Are Malaysians to live with a new division  between patriotic Malaysians who want to know and tangkap “MO1” and those who don’t care or want to know who is “MO1”?

A new division has arisen in Malaysia for the past month – between patriotic Malaysians who want to know  and tangkap “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1” (“MO1) mentioned 36 times and described as a mastermind and co-conspirator in the US Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit for US$1 billion forfeiture of assets as a result of theft, embezzlement, misappropriation and money-laundering of US$3.5 billion 1MDB funds and overnight turned Malaysia into a global kleptocracy and  those who don’t care or want to know who is “MO1”.

Patriotic Malaysians who want to know and tangkap “MO1” were acting both in  word and spirit of the Conference of Rulers’ statement issued ten months ago on  October 6 last year representing the concern of the nine royal rulers that the government quickly conclude investigations into the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) affair and to take “the appropriate stern action” against those implicated.

The statement by the Conference of Rulers was the first time that the sultans of the nine royal houses have commented on the 1MDB scandal which had by then dragged on for more than a year.

The rulers said: “The failure to give convincing clarifications and answers is feared to have resulted in a crisis of confidence.

“As a consequence, the people believe, whether basing on reality or perception, that this is among the causes for the plunge in the value of the ringgit, impacting the country’s financial market and economic climate negatively and at the same time, adversely affecting the world’s view of Malaysia.”

The rulers were worried that if the issue was not wisely handled and dragged on, could jeopardise the economy and livelihood of the people.

The statement called on those involved to extend “real and sincere” cooperation for the investigation to achieve its objectives.

It said: “The findings of the investigation must be reported comprehensively and in a transparent manner so that the people will be convinced of the sincerity of the government which shall not at all conceal facts and the truth.

“The Malay Rulers remind all leaders to always adhere to the Rukun Negara principles of upholding the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

“To ensure that the Government enjoys the people’s trust, that leaders are respected, that political stability is guaranteed and that the economy continues to grow, all leaders must constantly ensure that justice is meted out equitably and transparently based on the law.”

Although the Conference of Rulers’ statement was welcomed by the Cabinet Minister who was also the Barisan Nasional Strategic Communications Director, Datuk Seri Abdul Rahman Dahlan, who  claimed that the Rulers’ statement was in line with what the government wanted in the investigation on 1MDB.

Abdul Rahman even said:

“The prime minister (Najib Abdul Razak) has asked for six months (to settle the 1MDB issue). I guess early next year, January it can be resolved.”

January 2016 is long behind us, but  the 1MDB scandal is even further from resolution, growing ever bigger and mind-blowing, extending its international tentacles and turning Malaysia overnight into a global kleptocracy!

The past ten months have set a new record, as it will be difficult to find another example like the Conference of Rulers’ Statement on 1MDB  which had seen a greater multitude of violations by none other than the government itself – the most blatant and pernicious violations being:

•	Refusal to make public the Auditor-General’s Report on 1MDB despite the tabling of Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Report on 1MDB in Parliament on April 6;

•	Refusal and failure to respond to the DOJ lawsuit on forfeiture of US$1 billion assets from the theft, defrauding, embezzlement, misappropriation and money-laundering of US$3.5 billion 1MDB funds, with  codename of  “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1” mentioned 36 times in the 136-page DOJ filing, described as a master-mind and co-conspirator in the multi-billion ringgit defrauding and embezzlement of 1MDB funds;

•	Refusal of the PAC to re-open investigations into the 1MDB, based on the new information contained in the DOJ filings;

•	Refusal and failure of major national institutions, including the major enforcement and investigative agencies, such as  the Attorney-General’s Chambers,  the  police, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, Bank Negara,  the National Audit Office, Parliament, Cabinet or the Prime Minister to take “the appropriate stern action” against those implicated in the 1MDB scandal.

•	Refusal and failure to defend the integrity and good name of Malaysia after being described as  a “global kleptocracy” by the DOJ lawsuits.

Are Malaysians to live with this new division among them – between patriotic Malaysians who want to know  and tangkap “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1” (“MO1) and those don’t care or want to know who is “MO1”?

Abdul Rahman Dahlan has said that “only an idiot doesn’t know who that person was” as there is no secret who is Malaysian Official 1 (MO1) mentioned in the DOJ civil lawsuits.

Would he support #TangkapMO1 campaign and the cry of its spokesperson, Anis Syafiqah Md Yusf of “Whole world knows we’ve been robbed, why are we still relaxed”?

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 25 August 2016, 3:45 pm and is filed under
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Saudis and Extremism: ‘Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters’

by Scott Shaneaug,

New York Times

Aug. 25, 2016

Critics see Saudi Arabia’s export of a rigid strain of Islam as contributing to terrorism, but the kingdom’s influence depends greatly on local conditions.

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do not agree on much, but Saudi Arabia may be an exception. She has deplored Saudi Arabia’s support for “radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path towards extremism.” He has called the Saudis “the world’s biggest funders of terrorism.”

The first American diplomat to serve as envoy to Muslim communities around the world visited 80 countries and concluded that the Saudi influence was destroying tolerant Islamic traditions. “If the Saudis do not cease what they are doing,” the official, Farah Pandith, wrote last year, “there must be diplomatic, cultural and economic consequences.”

And hardly a week passes without a television pundit or a newspaper columnist blaming Saudi Arabia for jihadist violence. On HBO, Bill Maher calls Saudi teachings “medieval,” adding an epithet. In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria writes that the Saudis have “created a monster in the world of Islam.”

The idea has become a commonplace: that Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism has fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism. As the Islamic State projects its menacing calls for violence into the West, directing or inspiring terrorist attacks in country after country, an old debate over Saudi influence on Islam has taken on new relevance.

What Is Wahhabism?

The Islam taught in and by Saudi Arabia is often called Wahhabism, after the 18th-century cleric who founded it. A literalist, ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam, its adherents often denigrate other Islamic sects as well as Christians and Jews.

Is the world today a more divided, dangerous and violent place because of the cumulative effect of five decades of oil-financed proselytizing from the historical heart of the Muslim world? Or is Saudi Arabia, which has often supported Western-friendly autocrats over Islamists, merely a convenient scapegoat for extremism and terrorism with many complex causes — the United States’s own actions among them?

Those questions are deeply contentious, partly because of the contradictory impulses of the Saudi state.

In the realm of extremist Islam, the Saudis are “both the arsonists and the firefighters,” said William McCants, a Brookings Institution scholar. “They promote a very toxic form of Islam that draws sharp lines between a small number of true believers and everyone else, Muslim and non-Muslim,” he said, providing ideological fodder for violent jihadists.

Yet at the same time, “they’re our partners in counterterrorism,” said Mr. McCants, one of three dozen academics, government officials and experts on Islam from multiple countries interviewed for this article.

Conflicting Goals

Saudi leaders seek good relations with the West and see jihadist violence as a menace that could endanger their rule, especially now that the Islamic State is staging attacks in the kingdom — 25 in the last eight months, by the government’s count. But they are also driven by their rivalry with Iran, and they depend for legitimacy on a clerical establishment dedicated to a reactionary set of beliefs. Those conflicting goals can play out in a bafflingly inconsistent manner.

Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian terrorism expert who has advised the United States government, said the most important effect of Saudi proselytizing might have been to slow the evolution of Islam, blocking its natural accommodation to a diverse and globalized world. “If there was going to be an Islamic reformation in the 20th century, the Saudis probably prevented it by pumping out literalism,” he said.

The reach of the Saudis has been stunning, touching nearly every country with a Muslim population, from the Gothenburg Mosque in Sweden to the King Faisal Mosque in Chad, from the King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles to the Seoul Central Mosque in South Korea. Support has come from the Saudi government; the royal family; Saudi charities; and Saudi-sponsored organizations including the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and the International Islamic Relief Organization, providing the hardware of impressive edifices and the software of preaching and teaching.

There is a broad consensus that the Saudi ideological juggernaut has disrupted local Islamic traditions in dozens of countries — the result of lavish spending on religious outreach for half a century, estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. The result has been amplified by guest workers, many from South Asia, who spend years in Saudi Arabia and bring Saudi ways home with them. In many countries, Wahhabist preaching has encouraged a harshly judgmental religion, contributing to majority support in some polls in Egypt, Pakistan and other countries for stoning for adultery and execution for anyone trying to leave Islam.

But exactly how Saudi influence plays out seems to depend greatly on local conditions. In parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, for instance, Saudi teachings have shifted the religious culture in a markedly conservative direction, most visibly in the decision of more women to cover their hair or of men to grow beards. Among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe, the Saudi influence seems to be just one factor driving radicalization, and not the most significant. In divided countries like Pakistan and Nigeria, the flood of Saudi money, and the ideology it promotes, have exacerbated divisions over religion that regularly prove lethal.

And for a small minority in many countries, the exclusionary Saudi version of Sunni Islam, with its denigration of Jews and Christians, as well as of Muslims of Shiite, Sufi and other traditions, may have made some people vulnerable to the lure of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups. “There’s only so much dehumanizing of the other that you can be exposed to — and exposed to as the word of God — without becoming susceptible to recruitment,” said David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington who tracks Saudi influence.

Exhibit A may be Saudi Arabia itself, which produced not only Osama bin Laden, but also 15 of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001; sent more suicide bombers than any other country to Iraq after the 2003 invasion; and has supplied more foreign fighters to the Islamic State, 2,500, than any country other than Tunisia.

