The eye-witness testimony of the Baling OCPD during the  Memali Incident  and the need to end political  interferences in national institutions are extra potent  reasons why there should be a RCI to revisit the 1985 tragedy which cost 18 lives

Following the revelation last week by former Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Tun Musa Hitam that the then Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad was in Malaysia during the bloody Memali Incident on November 19, 1985, and not in China as it has been believed in the past three decades, I had called for a Royal Commission of Inquiry to ascertain the truth as Mahathir had absolved himself of the death of 18 people, including four policemen, in the Memali tragedy.

Another reason I had given for a RCI to revisit the Memali Incident is because the protagonists of the Memali Incident like former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir, former Deputy Prime Minister, Tun Musa Hitam, former Inspector-General of Police, Tun Hanif Omar, former Acting Inspector-General of Police,Tan Sri Dato’ Mohd Amin bin Osman, the then Information Minister Tan Sri Rais Yatim, Deputy Home Minister at the time, Tan Sri Radzi Sheikh Ahmad, the then UMNO Secretary-General Tan Sri Sanusi Junid, the OCPD Baling during the Memali incident, Tunku Muszaffar Shah and a follower of Ibrahim Libya who is now Senator Muhamad Yusof Husin from Baling, Kedah are still alive and can testify on the avoidable tragedy.

In fact, the eye-witness testimony of the Baling OCPD at time of Memali Incident, Tunku Muszaffar Shah,  is itself an extra potent  reason why there should be a RCI to revisit the 1985 tragedy which cost 18 lives so that the real truth could be uncovered for the nation and people.

Two years ago, Tunku Muszaffar wrote a book retailing how the bloody incident on November 19, 1985  which resulted in the death of Ibrahim Libya, 13 of his followers and four police personnel, resulted from political interference with police operations, causing the federal police headquarters at Bukit Aman to make poor decisions in its bid to arrest Ibrahim Libya after a second botched attempt to arrest him under the Internal Security Act (ISA) 1960.

In his book entitled Memali: A Policeman Remembers, Tunku Muszaffar said the poor decision-making was the result of political interference and underestimation of the tenacity of Ibrahim’s followers.

Tunku Muszaffar wrote that the top officers in Bukit Aman should never take orders from their “political masters” and reject requests that are not in line with police norms or procedures.

“The discretion and action of the police as to how they would go about doing their duty should be according to prevailing ground situations,” he writes.

According to the White Paper on the Memali incident tabled in Parliament in February 1986, the government justified attempts to arrest Ibrahim under the ISA by accusing him of establishing the Islamic Revolutionary Movement that aimed to topple the federal government by force.

Although Tunku Muszaffar did not document any example of political interference, he did note that Musa had issued specific orders during the first botched arrest attempt on Sept 2, 1984.

In the book,  he says Musa had ordered Bukit Aman to ensure that the arresting party did not use force when arresting Ibrahim and withdraw should they encounter resistance.

Led by the district special branch chief, the arresting party went to Ibrahim’s house in Kampung Charok Puteh at 2.45am on that day, but withdrew after they were met by about a dozen people armed with sharpened bamboo poles and other weapons.

According to then Ibrahim follower Muhamad Yusof Husin’s account of the incident, which forms a chapter in the book, the botched first arrest attempt led to followers deciding to guard Ibrahim from arrest. Muhamad Yusof  is at present PAS Senator representing Kedah until May 20.

In his book, Tunku Muszaffar criticised the then Bukit Aman leaders, including the acting inspector-general of police (IGP), for underestimating the resistance Ibrahim’s supporters would put up.

Attempts by a large police delegation to arrest Ibrahim at his home in November 1985 saw supporters attacking the police with firearms and sharp weapons, before the charismatic preacher was killed.

In the book, he describes such superior officers as “armchair generals” who saw it fit to arrest Ibrahim at his bastion, knowing that his supporters were waiting and some of them had shotgun licences.

There is in fact a fourth potent  reason for  a RCI into the Memali Tragedy of 1985, to ascertain whether it represented the first of political interferences with the professionalism, independence and  integrity of national institutions under the 22-year Mahathir premiership and which is now not confined to the police and have spread to other institutions including the civil service, the Attorney-General’s Chambers, the Judiciary, the Elections Commission and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission; and the need and formula to de-politicise and end political interferences in these national institutions to restore public confidence in the system of good governance in Malaysia.

                This entry was posted on Wednesday, 2 April 2014, 8:59 am and is filed under
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A Timeline of the Malaysian Government’s Many, Many MH370 Screw-Ups

By Adam K. Raymond

New York Times

1st April 2014

Three and a half weeks after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished from the sky, the world is still waiting to find out what happened. Searching millions of square miles for broken plane parts is, of course, no simple task, but it’s only been complicated by the Keystone Cops routine put on by the Malaysian government. Upon news that officials couldn’t even correctly quote the four words uttered by the co-pilot before all communication with MH370 was lost, here’s a timeline of Malaysia’s mistakes since the plane disappeared.

March 8:
 Immigration officials allow two passengers to board flight MH370 with stolen passports.

March 8:
 The Malaysian military fails to notice that that the plane has made a sharp left turn, even though it flew over a radar facility.

March 8:
 The Malaysian government confirms reports that two people boarded the plane with stolen passports, then says it was actually four people, before revising it back down two.

March 9:
 Five hours after it happened, state-owned Malaysia Airlines finally confirms that MH370 has disappeared.

March 11:
 Malaysia’s chief of police withdraws the story that baggage was taken off the flight before takeoff because five people didn’t board. Turns out, all those who checked in boarded.

March 11:
 China calls out Malaysia for the slow pace of its search. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang says Malaysia needs to “step up their efforts and speed up their investigation.”

March 11:
 The search begins in the Malacca Strait, three days after military radar captured MH370 turning from its path and flying over the body of water.

March 12:
 Officials admit they’ve known all along that a mysterious plane, likely MH370, appeared on military radar flying on a westerly course. Still, they diverted resources to search east of Malaysia.

March 12:
 Vietnam suspends part of its search for MH370 after Malaysia’s government fails to respond to its repeated requests for information.

March 12:
 Malaysian police release photos of the two men who boarded MH370 with stolen passports and they both seem to have the same legs. A photocopying error is blamed.

March 13:
 Malaysian Transport Minister Seri Hishammuddin Hussein denies a WSJ report claiming the plane flew for as many as four hours after disappearing from tracking systems. The government would later accept that version of events.

March 15:
 Investigators finally confirm that the mysterious flight captured by military data is MH370 and call off the wasted searches underway in areas Malaysian officials already knew were not possible crash sites.

March 15:
 A week after the flight’s disappearance, authorities search the homes of MH370’s pilot and co-pilot.

March 16:
India suspends its search as it waits for Malaysia to say whether it should be searching at all.

March 16:
 American officials tell the Washington Post that FBI agents are ready to go to Malaysia to help investigate the crash but their assistance hasn’t been requested.

March 17:
Officials change the sequence of events concerning the switching off of the plane’s communications system. Rather than insisting it happened before the co-pilot signed off with the words “Alright, good night,” they said it could have happened after, which puts a damper on terrorist-pilot theories.

March 19:
Family members of passengers stage a small protest at a press briefing and are forcibly removed by police who are accused of “manhandling” them.

March 24:
Malaysia Airlines sends a text to the families of passengers that says, “We deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board have survived.”

March 28:
 Four days after the above text, an official tell the families of passengers that he hasn’t discounted the possibility of survivors.

March 28:
 Malaysian officials tell the passengers’ families there is “sealed evidence” they cannot know about.

March 31:
The Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation corrects early reports that the last communication from MH370 was “Alright, good night.” The actual words were “Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero.”

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 3 April 2014, 12:35 am and is filed under
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Analysis: Pessimism Grows as Search for Missing MH370 Drags On

By Bill Neely

NBC News

April 1, 2014

PERTH, Australia – The signs aren’t good. The search coordinators aren’t optimistic. And the chief of the new group heading the search for missing Flight MH370 is warning that the days of intensive searching might be numbered.

“Inevitably, if we don’t find any wreckage on the surface we are eventually going to have to, probably in consultation with everybody who has a stake in this, review what to do next,” retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said.

That day may come soon.

The new search zone is yielding no results after more than 500 hours of searching by dozens of aircraft.

The Australians have been doing a lot to dampen down expectations of a breakthrough. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said several times in the last week that the search effort is “extraordinarily difficult.”

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has stopped giving details of objects found in the sea, preferring to say simply “nothing significant found” at the end of a day’s searching.

The area being searched remains enormous. On Tuesday, 10 ships and 12 planes scoured the Indian Ocean; more than 100 men and women in the air and more than 1,000 at sea.

