minister but I recognize that people are still not happy.”

Malaysians react with mixed feelings to Abdullah’s promise that there will be no let-up on reforms.

The question Malaysians are asking is whether the Prime Minister will go full steam in reforms to make up for the lost four years or he is  just “reform sloganeering” in his open war with his nemesis, Tun Dr. Mahathir.

From Abdullah’s statement, the Prime Minister has not fully emerged from the cocoon of denial – casting doubts  that he has at last found the political will to carry out the promised reforms.

Abdullah’s claim that he had instituted reforms in the judiciary,  the police  and to fight corruption do not bear scrutiny.

Two days ago, in opening fire on Mahathir, Abdullah blamed his predecessor for “many things that were not right”, citing the 1987 Operasi Lalang crackdown, the erosion of confidence in the judiciary and lack of freedom in the media as examples.

Abdullah is right on all three counts – Operasi Lalang, the judiciary crisis and clampdown on media freedom.

But it is precisely because  Abdullah has nothing  to show on all these and other  fronts as Prime Minister for  more than four years that it  precipitated the  March 8 political tsunami which caused the end of the two-thirds parliamentary majority of the Barisan Nasional and its loss of five state governments.

Abdullah is right that the problems on the judiciary did not start during his era.  Abdullah had lamented two days ago:

 “Many countries do not have confidence in our judiciary. And when there are differences between our countries, they do not want to refer the matter to a Malaysian court.

“They would rather take it to a court in Singapore, Hong Kong or Australia so I thought I had to do something about it to restore confidence because the people are hoping for reforms in the judiciary.”

But what did Abdullah do in the past four years to initiate judicial reforms to restore national and international confidence in the judiciary? He did nothing. In fact, public confidence in the independence, integrity and quality of the judiciary suffered new blows during the   first term of the Abdullah premiership with judicial scandals like  the fast-track appointment of a long-standing Umno activist, Tan Sri Zaki Tun Azmi  to the bench –  the  triple jump to become Federal Court judge in September without ever being High Court or Court of Appeal judge and the  quadruple jump three months later  up the judicial hierarchy to become the Court of Appeal President. Will Zaki make   quintuple jump to be  appointed Chief Justice of Malaysia in October when Datuk Abdul Hamid Mohamad steps down from the topmost judicial post?

Seven years ago in January 2001, Tan Sri Mohamed Dzaiddin started his tenure as Chief Justice of Malaysia publicly admitting  the  “unpalatable fact” that “public confidence in the judiciary has eroded in the last few years” and that  this negative perception had held back the country’s development as multinational corporations and foreign investors were  reluctant to invest because they perceived there was  no level playing field, causing them to prefer arbitration outside Malaysia in the event of dispute.

Seven years later, after being a Prime Minister for more than four years, Abdullah is making exactly the same complaint about the woes of the judiciary as that made by Tun Dzaiddin in 2001!  Is Abdullah  prepared to accept the responsibility not only for the failure to institute judicial reforms but also for the further slides in public confidence in the independence, integrity and quality of the judiciary in the past four years?

As for police reforms, is Abdullah now prepared to acknowledge the message of the March 8 “political tsunami” that Malaysians want an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) to create an efficient, incorruptible, professional world-class police service to reduce crime and restore to Malaysians their  fundamental rights  to be free from crime and the fear of crime?

On the fronts of  anti-corruption and media freedom, what reforms could Abdullah boast about in the past four years?

                This entry was posted on Tuesday, 8 April 2008, 5:23 pm and is filed under
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
,
Judiciary
,
Police
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal – 5 questions Ong Tee Keat must now answer

I welcome the undertaking by the Transport Minister, Datuk Ong Tee Keat to give a full report on the RM4.6 billion Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) bailout scandal, as during the last parliamentary meeting, his predecessor Datuk Chan Kong Choy was “on the run” to evade accountability and responsibility on  the many questions raised on the issue.

There are at least five questions about the RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal which cry out for answer, and which have now become the responsibility of the new Transport Minister, viz:

1. Was it true that when the Port Klang Authority and the Transport Ministry insisted on buying the 1,000 acres of Pulau Indah land for PKFZ at RM25 psf on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis, in the face of strong objection by the Attorney-General’s Chambers and the Treasury which had recommended that the land be acquired at RM10 psf, the Cabinet had given its approval subject to two conditions: (i) categorical assurance by the Transport Minister that the PKFZ proposal was feasible and self-financing and would not require any public funding; and (ii) that every RM100 million variation in the development costs of PKFZ would require prior Cabinet approval.