Mehmet Gormez, the senior Islamic cleric in Turkey, said that while he was meeting with Saudi clerics in Riyadh in January, the Saudi authorities had executed 47 people in a single day on terrorism charges, 45 of them Saudi citizens. “I said: ‘These people studied Islam for 10 or 15 years in your country. Is there a problem with the educational system?’ ” Mr. Gormez said in an interview. He argued that Wahhabi teaching was undermining the pluralism, tolerance and openness to science and learning that had long characterized Islam. “Sadly,” he said, the changes have taken place “in almost all of the Islamic world.”

In a huge embarrassment to the Saudi authorities, the Islamic State adopted official Saudi textbooks for its schools until the extremist group could publish its own books in 2015. Out of 12 works by Muslim scholars republished by the Islamic State, seven are by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Saudi school of Islam, said Jacob Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Adil al-Kalbani declared with regret in a television interview in January that the Islamic State leaders “draw their ideas from what is written in our own books, our own principles.”

Small details of Saudi practice can cause outsize trouble. For at least two decades, the kingdom has distributed an English translation of the Quran that in the first surah, or chapter, adds parenthetical references to Jews and Christians in addressing Allah: “those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).” Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University and the editor in chief of the new Study Quran, an annotated English version, said the additions were “a complete heresy, with no basis in Islamic tradition.”

Accordingly, many American officials who have worked to counter extremism and terrorism have formed a dark view of the Saudi effect — even if, given the sensitivity of the relationship, they are often loath to discuss it publicly. The United States’ reliance on Saudi counterterrorism cooperation in recent years — for instance, the Saudi tip that foiled a 2010 Qaeda plot to blow up two American cargo planes — has often taken precedence over concerns about radical influence. And generous Saudi funding for professorships and research centers at American universities, including the most elite institutions, has deterred criticism and discouraged research on the effects of Wahhabi proselytizing, according to Mr. McCants — who is working on a book about the Saudi impact on global Islam — and other scholars.

One American former official who has begun to speak out is Ms. Pandith, the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities worldwide. From 2009 to 2014, she visited Muslims in 80 countries and concluded that Saudi influence was pernicious and universal. “In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence,” she wrote in The New York Times last year. She said the United States should “disrupt the training of extremist imams,” “reject free Saudi textbooks and translations that are filled with hate,” and “prevent the Saudis from demolishing local Muslim religious and cultural sites that are evidence of the diversity of Islam.”

Yet some scholars on Islam and extremism, including experts on radicalization in many countries, push back against the notion that Saudi Arabia bears predominant responsibility for the current wave of extremism and jihadist violence. They point to multiple sources for the rise and spread of Islamist terrorism, including repressive secular governments in the Middle East, local injustices and divisions, the hijacking of the internet for terrorist propaganda, and American interventions in the Muslim world from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq. The 20th-century ideologues most influential with modern jihadists, like Sayyid Qutb of Egypt and Abul Ala Maududi of Pakistan, reached their extreme, anti-Western views without much Saudi input. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State despise Saudi rulers, whom they consider the worst of hypocrites.

“Americans like to have someone to blame — a person, a political party or country,” said Robert S. Ford, a former United States ambassador to Syria and Algeria. “But it’s a lot more complicated than that. I’d be careful about blaming the Saudis.”

While Saudi religious influence may be disruptive, he and others say, its effect is not monolithic. A major tenet of official Saudi Islamic teaching is obedience to rulers — hardly a precept that encourages terrorism intended to break nations. Many Saudi and Saudi-trained clerics are quietist, characterized by a devotion to scripture and prayer and a shunning of politics, let alone political violence.

And especially since 2003, when Qaeda attacks in the kingdom awoke the monarchy to the danger it faced from militancy, Saudi Arabia has acted more aggressively to curtail preachers who call for violence, cut off terrorist financing and cooperate with Western intelligence to foil terrorist plots. From 2004 to 2012, 3,500 imams were fired for refusing to renounce extremist views, and another 20,000 went through retraining, according to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs — though the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom expressed skepticism that the training was really “instilling tolerance.”

An American scholar with long experience in Saudi Arabia — who spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve his ability to travel to the kingdom for research — said he believed that Saudi influence had often been exaggerated in American political discourse. But he compared it to climate change. Just as a one-degree increase in temperature can ultimately result in drastic effects around the globe, with glaciers melting and species dying off, so Saudi teaching is playing out in many countries in ways that are hard to predict and difficult to trace but often profound, the scholar said.

Saudi proselytizing can result in a “recalibrating of the religious center of gravity” for young people, the scholar said, which makes it “easier for them to swallow or make sense of the ISIS religious narrative when it does arrive. It doesn’t seem quite as foreign as it might have, had that Saudi religious influence not been there.”

Centuries-Old Dilemma

Why does Saudi Arabia find it so difficult to let go of an ideology that much of the world finds repugnant? The key to the Saudi dilemma dates back nearly three centuries to the origin of the alliance that still undergirds the Saudi state. In 1744, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a reformist cleric, sought the protection of Muhammad bin Saud, a powerful tribal leader in the harsh desert of the Arabian Peninsula. The alliance was mutually beneficial: Wahhab received military protection for his movement, which sought to return Muslims to what he believed were the values of the early years of Islam in the seventh century, when the Prophet Muhammad was alive. (His beliefs were a variant of Salafism, the conservative school of Islam that teaches that the salaf, or pious ancestors, had the correct ways and beliefs and should be emulated.) In return, the Saud family earned the endorsement of an Islamic cleric — a puritanical enforcer known for insisting on the death by stoning of a woman for adultery.

Wahhab’s particular version of Islam was the first of two historical accidents that would define Saudi religious influence centuries later. What came to be known as Wahhabism was “a tribal, desert Islam,” said Akbar Ahmed, the chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington. It was shaped by the austere environment — xenophobic, fiercely opposed to shrines and tombs, disapproving of art and music, and hugely different from the cosmopolitan Islam of diverse trading cities like Baghdad and Cairo.

The second historical accident came in 1938, when American prospectors discovered the largest oil reserves on earth in Saudi Arabia. Oil revenue generated by the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco, created fabulous wealth. But it also froze in place a rigid social and economic system and gave the conservative religious establishment an extravagant budget for the export of its severe strain of Islam.

“One day you find oil, and the world is coming to you,” Professor Ahmed said. “God has given you the ability to take your version of Islam to the world.”

In 1964, when King Faisal ascended the throne, he embraced the obligation of spreading Islam. A modernizer in many respects, with close ties to the West, he nonetheless could not overhaul the Wahhabi doctrine that became the face of Saudi generosity in many countries. Over the next four decades, in non-Muslim-majority countries alone, Saudi Arabia would build 1,359 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 202 colleges and 2,000 schools. Saudi money helped finance 16 American mosques; four in Canada; and others in London, Madrid, Brussels and Geneva, according to a report in an official Saudi weekly, Ain al-Yaqeen. The total spending, including supplying or training imams and teachers, was “many billions” of Saudi riyals (at a rate of about four to a dollar), the report said.

Saudi religious teaching had particular force because it came from the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, the land of Islam’s two holiest places, Mecca and Medina. When Saudi imams arrived in Muslim countries in Asia or Africa, or in Muslim communities in Europe or the Americas, wearing traditional Arabian robes, speaking the language of the Quran — and carrying a generous checkbook — they had automatic credibility.

As the 20th century progressed and people of different nationalities and faiths mixed routinely, the puritanical, exclusionary nature of Wahhab’s teachings would become more and more dysfunctional. But the Saudi government would find it extraordinarily difficult to shed or soften its ideology, especially after the landmark year of 1979.

In Tehran that year, the Iranian revolution brought to power a radical Shiite government, symbolically challenging Saudi Arabia, the leader of Sunnism, for leadership of global Islam. The declaration of an Islamic Republic escalated the competition between the two major branches of Islam, spurring the Saudis to redouble their efforts to counter Iran and spread Wahhabism around the world.

Then, in a stunning strike, a band of 500 Saudi extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca for two weeks, publicly calling Saudi rulers puppets of the West and traitors to true Islam. The rebels were defeated, but leading clerics agreed to back the government only after assurances of support for a crackdown on immodest ways in the kingdom and a more aggressive export of Wahhabism abroad.

Finally, at year’s end, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and seized power to prop up a Communist government. It soon faced an insurgent movement of mujahedeen, or holy warriors battling for Islam, which drew fighters from around the world for a decade-long battle to expel the occupiers.

Throughout the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and the United States worked together to finance the mujahedeen in this great Afghan war, which would revive the notion of noble armed jihad for Muslims worldwide. President Ronald Reagan famously welcomed to the Oval Office a delegation of bearded “Afghan freedom fighters” whose social and theological views were hardly distinguishable from those later embraced by the Taliban.

In fact, the United States spent $50 million from 1986 to 1992 on what was called a “jihad literacy” project — printing books for Afghan children and adults to encourage violence against non-Muslim “infidels” like Soviet troops. A first-grade language textbook for Pashto speakers, for example, according to a study by Dana Burde, an associate professor at New York University, used “Mujahid,” or fighter of jihad, as the illustration: “My brother is a Mujahid. Afghan Muslims are Mujahedeen. I do jihad together with them. Doing jihad against infidels is our duty.”

Pressure After 9/11

One day in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Robert W. Jordan, the United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was driving in the kingdom with the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. The prince pointed to a mosque and said, “I just fired the imam there.” The man’s preaching had been too militant, he said.