Still, no one has the slightest idea where the Malaysia Airlines jet hit the sea.

Among the vessels joining the search in the coming days is the Australian naval ship Ocean Shield, which has been fitted with a sophisticated U.S. black box locator and an underwater drone.

It left on Monday but will take “several days” to reach the zone. Time is not on its side because the signal transmitted by the missing aircraft’s black box will fade and die about 30 days after a crash because of limited battery life, leaving investigators with silence from the plane and a much more difficult task of finding it.

Meanwhile, search coordinators are worried about the possibility of a mid-air collision between planes flying low and fast outside normal air traffic control. So Australia will deploy a modified Boeing 737 to act as a flying air traffic controller to prevent such an incident.

One U.S. search plane, a P-8 Poseidon, has flown just 200 feet above the water for long periods, while an Australian P-3 Orion flew briefly at 100 feet above the ocean.

It is an intensive search, to be sure. And no one doubts the high morale and the high hopes of the air crews.

But back at search headquarters, their leaders are growing more cautious and less confident by the day.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 3 April 2014, 12:22 am and is filed under
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First signs of MH370 crash may be found on Australian shore

Danny Lee in Kuala Lumpur

South China Morning Post

03 April, 2014

The first pieces of evidence that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 crashed into the ocean may come to light when they are washed up on a beach, possibly within weeks, experts said yesterday.

Oceanographers said that currents and prevailing winds would likely push any floating debris towards Australia’s vast west coast.

In the event that the huge ongoing Indian Ocean search turns up nothing, small, buoyant items could appear before the wreckage of the plane itself is located.

An assortment of aircraft and ships scouring the ocean some 2,000 kilometres off the coast of Perth have so far found no sign of the missing Boeing 777.

Dr Alec Duncan, an oceanographer from Curtin University in Perth, said: “Prevailing winds are southwesterly, which will push material in the general direction of the coast. However, the search area is a long way offshore, so this could take months.”

He said it was also possible that debris could wash up on one of the islands that dot the Indian Ocean.

Oceanographer Erik van Sebille said that if the plane had crashed near Australia there “would be a good chance” something washed up.

A computer-generated model created by Sebille, which tracks ocean rubbish based on historical data, suggests objects floating in the water 1,800 kilometres from Australia will take about six months to reach land.

But he warned that it would be difficult to identify anything that might wash up.

“I don’t think we will see many sightings, or people picking up debris from the plane, because it won’t be a beach full of plane wreckage,” he said.

“There’s so much debris in the ocean, if you start to investigate every single piece, the chances of it being from the plane are pretty slim.”

Graham Edkins, a former safety investigator with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said it was possible that objects would reach the coast.

“If someone stumbled across wreckage they would be required to call the police in the first instance,” he said.

Oceanographer Andrew Kiss described the current in the search zone as turbulent, and said it would spread floating objects in all directions.

He cautioned that even if something from the plane were to wash ashore, it could easily go unnoticed since the 2,600-kilometre west coast of Australia was sparsely populated.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology predicted that for the next seven days, waves would flow in southwestern and northerly directions in the area around the search zone.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 3 April 2014, 8:13 am and is filed under
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Members of Parliament must think hard and fast  whether  Parliament should adjourn next Thursday utterly lost and indecisive if it becomes increasingly unlikely that the black boxes of MH370 is going to be retrieved in the coming weeks and months?

After 27 days of the longest and largest ever multi-national sea-air-satellite search of the missing MAS Boeing 777 from South  China Sea to the Straits of Malacca; from the Andaman Sea to the Northern and Southern corridors; and now to the Indian Ocean, no clue has been uncovered with regard to  the whereabouts of MH370.

The MH 370 “black boxes” – which records flight data and cockpit voice communications – is now the only hope for clues to the mystery of the flight’s March 8 disappearance or the mystery may never be solved.

Time is fast running out as there are only three days left to retrieve MH370 boxes as their battery-powered signal usually last only about 30 days.

The entry of the British nuclear submarine, HSM Tireless, to join the search for Flight MH370 from Perth, has made it an eight-nation sea-undersea-and-air search involving Australia, Malaysia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the United States and United Kingdom.

However, despite a search involving 12 planes and 10 ships and now one submarine, with more than 100 men and women in the air and more than 1,000 at sea,  the prospects of the 27-day search  of the missing MH370 Boeing 777 have become increasingly pessimistic, forlorn and desperate with no one any the wiser as to where the Malaysia Airlines jet hit the sea.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has stopped giving details of objects found in the sea, preferring to say simply “nothing significant found” at the end of a day’s searching.

Without any single clue so far and  the likelihood that the debris field of the MH370 could be spread over a thousand miles after 27 days of the mysterious mishap on March 8, the warning of the former Australian air force chief, Air  Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who is leading the international search,  that the missing Malaysian Airlines planes “might never be found” must weigh heavily not only on the loved ones of the 239 passengers and  crew onboard MH370,   the international community of well-wishers world-wide but also on all Malaysian MPs.

It is very  somber to be reminded by Houston that Australia took 60 years to locate  HMS Sydney which was lost off Western Australia during the second world war and was not discovered until 2008.

Yesterday, the Inspector-General of Police, Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar has added to the gloom when he said that the MH370 may never be solved and the authorities may never learn what caused the mysterious disappearance of the Flight MH370.

The current meeting of Parliament ends next Thursday on April 10.

While we hope and pray that the black boxes could be retrieved in the next three days, Malaysian MPs, whether Pakatan Rakyat or Barisan Nasional, must think hard and fast  whether Parliament should adjourn next Thursday utterly lost and indecisive if it becomes increasingly unlikely that the black boxes of the missing Malaysian Airlines (MAS) aircraft MH370 is going to be retrieved in the coming weeks and months.

The Prime Minister and the Cabinet has yet to respond to the call for the establishment of an Opposition-headed Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 disaster.

Time is not only running out for the retrieval of the “black boxes” before their batteries expire, time is also running out for the Malaysian Parliament to play a meaningful role in the MH370 disaster before Parliament adjourns next Thursday.

I call on the Cabinet meeting tomorrow not to delay any further and to endorse the establishment of an Opposition-headed Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 next week before Parliament adjourns on April 10, to send a clear and unmistakable message, both nationally and internationally, that the Malaysia has  nothing to hide and is prepared to  find answers to the thousand-and-one questions which have surfaced in the past four weeks, not just about the “what, how and why” about the events leading to the disappearance of Flight MH370 on March 8, but also a whole series of questions and  controversies  surrounding the disappearance of the Triple Seven and the Search-and-Rescue (SAR) Operation.

Parliament will be committing an unpardonable dereliction of duty if Parliament adjourns next Thursday with absolutely no concrete parliamentary measures as to the role Malaysian MPs can play not only in finding answers to the many questions raised in the MH370 Disaster, but in help restoring national and international confidence in the transparency, good governance and international reputation of Malaysia.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 3 April 2014, 11:38 am and is filed under
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MH370 lost in a ‘broken ocean’, says daily

The Malaysian Insider

April 03, 2014

As the search continues in the Indian Ocean for signs of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the staggering amount of rubbish in the sea is hampering efforts to find possible debris from the missing aircraft.

Among those who had highlighted this problem is Fairfax writer Greg Ray whose article “The Ocean is Broken”, written last year went viral on social media, reported The Maitland Mercury.

In the article, Ray had quoted Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen who had sailed from Melbourne to Osaka and from there to San Francisco who expressed his sadness and horror at the astounding volume of garbage he encountered in the ocean during his journey.

Ivan told Ray that one of the things he noticed was the absence of the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Instead, in its place was a huge amount of garbage floating in the ocean.

“We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves,” Ivan’s brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States told Ray.

“We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.

“Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw,” Ray quoted Macfadyen as saying.

Ray wrote that plastic was everywhere, including bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.

Even the boat’s paint job was not spared, he said, adding that the boat’s vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.

Glenn also told Ray that there were “thousands of thousands” of yellow plastic buoys.

There were also huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.

Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea, Ray wrote.

“In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you’d just start your engine and motor on,” Glenn told Ray.

“In a lot of places we couldn’t start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That’s an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.

“If we did decide to motor we couldn’t do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.

“On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn’t just on the surface, it’s all the way down. And it’s all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.”

Ivan believed that part of the floating garbage was a result of the tsunami which hit Japan a couple of years ago.

“The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it’s still out there, everywhere you look.

“The ocean is broken,” he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

Ivan planned to lobby government ministers to help solve the problem.

He was also going to approach the organisers of Australia’s major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life, Ray wrote in his article.

Ivan had signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing – a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.

“I asked them why don’t we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess,” he told Ray.

“But they said they’d calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there.”

The huge amount of garbage in the ocean has hampered search efforts for MH370.