2. In the event, the first condition was breached when the PKFZ project ballooned from RM1.1 billion to RM4.6 billion requiring government intervention and bailout while the second condition was breached with the original PKFZ development costs of RM400 million ballooning to RM2.8 billion without any prior Cabinet approval ever sought for every RM100 million increase in development costs.

3. The Transport Minister had unlawfully issued four Letters of Support to Kuala Dimensi Sdn. Bhd (KDSB), the PKFZ turnkey contractor — to raise RM4 billion bonds, which were regarded as government guarantees by the market. The Transport Minister had no such powers to issue financial guarantees committing the government, as it could only be issued by the Finance Minister and only after Cabinet approval. The first Letter of Support was issued by the former Transport Minister, Tun Dr. Ling Liong Sik on May 28, 2003, which was Liong Sik’s last day as Transport Minister while the other three were issued by Kong Choy.

4. Whether it wasn’t true that in recognition that the four unlawful “Letters of Support” of the Transport Minister had nonetheless given implicit government guarantee to the market that the Cabinet had in middle of last year gave  retrospective approval for the unlawful and unauthorized four Letters of Support by the Transport Ministers in the past four years creating RM4.6 billion liability for the government in the bailout of PKFZ.

5. Why no action had been taken against the two previous Transport Ministers, both Liong Sik and Kong Choy, as well as the government officials responsible for the unlawful issue of the four “Letters of Support” – getting the government embroiled in the RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal?

I will again be demanding for  full government accountability and responsibility for the RM4.6 billion PKFZ bailout scandal.

I have submitted the following question on the PKFZ scandal for the first meeting of the 12th Parliament, beginning on April 28, 2008:

“To ask the Minister for Transport to fully explain the RM4.6 billion Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) bailout scandal, i.e. on  its viability, history of impropriety of  land transactions, illegal issue of Letters of Support, Cabinet bailout,  retrospective ratification of past illegal decisions by previous Transport Ministers.”

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 9 April 2008, 12:49 pm and is filed under
Parliament
,
PKFZ
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Judicial renaissance – start with retirement of judges who deliver “cut-n-paste” judgments or  those written by others

Let the annual conference of judges this year, held after the March 8 “political tsunami”, be really different from the annual conferences of judges in the past two decades – when the judiciary  except for a very brief period was smothered by a cloud of denial that it had increasingly  lost national and international confidence in its independence, integrity and competence with one judicial crisis after another.

The most infamous Judges’ Conference was the one held in Kuching  in March 1996 where the then Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohtar Abdullah shocked Malaysians with the revelation of a 33-page poison-pen letter which made 112 allegations of corruption, abuses of power and misconduct against 12 judges, together with his  directive to the police to launch investigations to “ferret out” and “bring to justice” the “conspirators” and “brutish beasts” so as to strike “at the venomous elements who are out to discredit the judiciary and subvert justice in our beloved country”.

Four months later, Mohtar Abdullah announced the close of the case when he revealed that a high court judge was the one behind the 33-page poison-pen letter against the judiciary and that the judge concerned had resigned.

The judge was then High Court Judge Datuk Syed Ahmad Idid Syed Abdullah Idid, who became a victim to a Malaysian system of justice which was completely bereft of  the most rudimentary concept of justice.

Syed Ahmad Idid came out of the woodworks more than a decade later, to reveal that his allegations were never really investigated.

In contrast to the infamous 1996 Conference of Judges, let the 2008 Conference of Judges be remembered in history as one which marked the start of the judicial renaissance – the call of the Regent of Perak, Raja Dr. Nazrin Shah in his key-note opening address at the conference yesterday.

After two-decades “judicial darkness”, there are many things crying out to be done to start the “judicial renaissance”, in particular:

•	A just and proper closure to  the 1988 judicial crisis over the sacking of Tun Salleh Abas as Lord President and Datuk George Seah and the late Tan Sri Wan Sulaiman Pawanteh as Supreme Court judges;

•	Constitutional amendment to restore the doctrine of the separation of powers by reinstating the inherent judicial powers of the judiciary as entrenched in the Merdeka Constitution but which was  taken away in a constitutional amendment in 1988.