Mr. Jordan, a Texas lawyer, said that after the Qaeda attacks, he had stepped up pressure on the Saudi government over its spread of extremism. “I told them: ‘What you teach in your schools and preach in your mosques now is not an internal matter. It affects our national security,’” he said.

After years of encouraging and financing a harsh Islam in support of the anti-Soviet jihad, the United States had reversed course — gradually during the 1990s and then dramatically after the Sept. 11 attacks. But in pressuring Saudi Arabia, American officials would tread lightly, acutely aware of American dependence on Saudi oil and intelligence cooperation. Saudi reform would move at an excruciatingly slow pace.

Twelve years after Sept. 11, after years of quiet American complaints about Saudi teachings, a State Department contractor, the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, completed a study of official Saudi textbooks. It reported some progress in cutting back on bigoted and violent content but found that plenty of objectionable material remained. Officials never released the 2013 study, for fear of angering the Saudis. The New York Times obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act.

Seventh graders were being taught that “fighting the infidels to elevate the words of Allah” was among the deeds Allah loved the most, the report found, among dozens of passages it found troubling. Tenth graders learned that Muslims who abandoned Islam should be jailed for three days and, if they did not change their minds, “killed for walking away from their true religion.” Fourth graders read that non-Muslims had been “shown the truth but abandoned it, like the Jews,” or had replaced truth with “ignorance and delusion, like the Christians.”

Some of the books, prepared and distributed by the government, propagated views that were hostile to science, modernity and women’s rights, not to say downright quirky — advocating, for instance, execution for sorcerers and warning against the dangers of the Rotary Club and the Lions Club. (The groups’ intent, said a 10th-grade textbook, “is to achieve the goals of the Zionist movement.”)

The textbooks, or other Saudi teaching materials with similar content, had been distributed in scores of countries, the study found. Textbook reform has continued since the 2013 study, and Saudi officials say they are trying to replace older books distributed overseas.

But as the study noted, the schoolbooks were only a modest part of the Saudis’ lavishly funded global export of Wahhabism. In many places, the study said, the largess includes “a Saudi-funded school with a Wahhabist faculty (educated in a Saudi-funded Wahhabist University), attached to a mosque with a Wahhabist imam, and ultimately controlled by an international Wahhabist educational body.”

This ideological steamroller has landed in diverse places where Muslims of different sects had spent centuries learning to accommodate one another. Sayyed Shah, a Pakistani journalist working on a doctorate in the United States, described the devastating effect on his town, not far from the Afghan border, of the arrival some years ago of a young Pakistani preacher trained in a Saudi-funded seminary.

Village residents had long held a mélange of Muslim beliefs, he said. “We were Sunni, but our culture, our traditions were a mixture of Shia and Barelvi and Deobandi,” Mr. Shah said, referring to Muslim sects. His family would visit the large Barelvi shrine, and watch their Shiite neighbors as they lashed themselves in a public religious ritual. “We wouldn’t do that ourselves, but we’d hand out sweets and water,” he said.

The new preacher, he said, denounced the Barelvi and Shiite beliefs as false and heretical, dividing the community and setting off years of bitter argument. By 2010, Mr. Shah said, “everything had changed.” Women who had used shawls to cover their hair and face began wearing full burqas. Militants began attacking kiosks where merchants sold secular music CDs. Twice, terrorists used explosives to try to destroy the village’s locally famous shrine.

Now, Mr. Shah said, families are divided; his cousin, he said, “just wants Saudi religion.” He said an entire generation had been “indoctrinated” with a rigid, unforgiving creed.

“It’s so difficult these days,” he said. “Initially we were on a single path. We just had economic problems, but we were culturally sound.”

He added, “But now it’s very difficult, because some people want Saudi culture to be our culture, and others are opposing that.”

C. Christine Fair, a specialist on Pakistan at Georgetown University, said Mr. Shah’s account was credible. But like many scholars describing the Saudi impact on religion, she said that militancy in Pakistan also had local causes. While Saudi money and teaching have unquestionably been “accelerants,” Pakistan’s sectarian troubles and jihadist violence have deep roots dating to the country’s origins in the partition of India in 1947.

“The idea that without the Saudis Pakistan would be Switzerland is ridiculous,” she said.

Elusive Saudi Links

That is the disputed question, of course: how the world would be different without decades of Saudi-funded shaping of Islam. Though there is a widespread belief that Saudi influence has contributed to the growth of terrorism, it is rare to find a direct case of cause and effect. For example, in Brussels, the Grand Mosque was built with Saudi money and staffed with Saudi imams. In 2012, according to Saudi diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, one Saudi preacher was removed after Belgian complaints that he was a “true Salafi” who did not accept other schools of Islam. And Brussels’ immigrant neighborhoods, notably Molenbeek, have long been the home of storefront mosques teaching hard-line Salafi views.

After the terrorist attacks in Paris in November and in Brussels in March were tied to an Islamic State cell in Belgium, the Saudi history was the subject of several news media reports. Yet it was difficult to find any direct link between the bombers and the Saudi legacy in the Belgian capital.

Several suspects had petty criminal backgrounds; their knowledge of Islam was described by friends as superficial; they did not appear to be regulars at any mosque. Though the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blasts, resentment of the treatment of North African immigrant families in Belgium and exposure to Islamic State propaganda, in person or via the internet and social media, appeared to be the major factors motivating the attacks.

If there was a Saudi connection, it was highly indirect, perhaps playing out over a generation or longer. Hind Fraihi, a Moroccan-Belgian journalist who went underground in the Brussels immigrant neighborhood of Molenbeek in 2005 and wrote a book about it, met Saudi-trained imams and found lots of extremist literature written in Saudi Arabia that encouraged “polarization, the sentiment of us against them, the glorification of jihad.”

The recent attackers, Ms. Fraihi said, were motivated by “lots of factors — economic frustration, racism, a generation that feels it has no future.” But Saudi teaching, she said, “is part of the cocktail.”

Without the Saudi presence over the decades, might a more progressive and accommodating Islam, reflecting immigrants’ Moroccan roots, have taken hold in Brussels? Would young Muslims raised in Belgium have been less susceptible to the stark, violent call of the Islamic State? Conceivably, but the case is impossible to prove.

Or consider an utterly different cultural milieu — the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. The Saudis have sent money for mosque-building, books and teachers for decades, said Sidney Jones, the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta.

“Over time,” said Ms. Jones, who has visited or lived in Indonesia since the 1970s, the Saudi influence “has contributed to a more conservative, more intolerant atmosphere.” (President Obama, who lived in Indonesia as a boy, has remarked on the same phenomenon.) She said she believed money from private Saudi donors and foundations was behind campaigns in Indonesia against Shiite and Ahmadi Islam, considered heretical by Wahhabi teaching. Some well-known Indonesian religious vigilantes are Saudi-educated, she said.

But when Ms. Jones studied the approximately 1,000 people arrested in Indonesia on terrorism charges since 2002, she found only a few — “literally four or five” — with ties to Wahhabi or Salafi institutions. When it comes to violence, she concluded, the Saudi connection is “mostly a red herring.”

In fact, she said, there is a gulf between Indonesian jihadists and Indonesian Salafis who look to Saudi or Yemeni scholars for guidance. The jihadists accuse the Salafis of failing to act on their convictions; the Salafis scorn the jihadists as extremists.

Whatever the global effects of decades of Saudi proselytizing, it is under greater scrutiny than ever, from outside and inside the kingdom. Saudi leaders’ ideological reform efforts, encompassing textbooks and preaching, amount to a tacit recognition that its religious exports have sometimes backfired. And the kingdom has stepped up an aggressive public relations campaign in the West, hiring American publicists to counter critical news media reports and fashion a reformist image for Saudi leaders.

But neither the publicists nor their clients can renounce the strain of Islam on which the Saudi state was built, and old habits sometimes prove difficult to suppress. A prominent cleric, Saad bin Nasser al-Shethri, had been stripped of a leadership position by the previous king, Abdullah, for condemning coeducation. King Salman restored Mr. Shethri to the job last year, not long after the cleric had joined the chorus of official voices criticizing the Islamic State. But Mr. Shethri’s reasoning for denouncing the Islamic State suggested the difficulty of change. The group was, he said, “more infidel than Jews and Christians.”

                This entry was posted on Friday, 26 August 2016, 6:49 pm and is filed under
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Will Najib clear Malaysia’s name of being a global kleptocracy in his 59th National Day  and 53rd Malaysia Day Messages and make it the subject of his address to the  UN General Assembly next month?

Malaysians will celebrate the 59th National Day and the 53rd Malaysia Day in five and three weeks respectively.

What should be Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s main concern in these two messages?

Will Najib clear Malaysia’s name of being a global kleptocracy in his 59th National day and 53rd Malaysia Day Messages and make it the subject of his fifth address as Prime Minister to the United Nations General Assembly next month?

When Najib became Prime Minister in April 2009, he prides himself as the ‘Father of Transformation’ or ‘Bapa Transformasi’ with a spate of transformation initiatives and an alphabet soup of acronyms such as 1Malaysia,  ETP, GTP, NKRA, NKEA, SRI, NEM, BR1M and KR1M, just to name a few.

But the last transformation Malaysians want from Najib is to transform Malaysia into a global kleptocracy overnight  – which the US Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuits for forfeiture of US$1 billion of assets as a result of theft, embezzlement, misappropriation and money-laundering of US$3.5 billion 1MDB funds have highlighted to the international community since July 20.

What is even most  embarrassing and incriminating is that  although the DOJ actions are “civil action in rem” for forfeiture for 1MDB-linked money-laundered assets in the United States, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, they do not preclude criminal action, as the forfeiture is but a first step to prevent dissipation of the specified assets.