Satellites keep picking up images of objects in the water but some of those objects have proven to be nothing but junk. – April 3, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 3 April 2014, 2:34 pm and is filed under
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Three things we learned about: MH370

By Justin Ong

The Malay Mail Online

April 2, 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 2 — It is nearly a month since the words “missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370” were seared into our consciousness on March 8.

Along the way, we have learned the word “unprecedented” and all its other variations, but not the actual answers to what happened to MH370 and the 239 souls on board.

Here are three things that we gleaned from the story so far.

1. Nobody actually knows

In the vacuum of actual information from on board the plane, we have only hypotheses, speculation and conspiracies.

From the innocent: There was a fire on board and the people succumbed to smoke.

To the insidious: Someone took over the plane and deliberately crashed it into the Indian Ocean, killing everyone on board.

And the inane: “Flight 370 Rescued, Safe in the Hands of Galactic Ship”.

The truth is, however, the mundane: Nobody will be able to tell until MH370 gives up its secrets.

2. We aren’t sure who some of the culprits are

Malaysia has come in for recrimination over the handling of the MH370 crisis, but there is more than meets the eye here.

The crux of the criticism lies with the timing of Malaysia’s initial release of information from British satellite firm Inmarsat, which the latter said it discovered on March 9, one day after the plane disappeared.

At first it appeared that Malaysia sat on this, but as more light was shed on the sequence of events, questions must be asked if others are not at fault.

The information was channelled to Malaysia by the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) only on March 12.

It then went on to US investigators for “further processing” on March 13. And sent back again for added refinement on March 14.

Malaysia then announced the findings on March 15.

Even before Malaysia learned from the AAIB and Inmarsat that MH370 “ended somewhere in the Indian Ocean”, US investigators appeared to already know and had urged Malaysia to direct all search assets there. How did they come to know this before Malaysia did?

While Malaysia has not responded as swiftly as it can in every facet of the investigation, this is one aspect that cannot be entirely blamed on the country’s authorities.

3. MH370 may never tell its secrets

Finding MH370 will be an immense challenge, but there is a very real prospect that, even when it is found, there will be no reward.

At this moment, the entire investigation into what happened on MH370 hinges on the race against time to find the so-called “black boxes” from the plane.

The US Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator, one of only a handful in the world capable of finding the “black boxes” from the plane, is expected to arrive at the current search area 2,000km west of Perth on April 3.

This gives searchers as few as five precious days to find the proverbial needle before they go silent forever in a haystack that drifts ever further each day.

It is also entirely possible that the crucial flight data and cockpit voice recorders are too damaged to be of use, even if they can be found.

A more gnawing fear is that since the recorders only hold a finite amount of data — just two hours’ worth of conversation from inside the cockpit, in the case of the voice recorder — the decisive moments when the plane was rerouted could already have been overwritten.

With so much riding on the data contained in the “black boxes”, investigators may be left with just the “How” of MH370’s end rather than the more burning question of “Why”.

Malaysia on Monday admitted that it was preparing for a contingency in which the plane is never found, but said it was not prepared to divulge the plans out of respect to the families.

Today, the Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar offered a sober appraisal of the investigation’s outlook: “We may not even know the real cause of this incident.”

As frustrating as it may sound, the “unprecedented” mystery of MH370 may always remain so.

– See more at: http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/three-things-we-learned-about-mh370#sthash.MYMbcE1S.dpuf

                This entry was posted on Thursday, 3 April 2014, 12:06 am and is filed under
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Chronic rent-seeking due to corrupted NEP, says Ku Li

by Joseph Sipalan

Malay Mail Online

4 April 2014

KUALA LUMPUR, April 4 — “Haywire” implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was the cause of the rampant cronyism and rent-seeking now ailing Malaysia, said veteran lawmaker Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.

The former finance minister said the practice of patronage in implementing the policy had undermined the “just and noble” philosophy that underpinned the social engineering programme that was mooted in the aftermath of the May 13, 1969 racial riots.

“The entrenchment of rent-seeking and patronage system into the fabric of Malaysian life begs the question: How did this come to pass?” he said in his keynote address at the launch of the book “Rich Malaysia, Poor Malaysians” last night.

“Much as this sounds like a blame game and much as this is distasteful to swallow, the answer lies in the New Economic Policy; or rather, the NEP that had gone wrong in its implementation,” he added.

Tengku Razaleigh, or Ku Li as he is popularly known, said the country has fallen victim to the machinations of politicians habitually lining their own pockets and colluding with businessmen who were uncompetitive without preferential treatment.

He said such political connections have been a major obstacle to promoting healthy and fair, open competition in business, paving the way for profits to be made through outright corruption, poor regulation and the transfer of public assets through privatisation exercises at bargain prices.

He was especially critical of the Barisan Nasional federal government for treating national oil firm Petronas as its personal “piggy bank”, drawing some RM529 billion in dividends, taxes, petroleum proceeds and export duties over more than three decades.

He cited cases such as the RM2.5 billion bailout of Bank Bumiputera in 1985 plus an additional RM1 billion aid payout to the bank six years later, and also the RM2 billion rescue of Konsortium Perkapalan Berhad in 1997.

“The national oil company was also made to underwrite the construction of the Twin Towers in the heart of the KL golden triangle for RM6 billion and the building of the extravagant Putrajaya for RM22 billion.

“In all, more than a half trillion ringgit has been spent. This amount could have been used more productively to fund a national pension programme for Malaysians as has been done by a certain Scandinavian country,” he said, in an apparent reference to Sweden, which is renowned for its extensive public welfare programme.

While acknowledging that the problem lies with corrupt politicians and their business associates working hand-in-glove to perpetuate their power and wealth, Tengku Razaleigh stressed that the solution must come from the public.

The outspoken Gua Musang MP added that this change must also be supported by a revamped education system that puts a premium on logical and critical thinking over rote memorisation just to make the grade.

“I say pressure must be brought to bear and it must be made known that we will not tolerate any more politics that is less than ethical.

“We must clearly and loudly make it known that politics must be practised with a high level of integrity. No, politics is not dirty but its practitioners, more often than not, are,” he said.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 8:30 am and is filed under
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Malaysia Airlines MH370: Unmanned Robot Subs Needed for Search

By Mary-Ann Russon

International Business Times

April 2, 2014

Unmanned robot submarines will need to be brought in to locate wreckage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in the Indian Ocean once the search zone has been narrowed down.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur Ifor Beijing with 239 people onboard  on 8 March but lost contact with air traffic control 50 minutes later.

After 26 days of searching there continues to be no sign of the wreckage. It is now assumed that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean without survivors and the search for the plane has now been classified as a criminal investigation.

Unmanned submarines, which are known as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), were crucial in finding the black box recorders from Air France Flight 447 after it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, killing all 228 people onboard.

Although some major wreckage was removed from the sea within five days of the crash, it took another two years and €32m spent on four deep water search missions before the black boxes were located at roughly 12,800 feet below sea level.

Narrowing down the search area

Investigators knew the general location of the Air France aircraft, but in order to have a chance of finding MH370’s wreckage, the search zone, which currently measures 221,000 square kilometres, must be narrowed down considerably.

“Air France 447 is a bit different from Malaysian Air 370 in that we had a few more clues to work with,” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Dave Gallo told AP.

Gallo led the search team from Woods Hole, an independent research institution which has offered its services to MH370 investigators but has not been asked to join the present search effort.

Woods Hole developed unmanned submarines primarily for research and to monitor shallow waters, such as measuring temperature and salinity of the waters over a wide area for many hours, but the AUV technology is increasingly being used for deeper underwater missions.

The US Navy uses robot submarines to hunt for underwater mines, while energy companies make use of the technology to survey the ocean floor at underwater drill sites.

Unmanned submarines are now the preferred choice for deep water search missions when compared to manned submarines, which are limited by needing to have enough power, air and light, as well as having to follow safety guidelines.

Investigators are currently using an underwater drone and a black box locator attached to the Australian Defence Vessel (ADV) Ocean Shield, a large Australian Royal Navy ship that is being used in the search.

Attaching these devices to the ship enables real-time data transmission to the surface and a continuous power supply from the ship to the devices, however this is a very slow way to search for wreckage.

19,000 feet below sea level

Another advantage of using AUV unmanned robot submarines is that they can travel much deeper underwater than regular submarines and can stay underwater for between 20 to 24 hours.

Wood Hole’s REMUS submarine is almost 13 feet long, weighs 1,900 pounds and comes equipped with sonar, which can be programmed to capture and record images of the ocean floor.

Scientists can view bits of data gathered by the submarines underwater and send instructions to the submarine using an acoustic link, but they can’t tell exactly what the submarine has found until it returns to the surface and the data is downloaded to a computer.