•	A Judicial Appointment and Promotions Commission.

There can be a faster start to the “judicial renaissance” with the retirement of judges guilty of misconduct such as not delivering judgments, giving “cut-and-paste judgments” or delivering judgments written by others.

This is a consensus which the ongoing Judges Conference can reach  at the end of its three-day conference to demonstrate the commitment of the serving judges to a judicial renaissance as a direct result of the March 8 “political tsunami”, where Malaysians have spoken loud and clear for institutional reforms, including the judiciary.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 10 April 2008, 1:49 pm and is filed under
Judiciary
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Public inquiry into RM70 million HPTC folly – object lesson to all Ministers and MPs on do’s and don’ts of good governance

Finally, the proposed
High Performance Training Centre (HPTC)
in Brickendonbury outside London, originally slated to cost RM490 million but later scaled down and projected to cost RM70 million, has been laid to rest.

The reasons given by the new Youth and Sports Minister Datuk Ismail Sabri Yaakob scrapping the HPTC project is exactly what critics and opponents of the project had said both in and out of Parliament – that it  is an extravagant and unnecessary expenditure which had nothing to do with raising the standards of Malaysian sports!

A special tribute must be given to crusading journalists like R. Nadeswaran of The Sun  who had persevered in their high-quality  investigative journalism under the most difficult of circumstances to expose the series of lies, half-truths and misinformation which proponents of the project had been spinning in the country in support of the folly.

Although Ismail said he was checking on the amount incurred on consultants, travel and other expenses in pursuing the project, giving an undertaking that they will be made public,  it is most extraordinary that the new Sports Minister has difficulty in getting  the latest update of the total expenditures incurred  in the project.

There is no reason why Ismail could not have got these figures as he had been appointed  Sports Minister for more than four weeks, with three intervening Cabinet meetings.  Furthermore,  there is  only a change of a Minister and no change of government with consequential disappearance of files, as happened in some of the states  where the Barisan Nasional had lost state power in the March 8 politicial tsunami.

The end of the HTPC folly is one direct consequence of  the March 8 political tsunami, removing not only the Barisan Nasional’s two-thirds parliamentary majority and control in five state governments but also its “high-and-mighty” attitude that it could do no wrong and could do what it liked with its electoral mandate from the people.

There should be a public inquiry into the folly of the RM70 million HPTC in Brickendonbury outside London  as an object lesson to all Ministers, MPs and civil servants  on  the do’s and don’ts if the government is serious about accountability, transparency and good governance – to establish how many millions of ringgit  have actually been wasted and misspent as well as to pin down the lies, half-truths and misinformation which had been spouted in the past two years by government officials and committees – representing  one of the worst examples of bad governance of the Abdullah premiership.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 11 April 2008, 5:15 pm and is filed under
Sports
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal – third Transport Minister to be marred and tarred?

Many must be surprised  by the combative and ferocious response  of the  new Transport Minister, Datuk Ong Tee Keat following  my statement welcoming his undertaking to give a full report on the RM4.6 billion Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) bailout scandal.

Ong’s reaction  was totally unprovoked and unjustifiable as my  statement had welcomed  his pledge of government accountability and transparency on the RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal, pointing out  five cardinal questions  of the PKFZ scandal which are crying out for answer.

I hope Ong’s uncharacteristic response was not because he had been told to “shut up” whether at Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting or elsewhere after his bold  announcements on Monday and Tuesday  that he would reveal the whole truth  about  the RM4.6 billion  PKFZ scandal, which was  reported  by the media, such as  the following newspaper headlines  viz:

•
“Ong to tell all on the PKFZ – ‘I wish to reveal to the people the true situation’”

(Star 8.4.08)

•
“Report on PKFZ – IT WON’T BE JUST A STATEMENT, PLEDGES TRANSPORT MINISTER”
 –
(The Sun, 8.4.08)

•
“Won’t consider whether former leaders would be investigated – Ong Tee Keat: Revealing the truth is about the issue and not personalities”

(Sin Chew 9.4.08)

The Sun
 reported:

Asked when the report will be ready, he said it will be out soon once a thorough report is completed. “We will not just give a statement to explain everything.”