As the act of money laundering and involvement in a conspiracy to do so are criminal offences, it is likely that criminal proceedings to prosecute those responsible for the alleged misappropriation of 1MDB funds and the laundering of those funds in the United States and elsewhere would follow upon forfeiture of the assets.

But Malaysia cannot wait for such criminal proceedings and their outcome in the United States, for Malaysia’s reputation and good name have been blemished and tarnished in our  “transformation” into a global kleptocracy.

What is worse, the Malaysian national sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, is not only the subject of the world’s largest single action against money-laundering and  forfeiture of assets as a result of multi-billion dollar kleptocracy, “public officials and their associates” are publicly named as being active participants and co-conspirators  in an international conspiracy from 2009 to 2013, to “fraudulently divert billions of dollars from 1MDB through various means, including by defrauding foreign banks and by sending foreign wire communications in furtherance of the scheme, and thereafter, to launder the proceeds of that criminal conduct, including in and through U.S. financial institutions”.

Although some of  these “public officials” are mentioned in code, “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1”, “1MDB OFFICER 1”, “1MDB OFFICER 2”, “1MDB OFFICER 3”, it is not difficult to guess their identities.

As Barisan Nasional  Strategic Communications Director and Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of EPU, Datuk Seri Abdul Rahman Dahlan,   has said, “only an idiot doesn’t know who that person was” as there is no secret who is Malaysian Official 1 (MO1) mentioned in the DOJ civil lawsuits. The same applies to the “1MDB OFFICERS 1-3”.

As “public officials” responsible for the management of 1MDB were directly implicated  as “co-conspirators” in the multi-billion ringgit theft, embezzlement, misappropriation and money-laundering of the funds from the national sovereign wealth fund, how can the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and the principal officers of all the national enforcement and investigative institutions like the Police, the Attorney-General’s Chambers, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, Bank Negara,  the National Audit Department and Parliament, adopt a hands-off, indifferent and nonchalant attitude to the  DOJ action as  in the past 35 days, acting like “ostriches with heads in the sand” to ignore Malaysia’s “transformation” in the international community into a “global kleptocracy”?

There is merit and validity in the cry by the spokesperson of the #TangkapMO1 campaign, Anis Syafiqah Md Yusof – “Whole world knows we’ve been robbed, why are we still relaxed?”

Will Najib address who is “MO1” and how to clear Malaysia’s unworthy transformation into a global kleptocracy in his 59th National Day and 53rd Malaysia Day Messages, as well as make a national commitment to speak at the United Nations General Assembly next month to convince the world that Malaysia is not a kleptocracy but fully committed to the principles good governance and public integrity?

                This entry was posted on Friday, 26 August 2016, 12:13 pm and is filed under
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Seeking a new formula to unite Malaysia’s diversity

Ooi Kee Beng

The Straits Times

AUG 26, 2016

The issue of Bangsa Johor (Johor nationality) made national news again on Wednesday, when former prime minister Mahathir Mohamed was asked about it at a forum on relations between the federal government and state governments.

Asked about Johor’s separation from Malaysia, a national concern fanned by provocative comments made by Johor’s Crown Prince, Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, Tun Dr Mahathir replied that such a separation would encourage “unhealthy” feelings of superiority and harm the unity of the federation.

The issue of “Bangsa Johor” is hugely interesting on several levels. It acts as a reminder that despite the centralised nature of Malaysian governance, the country was sewn together in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s as a federation. This was clearly reflected in the country’s 1957 Constitution.

This solution, worked out for a smooth decolonisation process, sought to acknowledge diversity while uniting a miscellany of state formations, identities and loyalties. Over the last half-century, however, much has happened to undermine this compromise.

The role of race champion that the Malay-based Umno developed for itself quickly skewed the national inter-ethnic compromise – and its consequent federal system – to such an extent that being Malay became more important to most of its followers than becoming Malaysian.

It also led to the power-sharing system that united the nation’s diverse groups from the very beginning being overwhelmed by the huge dominance of this ethno-centric party.

Not only had this train of events for decades been encouraging “unhealthy feelings of superiority” among some Malaysians against others, but it also damaged the ability of the federation to argue for diversity as a strength. Instead, diversity became the country’s major problem. And this diversity is as much intra-Malay as it is inter-ethnic or inter-regional.

The Johor case is symptomatic of this process having gone too far, and occurs alongside other recent expressions of Malay opposition to Umno power and to its self- proclaimed mandate to champion Malayness and Malaysianness.

These new expressions include Dr Mahathir’s newly formed party, Parti Peribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu), not to mention Parti Amanah Negara, recently established by dissidents from the Islamist party PAS, or Anwar Ibrahim’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat, formed in the late 1990s.

One can argue that the call for federal devolution, if not separation, by Johor’s Crown Prince and others, including many in the eastern state of Sabah, is in fact evidence of the failure of Dr Mahathir’s own Bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian Nation), a popular concept that he championed in the 1990s alongside his vision of a mature Malaysia realised by 2020.

When Malaysia’s impressive economic growth stalled during the 1997-98 financial crisis, and the top leadership of Umno split right down the middle, not only was the path towards Vision 2020 knocked off its trajectory, but the idea that Malaysia would nurture a citizenry whose obsession with ethnic identity would be substantially lessened by its phenomenal economic success was also forgotten by Umno.

Instead, that idea was adopted by those who rose up against Dr Mahathir, and by younger Malaysians who were just coming of age, following the sacking and jailing of his erstwhile deputy, Anwar, in the form of the goals of the Reformasi Movement.

This adoption inspired a shift in support away from the Barisan Nasional towards the opposition, but before that could gain momentum, Umno under Tun Abdullah Badawi managed to convince voters to give the party one more shot at realising Vision 2020 and Bangsa Malaysia despite the financial crisis.

Tun Abdullah failed, as was shown by the ruling coalition’s poor showing in the 2008 general election, and, pushed from within the party, he threw in the towel the following year.

His successor, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, immediately tried to regain the initiative through his slogan of One Malaysia. This appeared to lack sincerity and failed to gain traction among voters, and when this became clear to him in the 2013 elections, he quickly abandoned that agenda.

Since then, racial and religious tensions have increased, while scandals with international repercussions have distracted – and continue to distract – the Najib government from proposing any new vision that can convincingly promise economic growth and social harmony.

Without such a promise coming from the federation’s government, the constituent states are naturally anxious. This goes beyond inter-ethnic tensions or religious controversies. It is about the citizenry’s need for a promising future.

Malaysia’s dilemma thus remains the same – finding the right formula to unite the country without suppressing its diversity, and doing it while achieving real and concrete economic growth.

None but the pathological optimist believes today that Malaysia will reach the economic goals of Vision 2020. The technical requirements and structural support are simply not sufficient.

Fortunately, the search for the right balance between centralised power and regional autonomy, between unity and diversity, follows a different set of dynamics.

The issue is political, and to the extent policy can change mindsets, much can yet be achieved quickly.

The writer is the deputy director of Iseas – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. His recent books include The Eurasian Core: Dialogues With Wang Gungwu On The History of the World (Iseas, 2015).

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 27 August 2016, 8:00 am and is filed under
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A New Deal for all Malaysians

Ten years ago, no one in Malaysia would have entertained the thought that it was possible to bring about political changes to the extent there could be change of government in Putrajaya.

But the “political tsunami” in the 2008 General Elections led to the 13th General Elections three years ago on May 5, 2013 when Malaysians voters rooted for change of Federal Government, but  it was so near and yet so far – with Datuk Seri Najib Razak scraping through in Putrajaya as the country’s first minority Prime Minister winning 47 per  cent of the popular vote  and for the first time, saved by the voters of Sabah and Sarawak who decided who will be the country’s Prime Minister and the ruling coalition.

If 60 per cent of the 57 Parliamentary seats in Sabah and Sarawak had voted for change in the 2013 General Elections, Malaysia would have a new political coalition and a new Prime Minister in Putrajaya three years ago.

Malaysia has been described as a prime example of a country which had gone against the international trend in the past decades of decentralization, devolution or delegation of power and responsibility from the national centre to the provincial, state and local governments, not only on public transport, solid waste management and local government, but also in areas like education and policing.

But in Malaysia, the reverse had been the case, consistently centralizing revenue sources and responsibilities, with the country considered as one of the most heavily centralized federations in fiscal terms in the world.

Three years have brought great changes in the country.  While Malaysians were full of hope and expectation of change for the better in the general elections three years ago, this seemed to have been replaced with a sense of despair and hopelessness that there could be  any political change for the better in the near future.

Overnight, Malaysia became a global kleptocracy, with the country suffering the international odium and ignominy of being ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt nations – especially with the damning indictment of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuits for forfeiture of US$1 billion assets in the United States, United Kingdom and Switzerland from the theft, embezzlement, defrauding and money-laundering of US$3.5 billion 1MDB funds, and the separate  investigations by over half a dozen other  national jurisdictions about global financial fraud and money-laundering involving the Malaysian government.

What is most mortifying is that despite the largest global kleptocracy case which involved Malaysia with the naming directly and indirectly of Malaysian public officiais, including “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1”, besmirching and staining the reputation and integrity of Malaysia, no efforts are  being made by the Malaysian governent and the various national enforcement and investigative agencies to clear Malaysia’s name of the damning indictment  as a global kleptocracy.