The current search area ranges from between 2,600 feet to 9,800 feet deep. However, part of the search zone includes the Diamantina trench, a narrow area which has a depth of 19,000 feet.

The largest REMUS submarine can reach sea depths of 19,700 feet. In comparison, the Bluefun-21 autonomous submarine that the US Navy sent to Australia to join the search can only reach depths of 14,800 feet.

“Let’s hope the wreck debris has not landed over this escarpment. It’s a long way to the bottom,” said Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia’s James Cook University.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 5:42 am and is filed under
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Malaysia Airlines’ Missing Flight MH370: Timeline of an Air Mystery

By Ludovica Iaccino

International Business Times

March 12, 2014

Missing Malaysian airlines flight crash

Saturday 8 March

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 takes off at 12:21am local time (16:21 GMT) from Kuala Lumpur with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

Flight MH370 was supposed to arrive at Beijing Capital International Airport at 6:30am but two hours after takeoff, air traffic control loses contact with the plane. It is last heard of 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu.

No panic call is received from the crew and weather in the flight path is clear.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) confirms the jetliner never registered entering the airspace between Malaysia and Ho Chi Minh City.

Fear of a crash grow as Malaysia and Vietnam launch a search and rescue operation in the South China Sea. China dispatches two maritime rescue ships.

Terrorist plot, engine failure, disintegration, hijacking and pilot suicide all under consideration as the cause of the disappearance.

Malaysia Airlines releases the passenger list which includes 154 people from China and Taiwan, 38 from Malaysia, seven from Indonesia and six from Australia

Chinese premier Li Keqiang appeals to the Malaysian government to speed up the search operation.

Vietnam confirms seeing a giant oil slick and column of smoke in its waters. The slick is not connected to the missing aircraft, it is discovered.

Terror attack theory strengthens when two “missing” passengers of the flight MH370 reveal that their passports were stolen last year in Thailand.

Sunday 9 March

Radar signals indicate flight may have turned back from its scheduled before disappearing.

Malaysian rescue teams intensify their search off the west coast.

The FBI and Malaysian counter-terrorism units start investigating the terror angle after it emerges that two impostors had boarded the plane on stolen passports. One is described as Italian and the other Austrian.

The Thai travel agency that booked the tickets for the men had been asked to arrange the travel by an Iranian middleman.

Monday 10 March

No sign of mid-air explosion detected in American spy satellite imagery.

The possible sighting of a yellow life raft  is investigated, but it is unrelated.

Fearing a possible bomb explosion aboard the Boeing 777, seven countries resume rescue operation in the seas around Malaysia and Vietnam.

Chinese media claim that some passengers’ mobile phones were ringing when relatives called, but nobody answered.

Five people checked in to board but cancelled their travel at the last minute, Malaysian authorities say.

Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Authority chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahmanthe, says the missing plane is an “unprecedented aviation mystery” and that hijacking cannot be ruled out.

China begins using its orbiting satellites in a bid to find the missing flight.

Malaysia Airline’s share plunges.

Tuesday 11 March

At least 40 ships and 34 aircraft taking part in the search in the seas off Vietnam and Malaysia.

China Airlines reveals that a terror threat was made against Beijing Capital international airport in the days prior to the abrupt disappearance of MH370.

One man using stolen passport not affiliated with terrorist organisations, Malaysian police say. Iranian Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 19, was allegedly migrating to Germany.

The second stolen passport holder is identified as Delavar Syed Mohammed Reza who was allegedly heading to Sweden to seek asylum.

Malaysian authorities examining personal details of everybody aboard the missing flight.

Malaysia is outraged following allegations that co-pilot Fariq Ab Hamid had invited South African tourists into the cockpit on previous flights.

US-based satellite imaging firm DigitalGlobe allows the public to analyse high-resolution images to look for any sign of the missing plane.

Meanwhile, two men from different locations in the Malaysian state of Kelantan claim to have spotted the aircraft plunging into the sea at approximately the same location and time.

Malaysian military says the flight was last seen above the Strait of Malacca, over an hour after it disappeared from air traffic control screens.

After some people claimed to have located the plane using Google Maps, the company responds saying that users should not rely on its satellite imagery because the images are not live.

Wednesday 12 March

Vietnam partially suspends its search and rescue mission to locate the missing plane, citing a lack of response from Malaysian authorities.

Malaysia says it is extending search operations to the Andaman Sea, hundreds of miles from the original search radius.

Malaysian aviation authorities reveal the final conversation between the ground officials and the pilot. “Alright, good night” were the last words of the pilot.

Malaysia’s air force rejects claims that the plane was detected above the Strait of Malacca.

A prominent Iranian lawmaker blames the US for the disappearance of the flight, while a new theory suggests that a slow decompression of the cabin left both passengers and pilots unconscious

Investigators working under even more pressure as 30 days is said to be optimum window to dinf black box to help unravel the mystery.

Images of debris from the missing flight are captured by a Chinese satellite showing three “large, floating, objects” in the South China Sea.

Chinese authorities said the images were captured on March 9, the day after the plane went missing, but have only just been released on Wednesday 12 March.

Thursday 13 March

The search initiated following the images captured by the Chinese satellite is unsuccessful.

Police are carrying out psychological investigations to verify whether any passenger or crew member was suffering personal or psychological problems.

Investigators are considering the possibility that the pilot may have crashed the plane in a suicide bid.

A man claims to have witnessed the plane crashing off Vietnam coast.

According to latest reports, the Boeing 777 might have flown for 5 hours, which is now thought to be four hours after it lost contact.

Nasa joins the search to find the plane.

The US space agency will send any relevant data it finds to the US Geological Survey’s Earth Resources Observations and Science Hazard Data Distribution System.

The five-hour theory is denied by Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Tun Hussein who called the reports “inaccurate”.

Hussein also refutes claims that satellite images of debris from flight MH370 were authentic.

US aviation watchdog warns airlines of a problem with cracks in Boeing 777s that could lead to a mid-air break up; meanwhile Pentagon officials moves its searches into the Indian Sea, where they think the plane might have crashed four of five hours after disappearing from radar.

Friday 14 March

US officials believe the plane was being flown towards the Andaman Islands, an archipelago between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

Chinese researchers detect seismic activity near the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam when the flight went off the radar.

China also urges Malaysia’s government to release any information it has regarding the missing jetliner.

The shaman who has been performing rituals at Kuala Lumpur International Airport to find the flight threatens to take legal action against those who ridicule his practices.

A hoax advert featuring the Boeing 777-300 appears on Craigslist causing puzzled comments on social media.

Indian authorities launch a search of the uninhabited islands located in the Andaman Sea using heat-seeking technology in the hope of a breakthrough in the hunt.

A British woman claims she has found the missing plane after she takes part in a mass volunteer examination of satellite photos to find the plane.

Illusionist Uri Geller, using a technique called “remote viewing” to establish the fate of the plane, believes the pilots were overcome by a fire.

Saturday 15 March

Kuala Lumpur denies a report which said the ongoing investigation “conclusively” suggests the missing Malaysia Airlines flight was hijacked.

Meanwhile, a US official reveals that investigators are looking into the possibility that the “conclusive” hijacking may have been “an act of piracy”.

Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak confirms the movement of the aircraft was consistent with deliberate action by someone aboard to divert the flight from its original path.

Sunday 16 March

Rivalry among two prominent Malaysian politicians is also being mooted as being behind the abrupt disappearance of the flight.

Malaysian investigators fly an identical 777-200 in an attempt to retrace the missing airliner’s flight path.

British tech genius Simon Bax is asked to lead the search of the plane.

Fears that pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah may have hijacked the plane in an anti-government protest grow.

Monday 17 March

The missing plane is believed to have flown at an altitude as low as 5,000ft (1,500m) to escape  detection by ground radar, reports claim.

New Delhi denies speculations that the missing flight was heading towards India for a 9/11-style attack.

The flight engineer Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat on board the missing flight is being investigated by Malaysian police.

Tuesday 18 March

Families of the missing passengers threaten to go on hunger strike in protest at the lack of information.

Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim admits he is related to missing pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

“I am not denying that he [Zaharie] is related to one of my in-laws and that I have met him on several occasions,” Ibrahim said.

Beijing rules out claims that any of the 153 Chinese nationals on board were involved in sabotage or hijacking.

Wednesday 19 March

Investigators reveal that several files in the homemade flight simulator of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah were deleted recently. Malaysian authorities say the files could have provided crucial information regarding the mysterious disappearance of the aircraft.

Chinese relatives of the missing passengers are physically thrown out of the daily press conference in Kuala Lumpur. Two relatives of passengers had approached journalists to ask for information on the search and staged a protest against Malaysian authorities.