From Ong’s statement, Malaysians would expect him to make public the full report on the RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal in a week or two, or latest by before the convening of Parliament on 28th April 2008.

It is to ensure that Ong keeps his pledge to make public  a full report on the PKFZ scandal that I took out the  “insurance” to pose him an oral  question in Parliament on 8th May – a full month’s notice – on the PKFZ scandal, viz:

“To ask the Minister for Transport to fully explain the RM4.6 billion Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) bailout scandal, i.e. on  its viability, history of impropriety of  land transactions, illegal issue of Letters of Support, Cabinet bailout,  retrospective ratification of past illegal decisions by previous Transport Ministers.”

In my statement two days ago welcoming Ong’s pledge to give a full report on the PKFZ scandal, I pointed out five areas why the PKFZ project has become a RM4.6 billion financial scandal – the biggest financial scandal of the Abdullah administration which is even bigger than the first financial scandal of the Mahathir premiership, the RM2.5 billion Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) scandal.

All right-thinking Malaysians use the word “scandal” in connection with the PKFZ because of the government inability to give full and satisfactory accountability as to  how a RM1.1 billion project could balloon to RM4.6 billion, requiring government intervention and bailout when it was all along meant to be feasible, self-financing and would not require any single sen of public funding!

Ong should be better briefed before he makes any public outburst. He criticized me for not lodging any complaint to the authorities or making a visit to PKFZ.

He cannot be more wrong.  DAP had lodged over four police reports and one Anti-Corruption Agency report on the RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal, but all to no avail – and I had made a visit to the PKFZ at the end of last year.

Ong must be forewarned that if he reneges on his public pledge to “tell all” about the PKFZ scandal soon, made voluntarily and proactively by him early this week,  he runs the risk of being the third Transport Minister whose reputation would be marred and tarred  by the RM4.6 billion PKFZ scandal.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 11 April 2008, 9:59 am and is filed under
PKFZ
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.


Hishammuddin’s insensitive, irresponsible and provocative “Malay keris” antics – public apology awaited

(Speech at the first  Public Ceramah/Consultation with DAP MPs, Excos, State Assembly representatives  at Chin Woo Hall, Ipoh on Saturday, 12th April 2008)

After the March 8 political tsunami, MCA and Gerakan leaders blamed Umno for their electoral debacle, in particular the insensitivity shown by Umno leaders like the Umno Youth leader and Education Minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein for his provocative and irresponsible  “Malay keris” antics at Umno Youth general assemblies.

However, MCA and Gerakan leaders have not  admitted their own weaknesses and failures in not  speaking up loud and clear in Cabinet, Parliament and  the government to protest against such insensitivity and  demanding that Hishammudin publicly apologise for his “Malay keris” antics and that there should be no recurrence of such insensitivity in a plural society by a national leader who holds the important  and sensitive post of Education Minister.

It is heartening that after the March 8 “political tsunami”, MCA and Gerakan leaders have realized the damage, not only to the Barisan Nasional but to  five decades of nation-building, caused by Hishammuddin’s “Malay keris” antics, but it is not enough to realize one’s mistake if one is not prepared to take the necessary remedial measures.

 Hishammuddin should publicly apologise for his “Malay keris” antics and MCA, Gerakan and other Barisan Nasional  leaders should demand in unison for such an apology and assurance of no repetition in Cabinet and Parliament.

Unless Hishammuddin is prepared to make a public apology and MCA, Gerakan and other BN  leaders in Cabinet and Parliament take a public position demanding that Hishammuddin publicly apologise for his offensive, irresponsible and provocative  “Malay keris” antics, it could not be said that Umno, MCA, Gerakan and BN  leaders have learnt anything from the March 8 “political tsunami”.

The questions I want to pose tonight is whether Hishammuddin is prepared to  publicly apologise for his irresponsible and provocative  “Malay keris” antics and whether MCA, Gerakan and other BN  leaders  prepared to demand in unison for such an apology and assurance of no repetition in Cabinet and Parliament as proof that they have taken seriously the voice of Malaysian voters in the March 8 “political tsunami”.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 13 April 2008, 11:07 am and is filed under
DAP
,
UMNO
. You can follow any responses to this entry through
RSS 2.0
.                You can
leave a response
, or
trackback
 from your own site.