But what is even more mortifying is that the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Malaysian government seem to be able to get away with such height of irresponsibilty – raising the question whether Malaysians are prepared  to be tarred with the stain of a global kleptocracy overnight.

The PBS deputy president and Minister for Energy, Green Technology and Water, Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Ongkili has announced the setting up of a working committee to study the “skipped facts” on the formation of Malaysia in the school textbooks.

Even more serious than the “skipped facts” on the formation of Malaysia in the school history textbooks are the “rewriting of history” distorting the truth – and there can be no more serious distortion of the truth than for Malaysians to accept the country’s transformation overnight into a global kleptocracy.

Datuk Seri Najib Razak is duty-bound as the Prime Minister of the country to clear Malaysia’s name as a global kleptocracy.

I understand that Datuk Seri Najib Razak will not be going to the United Nations next month to address the UN General Assembly, which he had done four times since becoming Prime Minister in April 2009, where he repeatedly spoke of his proposal for a Global Movement of Moderates, which had fallen flat not only internationally, but also within the country.

This time, however, Najib owes the country a national duty and obligation to speak at the UN General Assembly to purge the national shame and ignominy of being transformed overnight into a global kleptocracy, and to convince the international community of Malaysia’s commitment to democracy, integrity and good governance.

I wish to congratulate the organisers of the DAP Policy Forum in Kota Kinabalu for its continuing initiative to transfer social democratic ideals into pragmatic reforms beneficial to the Malaysian society.

We cannot simply deal with the grievances whether in Sabah, Sarawak or Peninsular Malaysia, whether concerning the various communities and religions, the Malays, Chinese, Kadazans, Ibans, Indians or Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Taoists and Sikhs, but must offer answers – which is the challenge for the DAP Policy Forum.

Even in the darkest moments, there is still the hope for change – and this is why the question whether there could be change of government at national and state levels (in Sabah) remain a tantalising dream.

We must offer a new deal for all Malaysians, where everyone under the Malaysian sun can feel proud that he or she is a dignified citizen of the Malaysian nation. Let this be our constant  challenge.

(Speech at the DAP Policy Forum “New Deal for Malaysia” at Kota Kinabalu on Tuesday, August 30, 2016 at 10 am)

                This entry was posted on Tuesday, 30 August 2016, 9:57 am and is filed under
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Both Najib and UMNO/BN Must Go

Koon Yew Yin

31st Aug 2016

The hot rumour in town is that Prime Minister Najib may resign soon and that UMNO and BN will go into the next GE without him at the helm. This story seems to have appeared probably because of a n article by Dr. Lim Teck Ghee which appeared recently.

Titled, “Why Prime Minister Najib is on his way out”, the article has resulted in numerous comments and feedback from the public. Some commentators have agreed with Dr. Lim, who incidentally is a friend of mine, and his prediction that Najib will call it a day and leave office ahead of our 14th GE so as to give UMNO an advantage in the polls.

But others have disagreed with him. So strong is the public disapproval and disgust with what has happened in the 1MDB case as well as that unbelievably gigantic donation into the PM’s personal account that many Malaysians want to see Najib pay the price for these two scandals which is costing our taxpayers billions of ringgit. I am with other Malaysians who hope that the Prime Minister will not be able to get away scot-free or in the words of Dr. Lim, be able to engineer “the great escape” from these two scandals which have made headline news around the world for the wrong reasons.

One thing I must say about the piece is that Dr. Lim was trying to be a good social scientist and was not directly putting out his personal views on the Prime Minister’s integrity or leadership.  Dr Lim has already written enough in the past on the misrule and abuse of power by UMNO and BN. Those of us who know him and those who are familiar with his writings know where he is coming from and what he is getting at in this most recent article.

But I agree his article opens up lots of questions. Not only about what Najib is going to do next or when he is planning to go. Also what UMNO’s supreme council leadership may be discussing quietly among themselves behind the back of the Prime Minister. As Dr. Lim says, UMNO and other BN leaders must be nervously looking at the 1MDB mess and wondering if this mother of all financial scandals may have a final eruption which will take Najib as well as UMNO/BN down with him.

To me, and many thinking people in this country, it is simple.

This is that both Najib and UMNO/BN must go. We have given them a lifetime of being in office and provided them with positions, power, privilege and perks. And what have we got in return?  This is a question which every Malaysian must ask himself and herself.

What we have got from UMNO/BN is a rotten deal. Let me enumerate some of the details of this rotten deal that have come with this lifetime of BN rule.

Piratization, Cowgate, bailouts galore, brain drain, millions of foreign migrants, a sub-standard education system, GST, unaffordable housing, unemployed and unemployable graduates, super-cronies, grand corruption engaged in by Tan Sris, sick man Proton and APs – the list of abuses and cases of bad governance can fill up several books.

In 2012 when my book on “Road Map for Achieving Vision 20120” was published, it was revealed to readers that various mega projects such as the commission for Scorpene submarine purchase, Eurocopter deal, the National Palace project, etc had cost the taxpayer more than RM20 billion while the cost of bailing out GLCs, starting with Bank Bumiputra in 1970 and ending with the bailing out of Proton and MAS in 2006, had cost us close to RM70 billion.

I am sure that Dr Mahathir and Muhyiddin of the new party, Pribumi, realize this too as they were part of the rotten structure of UMNO/BN. But understandably they do not want to talk about or revisit this past record of structural rot and defect in UMNO/BN today.

What is important though is that these two key Malay leaders have now openly admitted that the problem of greed and corruption, abuse of power, and cronyism is embedded in UMNO and cannot be rooted out or defeated from within.

Only with the rejection of UMNO/BN – and not just the departure of Najib – can Malaysians hope to have a brighter future. Only with a change in government – after giving UMNO/BN a lifetime of opportunities – can Malaysia avoid falling into the list of failed states which we are rapidly plunging towards.

Three New Malay Parties

It is principally our Malay fellow citizens who must realize that they have been taken for a ride and betrayed by UMNO. There are now three new Malay parties with leaders of worth and integrity – PKR, Amanah and Pribumi – that can replace UMNO.

Let’s work together to get rid of Najib and UMNO/BN once and for all.

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 31 August 2016, 11:24 pm and is filed under
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Najib should remove the latest and most serious national  “moment of disunity” by  speaking at the UNGA next month to clear Malaysia’s name from serious allegation of Malaysia as a global kleptocracy

Six years ago, nobody in Malaysia would have heard of Batu Sumpah Keningau.  In fact, six years ago, very few in Sabah would speak about Batu Sumpah.

For over four decades, after the erection and the unveiling of Batu Sumpah Keningau on

August 31, 1964, the oath stone in Keningau and its significance were largely ignored and even forgotten by both the people and government of Sabah.

In March 2010, together with three DAP MPs, including Teo Nie Ching (representing Serdang) and Lim Lip Eng (Segambut) and the then sole Sabah Assemblyman, Jimmy Wong, I visited Batu Sumpah at the Keningau District Office. I revisited the Batu Sumpah in Keningau in 2012.

Since then, as a result of DAP campaign to highlight the nation-building, historic and heritage importance of Batu Sumpah Keningau, and an ongoing campaign programme to erect replicas of Batu Sumpah Keningau in various parts of Sabah, Batu Sumpah Keningau is no more alien to Malaysians and Sabahans, especially with DAP MPs and Sabah State Assemblymen repeatedly articulating “Batu Sumpah Keningau” issues in both Parliament and the Sabah State Assembly.

The PBS deputy president and Minister for Energy, Green Technology and Water, Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Ongkili has spoken about “skipped facts” in the history books for our students in the schools, and one of the “skipped facts” in the history books used in our schools, both in Malaysia and Sabah is Batu Sumpah Keningau and its contents.

Maximus announced the setting up of a working committee to study the “skipped facts” on the formation of Malaysia in the school textbooks.

Hopefully, Maximus can get the Education Ministry to reinsert in the history books in our schools about the true facts about the formation of Malaysia, including Batu Sumpah Keningau.

I have often quoted Kundera that “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, and this is most evident in the history of Sabah (as well as Sarawak) in the formation of Malaysia, particularly with regard to Batu Sumpah Keningau.

In his National Day Message yesterday, the Primr Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak called on Malaysians to value the “moments of unity” and decried the “moments of disunity”.

Unfortunately, never before have there been more “moments of disunity” under Najib’s premiership when compared to the first five Prime Ministers – Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun  Razak, Tun Hussein Onn,  Tun Mahathir and Tun Abdullah.

If Najib is serious in wanting to promote “moments of unity”, and reduce the “moments of disunity”, he should address and remove the legitimate grievances of the people, such as the indigenous people of Sabah about the significance and relevance of Batu Sumpah Keningau.

In Sabah, the removal of these legitimate grievances would include:

The government both Federal and State level to resolve the legitimate grievances  of Sabahan, including giving  proper recognition to Batu Sumpah Keningau by fulfilling the three pledges on (1) Ugama Bebas dalam Sabah; (2) Tanah Tanah dalam Sabah di kuasai oleh Kerajaan Sabah; and (3)  Adat istiadat anak rayat Sabah dihormatkan dan dipelihara oleh Kerajaan.

Resolution of the long-standing two-generation old problem of illegal immigrants in Sabah, changing not only the demography, security but also politics in Malaysia;

a Royal Commission of Inquiry to review more than five-decades of history of Sabah and Sarawak in Malaysia, to restore to Sabah and Sarawak the legitimate rights and powers as guaranteed in the Malaysia Agreement and 20-Points of 1963.