Some residents of Kuda Huvadhoo in Dhall Atoll, a remote Maldivian island, claim they sighted an unidentified plane flying low over their houses on the morning of 8 March.

Thailand’s military says its radars had picked up an unknown airliner, suspected to be the missing plane, hours after the aircraft vanished.

Thursday 20 March

The Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation launches an intensive probe to determine the nature of two objects of “reasonable size”, spotted in the southern Indian Ocean by a satellite.

Malaysia’s transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein says the two objects are a “credible lead”.

Friday 21 March

China is to send at least seven vessels to scour the southern Indian Ocean for debris.

UK prime minister David Cameron offers Malaysian counterpart Najib Razak a list of military vessels he would be willing to send to assist the search.

India turns down China’s request to enter its territorial waters to search for the aircraft.

New Delhi says it does not want the Chinese warships “sniffing around” Indian maritime territories under the pretext of searching for the jetliner’s wreckage.

Britain’s HMS Echo survey vessel joins the search for the missing plane.

The Daily Telegraph reveals the last 54 minutes of communication with the flight before it disappeared.

Malaysian Airlines officials confirm the aircraft had been carrying highly flammable lithium-ion batteries in its cargo hold.

Saturday 22 March

The Chinese government claims to have new images of debris that may be part of the missing flight

Relatives of the passengers accuse Malaysian authorities of a cover up.

Sunday 23 March

Volunteer observers aboard Australian jets claim they have seen a number of small floating objects, possibly aircraft debris.

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah received a phone call from a stolen phone hours before the take-off, it is revealed.

Images from French satellites show unidentified debris in the Indian Ocean.

Monday 24 March

A Chinese plane spots several “suspicious white and rectangular” objects around an area where satellite images had detected what could be aircraft debris.

Malaysian authorities say the first floating objects could be recovered by an Australian ship within a few hours.

Malaysian Airlines management said in a public statement they assume “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the missing flight “has been lost and that none of those on board survived”.

Tuesday 25 March

The announcement by Malaysian Airlines was received with grief and dismay by the relatives of the passengers, prompting China to double-check the data to verify Malaysian authorities’ assumption.

Chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya  could lose his job as he faces accusations of gross insensitivity, after sending a text message informing relatives of passengers that their loved ones are almost certainly dead.

Analysts in the investigation become increasingly convinced that the airliner crashed into the Indian Ocean due to a “rational” suicide mission, because of the routing, signalling and communications data transmitted from the aircraft.

Wednesday 26 March

The US Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator 25 (TPL-25) is brought to Australia to assist in the hunt for the plane.

Malaysian authorities said fresh satellite images have located 122 objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean, where the plane is believed to have crashed.

Januari Siregar, father of Indonesian passenger Chandra Siregar, seeks information of the flight’s data via the Chicago-based law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered. The move is seen as a prelude to a complete lawsuit against the airline.

Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah is said he was in “no state of mind to be flying,” after his wife had left him.

Investigators studying the final path taken by the jet disclose that the plane sent a final incomplete ping just eight minutes after the last of hourly pings was transmitted to the satellite.

Underwater geologist Robin Beaman, from the James Cook University in Australia, believes that volcanoes will make the search much more difficult because of the changing landscape beneath the southern Indian Ocean.

Thursday 27 March

Ahmed Seth, the youngest son of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, rejects the latest allegations that Shah could have been on a suicide mission.

Meanwhile, bad weather forces Australia to suspend the ongoing search for debris in the southern Indian Ocean.

A Thai satellite detects 300 floating objects near the search area for the missing plane.

Debris from the plane may be impossible to find due to strong ocean currents, experts claim.

Malaysian and Chinese insurance firms begin awarding compensation to the relatives of passengers , despite there being no official confirmation of the death.

Friday 28 March

Naval vessels and aircraft will be scouring a fresh search zone in the southern Indian Ocean, following a “new credible lead” from radar data, according to Australian authorities.

Malaysian authorities say satellite images showing objects potentially related to the missing plane floating in the ocean are still relevant to the search, despite a shift in focus of some 1,100km.

An Australian plane spots objects that may be related to the missing aircraft in a new search area.

Saturday 29 March

A black box locator heads to the a search area in the southern Indian Ocean after several floating objects are spotted by surveillance aircraft.

Objects retrieved by a Chinese ship are not debris from the missing flight.

Sunday 30 March

China is said to be planning to build dozens of satellites in order to set up a global monitoring network to avoid a repeat of the MH370 mystery disappearance.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) detects a distress signal in the southern Indian Ocean near Antarctica. The emergency beacon comes from a fishing vessel but the nature of the distress call is unknown.

Experts warn that finding the plane could prove one of the toughest tasks in aviation history.

Chinese relatives of passengers arrive in Kuala Lumpur to vent their anger at officials and to demand more information about what happened to the airliner.

Monday 31 March

A black box locator and an underwater drone have been attached to the Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield as the ship begins sailing to the remote southern Indian Ocean.

Malaysian aviation authorities warn that “time is running out” to find the black box.

Tuesday 1 April

Malaysian authorities release the transcript of the final words exchanged between the control tower in Kuala Lumpur and the flight.

“Previously, Malaysia Airlines had stated the  initial investigation indicated that the voice which signed off was that of the co-pilot,” it says in an accompanying statement.

“The police are working to confirm this belief, and forensic examination of the actual recording is ongoing.”

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 3:52 am and is filed under
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Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370: Mystery of missing aircraft ‘may never be solved,’ police warn

Kathy Marks

Sydney

The Independent

03 April 2014

With as little as two days left in which to recover the black box of Flight MH370, Malaysian police have warned that the mystery of the plane’s disappearance nearly four weeks ago may never be solved.

The country’s Prime Minister, Najib Razak, who visited the headquarters of the multinational search in Perth today, promised relatives of the 239 passengers and crew that “we will not rest until answers are… found”. However, batteries in the locator beacons of flight recorders only last about 30 days, which means MH370’s will die next Monday, or even this weekend.

The hunt for wreckage of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 continued in the Indian Ocean, with two British Royal Navy vessels joining seven other ships and eight planes. But since the search switched to the remote waters a fortnight ago, not a single piece of debris linked to the doomed flight has been found, despite exhaustive efforts.

Police, meanwhile, have yet to make any progress with their criminal investigation. Malaysia’s most senior police officer, Inspector-General Khalid Abu Bakar, said that every possible angle was being scrutinised, including whether meals served during the Beijing-bound flight had been poisoned.

Officers were also scrutinising the provenance of every piece of cargo – even a consignment of mangosteens, an Asian tropical fruit. “We had to find out where the mangosteens came from,” said Mr Khalid. “We tracked down who plucked the fruits, who packed them and shipped them out, who put them on the plane. Imagine how many people we must interview, and that was just the mangosteens.”

The enormity of the task facing search teams was acknowledged by Mr Najib, who described it as “a gargantuan challenge”, and by the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, who called the search “the most difficult in human history”.

While Mr Abbott, who hosted his Malaysian counterpart in Perth, said that Australia was “throwing everything we have at it”, he also warned that “we cannot be certain of ultimate success” – a contrast with previous statements in which he pledged that if there was wreckage to be found, Australia would find it.

The search force was bolstered by Britain’s HMS Echo and HMS Tireless, the latter a nuclear-powered submarine with advanced underwater search capability. The hope is that it may detect signals emitted by MH370’s black box – the flight data and cockpit voice recorders which hold the key to why the plane diverted radically off course soon after leaving Kuala Lumpur on 8 March.

Also on its way to the search zone, which was refined today to about 1,680 kilometres north-west of Perth, is the Ocean Shield, an Australian warship carrying a US-supplied black box detector. However, experts have warned that the device will be of little use unless the crash site can be identified much more precisely.

The failure to find any debris – and the imminent black box deadline – are exacerbating the anguish of relatives. “I know that until we find the plane, many families cannot start to grieve,” Mr Najib said. “I cannot imagine what they must be going through. But I can promise them that we will not give up.”

Selamat Omar, whose 29-year-old son, Mohammed Khairul Amri Selamat, was on the plane, told Australia’s ABC radio that he was still hoping he was alive. “After such a long time, they could not find any object [wreckage], even with the expertise of the helpers,” he said. “We are sure that there is hope of life.”

Mr Khalid, though, warned that “at the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause… the reason for this incident”.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 6:12 am and is filed under
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Malaysian Judiciary: How Low Can It Go?

Koon Yew Yin

4.4.2014

The independence and integrity of Malaysian Judiciary are now at the tipping point. During the past few years the attention of Malaysians has been riveted by the exposure to an unprecedented number of court cases with important political ramifications. These cases include the following

•	Altantuya Shaariibuu’s murder case

•	N.Kugan’s death during police custody

•	Teoh Beng Hock’s death

•	the PKFZ scandal

•	the NFC scandal

•	various election appeal cases arising from the 2013 general elections

•	Anwar’s Sodomy I and II case

•	Karpal Singh’s conviction for alleged sedition

At no time in the country’s history has there been such a large and wide variety of politically charged cases being brought to the country’s courts of law.