But even more important and challenging is for Najib remove the latest and most serious national  “moment of disunity” by speaking at the United Nations General Assembly  next month to clear Malaysia name from serious allegation of Malaysia as a global kleptocracy.

Overnight, Malaysia became a global kleptocracy, with the country suffering the international odium and ignominy of being ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt nations – especially with the damning indictment of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuits for forfeiture of US$1 billion assets in the United States, United Kingdom and Switzerland from the theft, embezzlement, defrauding and money-laundering of US$3.5 billion 1MDB funds, and the separate  investigations by over half a dozen other  national jurisdictions about global financial fraud and money-laundering involving the Malaysian government.

What is most mortifying is that despite the largest global kleptocracy case which involved Malaysia with the naming directly and indirectly of Malaysian public officiais, including “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1”, besmirching and staining the reputation and integrity of Malaysia, no efforts are  being made by the Malaysian government and the various national enforcement and investigative agencies to clear Malaysia’s name of the damning indictment  as a global kleptocracy.

But what is even more mortifying is that the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Malaysian government seem to be able to get away with such height of irresponsibilty – raising the question whether Malaysians are prepared  to be tarred with the stain of a global kleptocracy overnight.

So long as Malaysia is tarred as a global kleptocracy, this will be one of the greatest and most supreme “moments of disunity” in Malaysia, causing great division and disunity among Malaysians, regardless of race, religion or region.

Najib Razak is  therefore duty-bound as the Prime Minister of the country to clear Malaysia’s name as a global kleptocracy.

Najib Razak will not be going to the United Nations next month to address the UN General Assembly, which he had done four times since becoming Prime Minister in April 2009, where he repeatedly spoke of his proposal for a Global Movement of Moderates, which had fallen flat not only internationally, but also within the country.

Najib will be failing the duty as Prime Minister if he fails to speak at the UNGA to purge the national shame and ignominy of being transformed overnight into a global kleptocracy, and to convince the international community of Malaysia’s commitment to democracy, integrity and good governance.

(Speech  at the 52nd anniversary of Batu Sumpah Keningau in Keningau on Tuesday,  August 31, 2016 at 11 am)

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 31 August 2016, 3:51 pm and is filed under
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A Political Divide Over Islamic Law Could Undo Malaysia’s Social Fabric

David Hutt

World Politics Review

Aug. 30, 2016

During my last visit to Malaysia in February, I met the famed film director Chiu Keng Guan to discuss his fourth and latest movie, “Ola Bola.” It had just come out in local cinemas and was already proving to be such a sensation that one newspaper asked if there was an “Ola Bola overload.” A little misty-eyed perhaps, the film is a fictionalized account of the Malaysian national football team’s qualification for the 1980 Olympic Games, arguably one of the country’s finest sporting milestones, made all the more memorable by the fact that it was achieved by a multiracial, multireligious team.

“Ola Bola is a story about Malaysia,” Chiu told me as we sat on the steps of the decaying Stadium Merdeka, where independence from Britain was announced in 1957. “I wanted to talk about team spirit, how a team of young players went through difficulties, trained together, sweated together, and how they worked as a team.”

Being in Malaysia at the time of the film’s release, it wasn’t difficult to notice that, aside from the nostalgia, people were speaking of it as a piece of social commentary in a country where racial and religious tensions are never far from the surface. One critic surmised, “Ola Bola [has] been able to do for Malaysia what many politicians cannot do—to remind us as a nation and as Malaysians, ‘kita menang sama-sama, kita kalah sama-sama’”: We win together; we lose together. One cannot help but feel the critic’s words were even more pertinent months later when politicians forced the country into yet another existential debate.

In May, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, PAS), an opposition party, successfully tabled a bill to introduce strict Islamic criminal codes, known as “hudud,” in the northern state of Kelantan, which has been a PAS stronghold since 1990. Hudud are criminal punishments established by the Quran and Sunnah, the oral teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, which typically cover what are deemed criminal offenses, such as theft, fornication, intoxication, apostasy and slander. Punishments can include the amputation of limbs for theft, flogging for “improper” sexual acts and stoning to death for adultery, although the latter is not always imposed.

Although now commonly referred to as the “hudud bill” by the local press, the motion specifically attempts to amend the 1965 law regulating Shariah law, known in Malaysia as syariah, in order for the Malaysian state of Kelantan’s syariah courts to impose any punishment, except the death penalty, as they see fit. The PAS contends this isn’t strictly hudud, but that comes down to a debate over definitions. Since independence, Malaysia has had a divided legal system in which federal courts, more often than not, oversee and supersede the state-level syariah courts. But critics say the hudud bill would unconstitutionally undermine federal law and run the risk of sparking religious and racial tensions. The bill is expected to be debated in the Dewan Rakyat, the lower house of Malaysia’s parliament, in October.

Mahathir Mohamad, a former prime minister and long-time opponent of hudud, was quick to point out what many believe to be the obvious: that the bill would make sense if Malaysia were “100 percent Muslim,” but, because it isn’t, the law would naturally lead to inequality in the justice system. “If a Muslim was caught for stealing he would have his hand chopped off, but a non-Muslim would only be jailed for two months,” he said. “Hudud is supposed to be just to its people, but it can’t be carried out here because Muslims only make up 60 percent of the population.” In his typical waggish manner, he reduced the debate to the PAS simply wanting to “catch women who wear tight clothes.”

Managing Malaysia’s Diversity

According to the last national census, which was conducted in 2010, 67 percent of the population is of Malay heritage, 25 percent Chinese, 7 percent Indian, 0.7 percent other, and just over 8 percent are noncitizens. In terms of religion, 61 percent is Muslim, 20 percent Buddhist, 9 percent Christian, and 6 percent Hindu, with the remainder comprising smaller religious affiliations.

Malaysia’s history has shown that such diversity has been difficult to manage. In the 19th century, British colonial forces brought Chinese workers to Malaysia to become indentured laborers in tin mines and rubber plantations. By the time of independence, a sizeable, and typically urban, Chinese-Malaysian population controlled much of the country’s trade and business sectors, while most Malays remained in rural areas. Decades of debate over post-independence racial policies came to a head in 1969, when race riots between Malay-Malaysians and Chinese-Malaysians in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, led to the deaths of an estimated 200 people —some say as many as 600 — and a state of national emergency. It was followed by the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1971, which attempted to foster racial equality but was seen by critics as introducing affirmative action policies for the Malay population, especially in government positions. Speak to many Chinese-origin Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur and they’ll soon descend onto the topic of “ketuanan Melayu,” or Malay supremacy. Indeed, Article 153 of the constitution denotes the “special position of the Malays.”

This is, of course, a truncated and simplified depiction of Malaysian history. Nevertheless, with this background, one can arrive at the question that many commentators are raising in Malaysia: Why is the hudud bill being debated now? Hudud has been a perennial issue for the PAS since the 1980s, and the party has called for its implementation on many occasions. However, rarely has there seemed to be the real possibility of actually introducing it. The United Malays National Organization (UMNO), a pro-Malay political party that has ruled the country since the formation of the modern federation in 1963 — and as part of the National Front (Barisan Nasional, BN) coalition since 1973 — has constantly opposed hudud. Indeed, in 2011, Prime Minister Najib Razak stated vehemently, “Hudud laws cannot be implemented.”

But on March 27, 2014, the minister in charge of Islamic affairs, Jamil Khir Baharom, announced during a parliamentary debate that UMNO would assist PAS representatives in Kelantan in tabling the hudud bill in parliament and, in fact, help to fast-track it.

“UMNO leaders have undeniably issued public statements which are enough to convince a neutral observer that UMNO is serious in wanting to see hudud practised in Kelantan and, perhaps, eventually Malaysia,” wrote Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, a professor of political science at Universiti Sains Malaysia, in a 2015 essay.

But, as Ahmad Fauzi told me in an interview, however it appears to the lay observer, what really lies behind all of this is UMNO politicking. “They are in a very weak position,” he said, “and are trying to reclaim their place in politics.”

First, Najib has been under considerable pressure following the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal, in which he was accused of siphoning off more than $700 million from the government-run development company into his private bank accounts. Since the initial reports in 2015, and despite a local court finding him innocent of any wrongdoing, investigations by the Wall Street Journal and U.S. Justice Department have allegedly uncovered far greater misappropriations, and for the past year, Najib has faced growing calls to resign. One of his most vocal opponents has been his former mentor, Mahathir Mohamad, who called in July for a referendum on whether the prime minister should be allowed to continue.

Second, and arguably more problematic for UMNO, is that it has been shedding electoral support for almost a decade. At the 2008 general elections, the BN coalition lost 58 seats, with the opposition coalition, People’s Alliance (PR), gaining 61 seats — the three main parties of the PR, at the time, were the PAS, the People’s Justice Party (Parti Keadilan Rakyat, PKR) and the Democratic Action Party (Parti Tindakan Demokratik, DAP). In terms of the popular vote, BN secured only roughly 300,000 votes more than the PR.

At the following general election in 2013, the results were even direr for UMNO and the BN coalition. The BN won 133 seats, compared to the PR’s 89. However it did so with fewer popular votes — 47.3 percent compared to 50.8 percent. Malaysia operates under a first-past-the-post system, which explains the contrast between seats and votes. It was the first time that the BN had fewer popular votes than an opposition coalition. What’s more, UMNO’s ruling coalition partners — the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) — suffered heavily.

That election, Ahmad Fauzi posited in his essay, “[propelled] Islam to the forefront of national politics. . . . Under pressure from its rank and file to recover loss of support from the Malay masses in two successive general elections, UMNO leaders played along with ethnocentric sentiments of its divisional and branch level figures which sought to portray the Malay nation as being under threat of being overwhelmed by non-Malay forces.”

Since the 1970s, Malaysian politics have been defined by what Farish A. Noor, a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, has described as “a hotly divisive contest” between the country’s two main Malay-Muslim parties. “The fact that UMNO and PAS presented themselves as defenders of both Malay ethno-nationalist and Muslim communitarian interests,” he wrote, “meant that Islam would invariably be brought into the political contestation between them.”

Because UMNO has ruled Malaysia since its formation, however, it has had the upper hand in dictating how this ethno-religious politics would be played. The introduction of the New Economic Policy and the National Cultural Policy in 1971 began the process of co-opting syariah officials and a good deal of the ulama — the body of Muslim scholars that specialize in Islamic law — into the federal bureaucracy, controlled by UMNO.

In the 1980s, UNMO’s primarily Muslim politicians expanded authority over syariah courts. Since the 1990s, however, the highest echelon of UMNO has also reached out to other constituencies, notably the Chinese-Malaysian population.

Indeed, electoral success for the BN coalition has depended a great deal on voters from non-Muslim communities, especially in urban areas. One of the implications is that UMNO has not pushed as stringently as it could have for a stricter enforcement of syariah, despite pleas from the UMNO rank and file. Nevertheless, Ahmad Fauzi told me that UMNO has been adroit in what he calls “doublespeak,” saying one thing in the rural, Malay heartlands, and the exact opposite when speaking to crowds of non-Muslims in Kuala Lumpur.

At the same time as it continued to court non-Muslim voters after 2013, UMNO’s turn toward more conservative Islam at the time was easily discernible. For example, in December 2013, the government outlawed the Shiite Association of Malaysia, despite assurances two years earlier that the Muslim minority group was free to practice its beliefs. The majority of Muslims in Malaysia follow the Shafii school of Sunni Islam, and conservative ulama have long opposed minority branches.

Another example was the opening of the 57th national-level Quran Recital Assembly in 2015, where Najib took to the stage to deplore what he called “human rightism.”

“It’s deviationist in that it glorifies the desires of man alone and rejects any value system that encompasses religious norms and etiquettes,” he told the audience. “They do this on the premise of championing human rights. We will not tolerate any demands or right to apostasy by Muslims, or deny Muslims their right to be governed by Shariah Courts and neither will we allow Muslims to engage in LGBT activities.”

In response to such statements, Ahmad Fauzi has argued that “[because of] the recent upsurge of an Islamist conservative lobby intent on imposing its arbitrary worldview upon Malay-Muslim society in Malaysia, Najib’s diatribe against modern humanistic values was not altogether surprising.”

While appealing to its core Malay voters, UMNO also set about splitting the opposition, and hudud was its instrument to court PAS purists. The strategy succeeded. In June 2015, the PR collapsed when the PAS severed ties with the coalition after the DAP voiced opposition to the hudud bill. In the aftermath, a number of politicians and activists split from the PAS to form the National Trust Party (Parti Amanah Negara, PAN), which rejoined the DAP and the PKR to form a new coalition, the Alliance of Hope (Pakatan Harapan, PH).

A year later, in June 2016, UMNO’s Janus-faced initiatives bore fruit when it won two parliamentary by-elections by sizeable margins.

“Support for hudud laws, especially among West Malaysian Muslims, has been high. . . . Some surveys estimate more than 70 per cent,” said Ibrahim Suffian, head of Merdeka Centre, an independent polling firm. He described the UMNO’s apparent backing of the hudud bill as a “clever move,” allowing it to secure the by-election victories.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the PR’s split was obvious in the by-election results. In one district, the PAS came in second and the PAN third, while in the other, though the positions were reversed, the margin was small. Such was the disappointment with the future electoral chances of the PH that, in July, seven small opposition parties announced their intention to form another coalition, Gabungan Rakyat Saksama. However, few observers believe this third force would ever be able to challenge the hegemony of UMNO and the BN coalition at the 2018 election; in fact, they contend it will probably only work to split opposition forces further.

Some have suggested that, with the opposition divided and weakened, as is the BN, UMNO might attempt to form an alliance with the PAS, raising the possibility of a pro-Malay coalition between the pair; a similar claim was rumored in 2008, however. If statistics are anything to go by, then with Malay-Muslims comprising more than 60 percent of the population, a UMNO-PAS partnership would certainly offer strong odds on a majority in 2018’s general elections. PAS’s president, Abdul Hadi Awang, recently told his party that Islam teaches people to treat political rivals with respect, hinting at a reconciliation between the two parties.

Still, most political commentators dismiss the possibility of such an alliance, believing instead that UMNO is playing a game of brinkmanship with the opposition. Ibrahim Suffian told me that “most observers don’t think that hudud would really be introduced,” and that UMNO politicians will simply reject it when it’s debated in October. A simple mathematical calculation also shows that the bill is unlikely to pass, even with unanimous UMNO backing. In the Dewan Rakyat, Malaysia’s parliament, a majority of votes is needed to accept a bill, and of the body’s 222 legislators, only 100 are from UMNO and PAS. Most other sizeable parties have stated they would not support the bill.

Nevertheless, if this is just UMNO chicanery, are the ends necessarily worth the means? There are concerns that permanent damage might be done even before the bill is debated in October.

Abdul Rahman Osman, the mufti of Malaysia’s third-largest state, Pahang, sparked controversy in late June when he called DAP politicians “kafir harbi” — non-Muslim infidel — over the party’s opposition to the bill. Some interpret the kafir harbi label as justifying the killing of those so designated. Few commentators missed the significance of the fact that such an escalation in sectarian rhetoric came a week before the first successful attack by the so-called Islamic State in Malaysia. On June 28, a grenade was thrown near a nightclub in Kuala Lumpur injuring eight people, but with no fatalities. Fifteen people were arrested for the attack, including two policemen, all with links to the Islamic State. The Malaysian police say they have foiled nine Islamic State attacks in the country since 2014.

The hudud bill has also raised concerns, once again, over the place of non-Muslims in Malaysia. While the tabled bill only applies to the state of Kelantan, trepidation remains that, once accepted, it could generate a slippery slope toward its application everywhere in Malaysia. Critics say this would undermine the legitimacy of the federal justice system, making it separate and unequal, or that it would infringe on the rights of non-Muslims. PAS leaders contend that non-Muslims in Kelantan should not worry since the bill would not apply to them. But in neighboring Indonesia, the recent flogging of an elderly Christian resident accused of selling alcohol in the special autonomous region of Aceh —w here hudud was introduced in 2001 — has raised doubts that punishments can be kept to just one religious community.

One commentator has suggested that, if passed, the bill could even eventually lead to the “breaking up the [Malaysian] federation.” For example, Sim Kui Hian, president of the Sarawak United People’s Party (Parti Rakyat Bersatu Sarawak), has said that since Islam is not as prominent in the east Malaysian island of Borneo where the party is based, as it is in mainland Western Malaysia, the “passing of the bill could motivate Sarawakians to part ways with Malaysia.”

Politically speaking, the bill also raises concerns about the future stability of the BN coalition. “It’s a very serious threat,” Ibrahim Suffian said. “If you look at political stability in Malaysia, it basically rests on BN as a coalition being united and being able to manage the competing interests of the group.” But cracks are appearing. Six ministers from the ruling coalition have threatened to resign if the bill is passed.

UMNO, however, holds the majority of BN’s seats in the Dewan Rakyat — 86 of the coalition’s 130. The second largest party in the coalition is the pro-Malay United Bumiputera Heritage Party (Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu), which has 14 seats. The MCA and MIC, by comparison, have a paltry seven and three seats, respectively. The insinuation is that UMNO might not be too threatened should the MCA and MIC leave the coalition over the hudud bill, or alternatively that, in their weakened conditions, the two parties cannot risk leaving the coalition even if they wanted to.

At the end of the day, if UMNO is using the hudud bill to divide and conquer the opposition, as it is generally assumed, then the electoral benefits of doing so would most likely outweigh the risks of weakening its own coalition — although this says nothing of the possible social implications, which are discussed almost daily by the local press. The PAS is today losing its own members and supporters to the splinter party PAN, which almost equaled the PAS in terms of votes in June. One might assume that the PAS-PAN split will allow UMNO to reclaim voters from the rural, Malay heartlands. What’s more, UMNO might still oppose the hudud bill in parliament in October, after which it can say to its non-Muslim voters that it has been opposed to the rise of Islamism all along. For a country where the politicization of Islam has been used, often successfully, by UMNO for decades, the hudud controversy might smack of desperation from the embattled party and its menaced prime minister, but it certainly is a case of business as usual.

David Hutt is a journalist and features writer. Since 2014, he has been based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, reporting on politics and current affairs in the Asia-Pacific region.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 1 September 2016, 9:08 am and is filed under
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After official admission that MO1 is Najib, it is height of national cowardice and irresponsibility if Cabinet does not  resolve that Prime Minister should personally address UN General Assembly to purge and cleanse Malaysia’s reputation as “global kleptocracy”

At long last, the Malaysian government has officially admitted that the “MALAYSIAN OFFICIAL 1” mentioned 36 times in the US Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuits for forfeiture of US$1 billion of assets as a result of an international conspiracy of  theft, embezzlement, misappropriation and money-laundering of US$3.5 billion 1MDB funds is none other than the Malaysian Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak.