If we take these cases individually and collectively, the overall impression that can be obtained from the many articles and analysis which have appeared in the internet media is that the Malaysian judiciary has come under tremendous political pressure when arriving at their judgements.
 Each case that I have listed above has its litany of unanswered questions such as

•	why were certain people released midway through the trial while others with no obvious motive, were sent to the gallows for the Altantuya case?

•	Why was Rafizi Ramly and another whistleblower prosecuted, instead of the people involved in the NFC project?

•	Why did the Attorney General not appeal against the court’s judgement in the case of the PKFZ, involving billons of Ringgit in taxpayers’ money

•	The bench made a reserved judgement on the Herald’s case, but in Anwar’s Sodomy II case, why was there such haste to sentence him to five years’ jail?

Although Malaysians have generally not paid much attention to the issue of the relationship between judicial authority and political power (including the power and neutrality of the Attorney General) in the past, I believe that the cumulative effect of all these cases has resulted in our rakyat shedding their indifference and passivity on this key issue of the independence of our judiciary.

Incompetent and Compromised Judiciary

As noted by my good friend and highly respected former court of appeals judge N.H. Chan

How could it be, we may ask, that we are the only country, out of all the other common law countries, in the entire world that has so many incompetent judges? There must be something wrong in our system for the appointment of judges. There was a time when judges were appointed from the cream of the legal profession. Sadly those days were gone.

Besides commenting on the incompetency of our judges, N.H.Chan has asked the crucial question:

What can be done to stop all these unjust decisions being handed down by recalcitrant judges?

His answer is simple. It is that Malaysians must use the power of the ballot box to bring about change.  This is a solution which I am in total agreement with.

The ordinary people of this country must do something about the sorry state of our judiciary with its host of incompetent judges? We cannot and must not allow this state of incompetence among our judges to continue. Any reader of this article and my previous one, “A Sense of Injustice”, knows the law applicable but not so our judges. We must exercise the power of the vote to oust the incumbent government that was responsible for the appointment of such judges who, because they have shown themselves to be incompetent, have made our country the laughing stock in the entire common law world.

It takes only a simple Act of Parliament to rid the country of the incompetent and, therefore, unjust judges. Even the incumbent government could redeem itself by passing a law declaring those judges who had proved themselves to be incompetent, as I have shown in the election petition cases, be removed from office forthwith in ignominy, with all privileges of their office, such as their pension, withdrawn.

Anwar’s Case: The Tipping Point

I also believe that Anwar’s Sodomy verdict is the final tipping point for many Malaysians in their concern to change the government of the country and to recover the independence of our judiciary.

Should Anwar’s appeal be rejected, I have no doubt that there will be a national and international uproar which will only end with the BN being thrown out of power.

The BN Government must realize that the political awakening that Anwar has unleashed in the nation cannot be suppressed just by throwing him into prison with the assistance of what many see as a compromised judiciary. That political awakening will only multiply many fold should Anwar die or be incapacitated while in prison.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 12:05 pm and is filed under
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MH370: What Do We Know? What Will We Ever Know?

By TODD PITMAN

Associated Press

April 3, 2014

Bangkok: At the time — the evening of March 24 — it seemed like the breakthrough the world was waiting for.

In a hastily called speech, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that an unprecedented analysis of satellite signals concluded that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 “ended” deep in the Indian Ocean, far from any possible refuge for the 239 souls aboard.

Finally, there was a solid explanation for what happened to the aircraft. A much more focused search could begin, and so perhaps could the grieving process for families from 14 countries. Najib’s announcement quieted wild speculation about desert islands and terrorists and covert operations.

But four weeks after the plane disappeared, the apparent pivot in the search is proving to be not much of a pivot at all.

Not a single piece of wreckage from the lost plane has been found, not even after a new analysis led investigators to change the focus of their search yet again. The latest search area is based on extremely limited satellite data combined with radar data taken some five hours before the plane is believed to have gone down. It is, as one search official said, “a very inexact science.”

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose country is coordinating the current search effort, spoke of “very credible leads” and “increasing hope” a day before Najib’s announcement. But on Thursday he said the search has become “the most difficult in human history.”

The aircraft could indeed still be in the area planes and ships from several countries have been combing for nearly a week. Currents change the area each day, but on Thursday it was a 223,000-square kilometer (86,000-square mile) patch of ocean 1,680 kilometers (1,040 miles) northwest of Perth.

Each unsuccessful day adds to the skepticism.

“Without any kind of proof, uncertainty rules the day,” said Tim Brown, a satellite imagery expert at GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Virginia. “People still can’t wrap their head around how a modern airplane that big could just go missing in the modern world.”

The focus of the search has changed repeatedly since air traffic controllers lost contact with the Boeing 777 between Malaysia and Vietnam. It began in the South China Sea, then shifted toward the Strait of Malacca to the west, where Malaysian officials eventually confirmed that military radar had detected the plane.

Then came evidence that the plane had continued flying for at least five hours after contact was lost. The plane automatically sent hourly signals to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat, a British company, after the plane’s transponder and all communication systems had shut down. The “pings” did not include specific location information, but the team of experts who studied them said they must have come from one of two vast arcs that ran through both the Southern and Northern hemispheres.

Najib’s announcement reflected a further refinement of that data that determined the aircraft could only have flown south, where it most likely crashed into the sea when it ran out of fuel. Days of costly and fruitless searches off the coast of Perth since then have employed satellites, advanced aircraft and ships, but so far there have only been dead ends.

Last week, using revised estimates of how fast the plane was traveling when it left the Malacca strait, investigators moved the search area hundreds of kilometers (miles) north. But there’s no guarantee that the plane maintained that speed for hours before going down.

“The problem is, we’re dealing with probabilities — estimates,” Brown said of the Inmarsat data. “It’s where they THINK the plane went down.”

Or as Capt. Ross “Rusty” Aimer, a former pilot who now runs Aero Consulting Experts, put it: “Until we find a positive concrete shred of evidence — a piece of the aircraft — everything else is just conjecture, and it could be totally wrong. So far, the satellite calculations have only directed us to oceanic garbage dumps.”

Australian officials have expressed increasing pessimism in recent days. Angus Houston, who heads the joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort out of Australia, said investigators are using computer modeling to determine the plane’s final location, but two key variables needed to calculate that more precisely are unknown: the aircraft’s altitude and speed.

“The starting point whenever you do a search and rescue is the last known position of the vehicle or the aircraft,” Houston said Tuesday. “In this particular case, the last known position was a long, long way from where the aircraft appears to have gone.”

Satellite images taken from the previous search area captured hundreds of possible objects in the water, but searchers in planes and ships found nothing related to Flight 370. In the current search area, even those clues have been lacking.

“We have not had any satellite data, I’d have to say, that has given anything better than low confidence of finding anything so far,” Mick Kinley, deputy CEO of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, said Tuesday. But he also said plane and ship crews “have by no means exhausted” the search area.

Affected families, particularly those of some of the 153 Chinese passengers, have lashed out at Malaysian authorities for essentially declaring their loved ones dead without any firm proof.

Najib said Thursday that everyone involved in the search is thinking of the families and their suffering.

“I know that until we find the plane, many families cannot start to grieve,” he said. “We will not rest until answers are indeed found. In due time, we will provide a closure for this event.”

Malaysia’s government on Wednesday organized a closed-door briefing for the families in Kuala Lumpur with officials and experts involved in the hunt. Steve Wang, a representative of some of the Chinese families who were also briefed in Beijing via video link, said most relatives remain skeptical.

“They said themselves that there are many different possibilities, but they are judging on the basis of just one of them. We all know this can’t convince us,” Wang said. “Hope dwindles by the day and sadness grows. I believe the plane must be somewhere and someone must know, but we do not know who knows it.

“What else can I do but wait in bitterness?” he said. “Two sleeping pills may get me two hours of sleep if I am lucky.”

Dr. Michael Phillips, a Shanghai-based Canadian psychiatrist, said that without bodies or even wreckage, families are caught in an emotional “no man’s land.”

“A whole bunch of things can complicate grief, but in this situation it’s clearly complicated because they’re not sure the people are dead,” Phillips said. “Your logical head would say, ‘Oh, of course they’re dead,’ but your heart will say, ‘No, no, no, I don’t know.'”

The lack of physical evidence also weighs on the investigation into the crash. Just like on Day 1, every theory remains on the table, including electrical or mechanical failure, terrorism, hijacking and pilot murder-suicide.

On Wednesday, Malaysian Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar sounded the most pessimistic note yet, warning that although investigations will go on, at the end of it “we may not even know the reason” the plane veered off course.

The most vital clues are trapped inside the plane’s black boxes, or are hoped to be. Information from the flight data recorder will show what the jetliner was doing, but it may not explain why. The cockpit voice recorder, which only records audio from the flight’s final couple of hours, could simply be silent if the pilots were incapacitated before the plane went down.

Wherever those boxes are, they are pinging. Their batteries are designed to last a month. That month runs out Tuesday.

Associated Press writers Christopher Bodeen, Didi Tang and video journalist Peng Peng in Beijing, Gillian Wong in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Kristen Gelineau in Sydney contributed to this report.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 5:18 am and is filed under
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Parliament should reserve next Thursday for a special debate on the MH370 disaster and what MPs should do to help restore national and international confidence in the transparency, good governance and reputation of Malaysia

The 28-day Malaysian Airlines (MAS) disaster of the missing MH370 Boeing 777-200 aircraft with 239 passengers and crew on board is both a national and international disaster, and this is why it has spawned the longest and largest multi-national air-sea-undersea-satellite search for the missing plane, at one time  involving 26 nations.

Today, a United States underwater drone has joined the race against time in the eight-nation search involving 14 planes, ten ships and a submarine in an area of around 86,000 square miles some 1,000 miles west-north-west of Perth, Australia as there are only two days left to retrieve MH370 black boxes as their battery-powered signal usually last only about 30 days.

At a press conference in Parliament yesterday, I had urged all MPs, whether Pakatan Rakyat or Barisan Nasional, to  think hard and fast  whether Parliament should adjourn next Thursday utterly lost and indecisive if it becomes increasingly unlikely that the black boxes of the missing Malaysian Airlines (MAS) aircraft MH370 is going to be retrieved in the coming weeks and months.

As the current meeting of Parliament adjourns next Thursday, April 10, I suggest that Parliament should reserve next Thursday for a special debate on the MH370 disaster and what MPs should do to help restore national and international confidence in the transparency, good governance and reputation of Malaysia.

This however would require the agreement of the Prime Minister who is the Leader of the House, as it is now impossible for Pakatan Rakyat MPs to introduce any motion on MH 370 which would require 14-days’ notice under the Standing Orders.

This is why the Pakatan Rakyat MP for Seremban, Anthony Loke’s motion to establish a Parliamentary Select Committee on the MH370 disaster was rejected by the Speaker, Tan Sri Pandikar Amin Mulia, as not complying with the requisite 14-day notice necessary for any motion from backbencher MPs.

However, it is provided under Standing Order 27 (3) that  if the Speaker “is satisfied upon representation to him by a Minister that the public interest requires that a motion should be debated as soon as possible, one day’s notice shall be sufficient”.

It is therefore incumbent on  the Prime Minister to have a motion moved and debated for the whole of Thursday on the MH370 plane disappearance disaster, which had gripped the attention and concerns not only of the aggrieved family members of the 239 passengers and crew and the people of Malaysia, but also  the whole world!

As the country whose aircraft with 239 passengers and crew from 14 countries have disappeared into the air with zero findings or clue after four weeks, it will be a disgrace and shame if the Malaysian Parliament is less concerned than other Parliaments or legislatures about the missing MH370 disaster.

I would urge the Prime Minister to agree to set aside the entire Thursday next week to discuss the disaster of the missing MH370 plane, including whether a Parliamentary Select Committee on MH370 should be established.

MPs should also discuss next Thursday whether the Malaysian Parliament should initiate a global parliamentary inquiry into the MH370 disaster, as 14 nationalities are victims of the disaster, with the passenger list counting 153 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, 7 Indonesians, 6 Australians, 5 Indians, 4 French, 3 Americans, 2 each from New Zealand, Ukraine, Canada and Iran and one each from Russia, Taiwan and Netherlands.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 3:45 pm and is filed under
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Putrajaya seeks stiffer penalty against Karpal for sedition

by V Anbalagan

The Malaysian Insider

April 04, 2014

Veteran lawyer Karpal Singh, who was fined RM4,000 for sedition last month, could now be jailed after prosecution filed a cross appeal, urging the court to impose a stiffer penalty.

Karpal was found guilty of sedition and fined by the Kuala Lumpur High Court on March 11.

However, he told The Malaysian Insider yesterday that he received a copy of the notice of appeal filed by the prosecution, urging the Court of Appeal to enhance the sentence.

“They want me in jail,” said Karpal, who stepped down as DAP chairman following the conviction and sentence last month.

“Well, they are entitled to file a cross appeal.”

Speaking to The Malaysian Insider yesterday, the 73-year-old wheelchair-bound lawyer said the Court of Appeal could impose the maximum RM5,000 fine or sentence him to jail which could be up to three years.

An accused convicted of sedition could be fined, ordered to prison, or both.

Karpal had earlier filed his appeal against both the conviction and sentence.

He committed the offence based on a statement at a press conference on February 6, 2009, commenting on the Sultan of Perak, Sultan Azlan Shah’s decision to remove the then Perak menteri besar Datuk Seri Mohamad Nizar Jamaluddin from office.

On February 21, High Court judge Datuk Paduka Azman Abdullah found Karpal guilty and on March 11 imposed a RM4,000 fine although deputy public prosecutor Noorin Badaruddin pressed for a deterrent sentence.

Karpal now risk losing his Bukit Gelugor parliamentary seat unless the appeal court reduced the fine to less than RM2,000.

Under the Federal Constitution, an elected representative is disqualified from office if fined more than RM2,000 or jailed for a term exceeding one year.

Karpal’s conviction and sentence has been condemned by local and foreign lawyers groups like the International Commission of Jurist (ICJ), Malaysian Bar Council and Lawyers for Liberty.

The Geneva-based ICJ said the Malaysian government was brazenly utilising a draconian and outdated sedition law to restrict freedom of expression in the country by lawyers and public figures. – April 4, 2014.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 8:40 am and is filed under
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Time, Batteries Running Out on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ‘Black Box’

By Ross Kelly in Perth, David Winning in Sydney

Wall Street Journal

April 3, 2014

The Australian head of the international search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has called the operation one of the “most challenging” he has ever seen.

As the chances dim for finding Malaysia Airlines 370’s “black box” flight recorders before the batteries in their locator beacons run out, Malaysian and Australian leaders sought to inject new momentum into a search of the southern Indian Ocean that has yet to find plane wreckage.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak met aircrews involved in the multinational search for Flight 370 at Pearce air base, near Perth, on Thursday. The visit is Mr. Najib’s first to Australia since the focus of the search swung abruptly to the southern Indian Ocean on March 20, based on satellite images of possible plane debris. So far, nothing related to the missing plane has been found.

Malaysian investigators still believe Flight 370 crashed in the ocean when it ran out of fuel—thousands of kilometers from the nearest airport—hours after disappearing from civilian radar on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board.

“The search area is vast and conditions are not easy, but the new refined search area has given us new hope,” Mr. Najib told reporters.

But with uncertainty persisting about whether it is the right area, investigators from five countries, including the U.S. and China, are continuing to analyze satellite and communications data that shed light on how the plane was traveling, including its speed and altitude.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Thursday described the search as possibly the most difficult in human history and reiterated that there was no certainty of a breakthrough.

“On the basis of just small pieces of information, we are putting the jigsaw together,” he said. “Every day we have a higher degree of confidence that we know more about what happened to this ill-fated flight.”

On Thursday, 10 aircraft and nine ships were dispatched to the search area, which lies some 1,680 kilometers (about 1,000 miles) northwest of Perth, to look for wreckage and drop marker buoys that can help authorities understand the impact of ocean currents in dispersing any plane debris. The area largely overlaps the one scoured fruitlessly by aircrews and ships the previous day.

Authorities said late Thursday that no new objects had been spotted.

Now in its fourth week, the hunt for Flight 370 has yielded only unrelated scraps of junk. The current search area is in a part of the ocean where currents frequently bring together floating garbage.

This week, the search was joined by a U.K. military submarine equipped to detect signals from the flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders, whose beacons could run out of power as soon as this weekend. The HMS Tireless bolsters the capabilities of the multinational team, which has been relying on a combination of satellite images, radar data and crews scanning through aircraft windows to search an area the size of Italy for floating debris.

The nuclear-powered submarine, built for the Royal Navy as a Cold War attack vehicle, has equipment on board that may help it to pinpoint signals from Flight 370’s recorders. It could also be used to search for aircraft wreckage along the largely undisturbed seabed, a spokeswoman for the U.K.’s defense ministry said.