If the Malaysian Government is going to make such an admission six weeks after the US DOJ lawsuits on July 20, why didn’t the Prime Minister and the government make such an admission promptly and  immediately after the DOJ actions, especially as the Barisan Nasional  Strategic Communications Director and Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of EPU, Datuk Seri Abdul Rahman Dahlan,   has said, “only an idiot doesn’t know who that person was” as there is no secret who is Malaysian Official 1 (MO1) mentioned in the DOJ civil lawsuits, as  everyone who has read the court documents or familiar with the issues would know who is the person being referred to.

Is Abdul Rahman, who made such an official admission in the interview with BBC, or the Prime Minister capable of offering an answer to this question?

Why the government’s  cat-and-mouse game for the past six weeks as to who is “MO1”, to the extent that it prompted a “TangkapM01” campaign, including a demonstration organized by university students  last Saturday?

Furthermore, how many Cabinet Ministers knew from the beginning six weeks ago that “MO1” was Najib, and can they explain why the Ministers shied away from the subject of DOJ lawsuits in the Cabinet for the past six weeks?

Is this because  the Ministers  dare not raise the subject, as it directly affects the Prime Minister,  and the Prime Minister in Malaysia has long ceased to be “primus inter pares” in the system of Malaysian governance but is virtually the “Master” over all the Ministers, who are totally at his beck-and-call?

However, after the belated “six-week overdue”  official admission that MO1 is Najib, it is height of national cowardice and irresponsibility if Cabinet does not  resolve that the Prime Minister should personally address the UN General Assembly to purge and cleanse Malaysia’s reputation as a “global kleptocracy” and convince the world community of the Malaysian govenrment’s commitment to public integrity.

I had hoped that the Prime Minister, in his 59th National Day message, would start the process to purge and cleanse Malaysia of the international indictment as a global kleptocracy as a result of the US DOS’ largest global kleptocracy action against 1MDB and Malaysia, directly implicating Najib as Prime Minister, but to  my great disappointment,  Najib conspicuously avoided this sensitive subject in his National Day Address.

When Najib became Prime Minister in April 2009, he prided himself as the ‘Father of Transformation’ or ‘Bapa Transformasi’ with a spate of transformation initiatives and an alphabet soup of acronyms such as 1Malaysia,  ETP, GTP, NKRA, NKEA, SRI, NEM, BR1M and KR1M, just to name a few.

But Najib’s latest  transformation of Malaysia into a global kleptocracy overnight is the greatest shame and infamy to befall the country in the nation’s 59-year history under six Prime Ministers.

What is even most  embarrassing and incriminating is that  although the DOJ actions are “civil action in rem” for forfeiture for 1MDB-linked money-laundered assets in the United States, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, they do not preclude criminal action, as the forfeiture is but a first step to prevent dissipation of the specified assets.

But Malaysia cannot wait for such criminal proceedings and their outcome in the United States, for Malaysia’s reputation and good name have been blemished and tarnished in our  “transformation” into a global kleptocracy.

What is worse, the Malaysian national sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, is not only the subject of the world’s largest single action against money-laundering and  forfeiture of assets as a result of multi-billion dollar kleptocracy, “public officials and their associates” are publicly named as being active participants and co-conspirators  in an international conspiracy from 2009 to 2013, to “fraudulently divert billions of dollars from 1MDB through various means, including by defrauding foreign banks and by sending foreign wire communications in furtherance of the scheme, and thereafter, to launder the proceeds of that criminal conduct, including in and through U.S. financial institutions”.

Now, a Cabinet Minister has admitted that the highest-level Malaysian “public official” – “MO1” –  is none other than the Prime Minister himself.

In his 59th National Day Message, Najib Razak called on Malaysians to value the “moments of unity” and decried the “moments of disunity”.

Unfortunately, never before have there been more “moments of disunity” under Najib’s premiership when compared to the first five Prime Ministers – Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Razak, Tun Hussein Onn, Tun Mahathir and Tun Abdullah.

One of the issues causing unprecedented “moment” of disunity and disharmony among Malaysians, regardless of race, religion or region, is the damning international indictment of Malaysia as an overnight global kleptocracy.

If Najib is serious in wanting to promote “moments of unity”, and reduce the “moments of disunity”, he should assume the greatest challenge of his premiership to address  the United Nations General Assembly at the end of the month to purge and cleanse Malaysia’s good name and reputation from being identified as a global kleptocracy.

Is Najib capable of rising up to  this greatest challenge of his premiership – to address the UN General Assembly to purge and cleanse the damning international indictment  of Malaysia as a global kleptocacy?

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 1 September 2016, 12:16 pm and is filed under
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Leonardo DiCaprio urged to repay donations to Malaysian rainforest fund

Edward Helmore in New York

Guardian

31 August 2016

Wolf of Wall Street may have been backed by donations linked to an international money laundering scandal, says the Swiss-based charity

The actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio is being urged to repay donations connected to the Malaysian fund that backed his hit film The Wolf of Wall Street and is now subject to a US justice department investigation and asset seizure effort.

The calls come from the Bruno Manser Funds, a Swiss-based charity focused on protecting the Malaysian rainforest. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the organization accused the star of “double standards” for accepting donations linked to an international money laundering scandal.

The charity claims that while DiCaprio has been engaged in an effort to protect the last remaining tracts of rainforest in Sumatra, the scandal-plagued 1MDB fund, which participated in a fundraising Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation auction at Christie’s in 2013, is connected to Malaysian deforestation less than 500 miles away.

“We are deeply disturbed that Leonardo DiCaprio and his foundation accepted assets that originate from the proceeds of corruption in Malaysia. This is a disgrace and in total contradiction with the declared aims of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation,” said Lukas Straumann, director of the Bruno Manser Fund. “We call on DiCaprio to apologize and pay back all this dirty money to the Malaysian people.”

He told the Hollywood Reporter: “We hear he has a genuine commitment to nature and championing indigenous rights … but if it comes to accepting stolen money, that’s a simple no go.”

According to the fund, DiCaprio received money from controversial businessman Jho Low and Riza Shahriz Bin Abdul Aziz, the stepson of the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak – both figures named in a justice department asset seizure complaint and connected to the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund.

The Manser fund claims the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation received money from a Christie’s charity auction in 2013, where Low is alleged to have used $1.1m of diverted 1MDB funds to buy two works of art by Ed Ruscha and Mark Ryden.

The charity claims that political corruption in Malaysia is a “major driver” of deforestation, with local politicians handed lucrative logging contracts as bribes.

“It’s a corrupt system and directly affects the way natural resources are being handled,” Straumann told the Hollywood Reporter. “Politicians in Malaysia have earned billions of dollars from cutting down the rainforest illegally.”

An investigation by the Hollywood trade paper found further examples that the publication claims were channels for 1MDB funds to enter DiCaprio’s charity. It claims Low and Joey McFarland, cofounder of Red Granite, the production company behind The Wolf of Wall Street, were among those who helped raise $3m for the foundation by buying marked-up bottles of champagne at DiCaprio’s birthday party.

Last year, Low donated a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture, 1982’s Brushstroke, valued at roughly $700,000, to the foundation, which was then auctioned at a charity event in St Tropez.

The Swiss charity is named for the environmentalist Bruno Manser, who lived in Sarawak, Malaysia, with the Penan tribe, one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in the region. Manser organized several blockades against timber companies, angering Malaysian authorities, and later became a prominent campaigner for rainforest preservation and the rights of indigenous peoples. He disappeared during his last journey to Sarawak in May 2000 and is presumed dead.

The claims place DiCaprio in an awkward position. His latest environmental documentary, Before the Flood, is due to have its premiere at the Toronto international film festival next month. The film, by Fisher Stevens, the documentary film-maker behind 2010’s Academy Award winner The Cove, follows DiCaprio around the world as he draws attention to environmental issues.

The Bruno Manser letter comes a week after THR published a lengthy story questioning the DiCaprio foundation’s ties to 1MDB. In it, Straumann alleges that the actor was paid as much as $25m for The Wolf of Wall Street from funds allegedly siphoned off from 1MBD. “Money was stolen from the treasury and went straight into Leo’s pocket,” Straumann is quoted as saying.

The justice department complaint does not target DiCaprio specifically – he’s referred to twice in the 136-page document and only as “Hollywood Actor 1” – but any funds originating with 1MDB that ended up in the foundation or were paid to DiCaprio directly for work or as a credited producer on The Wolf of Wall Street could legitimately be targeted by the justice department.

DiCaprio started the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998. It is “dedicated to the long-term health and wellbeing of all Earth’s inhabitants”, according to the organization’s website.

The foundation has donated $3m to the WWF tiger conservation program in Nepal with the other $3m grant heading to Oceana to help save the oceans and marine animals from unsustainable fishing methods. It recently donated $1m to the Elephant Crisis Fund.

According to the Wildlife Conservation Network, the grant “will be sued to save elephants from the current ivory poaching crisis by funding on-the-ground projects that stop poaching, trafficking and the demand for ivory”.

“Elephant poaching is a brutal crisis, with more than 30,000 elephants killed last year alone,” said DiCaprio. “The decimation of these animals is something we have the power to stop, and the Elephant Crisis Fund is a crucial part of the solution. I am honored to support them.”

Earlier this week, Terry Tamminen, CEO of the foundation, told THR the organisation had made grants of more than $30m this year and described the foundation as “an incredibly efficient, highly effective philanthropic organization that, through its relationship to the California Community Foundation, is supporting credible organizations that are carrying out some of the most important work on the planet”.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 1 September 2016, 9:00 pm and is filed under
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