Peter Jennings, a defense expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said submarines are of limited use in deep-water searches, though. Most are designed to operate in less than a kilometer (0.6 miles) of water. Depths in the current search area are estimated at up to four times that.

The best hope, he said, lies with sonar systems towed by ships, such as a U.S. Navy black-box locator that left Perth aboard the Australian navy vessel Ocean Shield Monday night.

But Ocean Shield, built to operate in Antarctic weather, isn’t expected to arrive in the search area before April 5—as little as two days the locator-beacon batteries, which have an estimated life of 30 days, expire.

—
Rachel Pannett in Sydney contributed to this article.

                This entry was posted on Friday, 4 April 2014, 8:30 am and is filed under
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Candlelight vigil on Monday midnight which marks full-month of disappearance of MH370 in prayer and hope for the 239 passengers and crew on board and in support and solidarity with their loved ones in their anguish and suffering

Today, 29 planes and 11 ships are scouring a search area of about 217,000 square kilometres 1,700 kilometres north west of Perth in a desperate race against time to retrieve  the missing  MH370-200 Boeing 777-200 aircraft’s blackbox before its batteries run out.

The CNN report that the aircraft’s black box battery life may be shorter than expected, lasting only 20 to 25 days, as flight MH370’s black box pingers have not been replaced in 2012, is most shocking news.

Monday in two days’ time will be the full month of the tragedy of the missing Malaysian Airlines (MAS) MH370 Boeing 777-200 aircraft which took off from the KLIA on March 8 at 12.41 am for a six-hour flight to Beijing but which disappeared within the first hour with no clue discovered so far as to its whereabouts despite the longest and largest-ever multi-national air-sea-undersea-satellite search.

I call on Malaysians to have a candlelight vigil on Monday midnight which marks the full month of the disappearance of MH 370 in prayer and hope for the 239 passengers and crew on board and in support and solidarity with their loved ones in their anguish and suffering.

Not only in Malaysia and the 13 countries whose nationals were on board of the missing MH370, but all over the world, concerned people will be praying and hoping, however slim the hope, for  a miracle about the safety of the 239 passengers and crew.

A  candlelight vigil in Dataran Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur and in Johor Baru are being planned on Monday midnight.

(Media Conference Statement in Pontian at the planting of 500 mangrove seedlings by the Green Team jointly organised by The Malaysian Dream Initiative and JARING movement in Pontian on Saturday, April  5, 2014)

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 5 April 2014, 2:03 pm and is filed under
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Invitation to Minister in Prime Minister’s Department and Deputy Environment Minister to visit “Pulau Ubah” to ascertain whether large-scale  land reclamation in accordance with the law

It is my pleasure to be with all of you today for this meaningful event.  Soon we will get down to the ground, or rather the mudflats, to plant 500 mangrove seedlings, marking the start of coastal mangrove rehabilitation in this area.

This is a collective effort of different organisations and individuals present here today.   The Green Team under the Malaysian Dream Movement, and the NGO J.A.R.I.N.G are the co-organisers. But perhaps more encouraging is to see many  of you volunteers, from Pontian as well as other parts of Johore, to join us here on this faithful morning.

You are all agents for change for a better Malaysia.

Background

Malaysia is a country blessed with a long coastline and has always been steep in maritime culture.  In Johor, many of us do not realize that we are living in a very special state with the longest coastline among all eleven states in Peninsula Malaysia.  No other state can boast a coastline as long as 400km and surrounded by the Straits of Malacca in the west, the South China Sea in the east and the Straits of Johore in the south.

Johor is truly blessed with long coasts lined with lush mangroves.  Not far from here, we have Tanjung Piai, Pulau Kukup and the Sungai Pulai mangroves which are recognized worldwide as unique ecosystems supporting diverse marine biodiversity.  Lesser known mangrove wetlands, such as those around Rambah and the Pontian town, are no less important to the environment and local livelihoods.

Not only Mosquito and Mud

In the past, perhaps due partly to ignorance and misconceptions, many view mangroves and wetlands as nuisance.  For some, these are just big patches of water-logged, muddy swamps full of mosquitoes.  Swampy and unproductive land must be drained and transformed or else how could human beings settle and civilisation flourish.  Forces of nature must be tamed, or so they say.

In the last 50 years, amidst the rapid development especially along the coastal plains in Malaysia, some 80% of mangrove forests were converted.

However, it is also during the past decades that we are increasingly informed about the functions of mangroves and how they form the bio-physical base to support marine resources and coastal fisheries.  Without the mangroves, mudflats and the coastal wetlands, there will be no fish, no prawns and crabs, and no human settlements in Johor.

After the 2004 South Asian Tsunami, we learnt the lessons that that coastal mangroves save lives and protect communities from being swept away by tsunami waves.

It is, after all, not merely mosquitoes and mud.

Our presence here today for mangrove replanting is indeed a reminder to all of us that we must learn a smarter way to co-exist with nature, and instead of indiscriminately bulldoze the mangroves for so-called ‘development’, we have to assume the role of stewardship towards the environment on which our sustenance are dependent.

Lawlessness in Iskandar Malaysia – The case of Pulau Ubah

Let me take the opportunity here to highlight the ongoing “Pulau Ubah” scandal in Gelang Patah.

Where is Pulau Ubah? You won’t find it anywhere on the official maps published by the Malaysian authorities. For this is a newly reclaimed island off the coast of Tanjung Kupang, in Gelang Patah, Johor Bahru.

Since January this year, a humongous project started near Tanjung Kupang and the local fishermen in Pendas brought me there by boat twice.  First on 15th February 2014 and then on 24th February 2014.  It was shocking.  The damages were beyond words.

I was told that this area, prior to reclamation, is where sea-grass flourish and marine lives thrive.  Seahorses, in particular, breed here. So does dugong and so many other kinds of marine creatures.  The entire area, extending to Pulau Merambong, are supposed to be designated as a marine protected area.

But instead, the sea was parcelled out by the State Government to developers for reclamation.  According to documents that we have sighted, they wanted to reclaim as much as 2500 acres, leaving very little waters left for hundreds of fishermen who still ply the straits for their livelihood.

I am sure many of the local Pontian fishermen here knew about the project and have witnessed the damage it has inflicted upon the marine ecosystem.  They suffer greatly from its detrimental impacts.  Barely two months ago, cases of suspicious widespread fish death along the Straits, were widely reported.

We know the Straits of Malacca is just a narrow patch of water, not to mention the even smaller Straits of Johor.  When you reclaim 2,500 acres or more, the waters are largely out of bounds for the fishermen.  Could they possibly fish on reclaimed land?

Questions in Parliament

I raised this issue specifically in Parliament on 13th of March.  I questioned the Minister of Environment – How could the reclamation start prior to any regulatory approval from his Ministry including the mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)?  I asked the Prime Minister, as the Co-Chairperson of Iskandar Regional Development Authority (IRDA), to explain – why IRDA can approve such project without considering the fact that the reclaimed area is earmarked as ‘marine protected area’ in IRDA’s own 2011 Shoreline Management Blueprint?

The BN Government spent millions of taxpayers money to hire top-class consultants to produce development plans, to conduct studies and to compile blueprints, to make Iskandar Malaysia an economically vibrant and environmentally sustainable development region unmatched by any other in the world.

In those shiny plans and blueprints, Pulau Ubah never exist – there is no plan at all for reclamation there, it should be kept as mudflats, wetlands and marine protected areas.

What happen to the development plan and blueprints? I asked the Ministers.  The Deputy Minister of Environment [The Minister, Palanivel, did not report to Parliament perhaps because he is too occupied to with the Giant Panda from China], James Dawos Mamit said “an EIA is not required.  The reclaimed area is small, only 49 hectares”.

On the other hand, Wahid Omar, a Johorian, who is in-charge-of Economic Planning Unit in the PM’s Department, claimed the government will always follow the plans and blueprints in monitoring the development activities in Iskandar Malaysia.

What both of them have said in Parliament are incorrect.  We have done our research properly and obtained documents and maps from none other than the government’s offices – the reclaimed area is far greater than 49 hectares.

In fact, not only off Tanjung Kupang, the coastal waters of Tanjung Piai in Pontian will also be subjected to large scale reclamation as large as several thousand hectares.  All these have NEVER been a part of the Iskandar Malaysia Comprehensive Development Plan.

The facts and evidence are laid bare before our eyes.  I will write to invite both Ministers to join me for a field trip to Tanjung Kupang to see for themselves the so-called 49 hectares reclamation which is supposed to be lawful and well planned.

Maritime Traffic Affected?

I would also ask the Federal Government to explain if indeed the ongoing reclamation would affect maritime transport, especially that of ships calling at the Port of Tanjung Pelepas (PTP).  I was told that the Ministry of Transport have written to the Johor State Government, objecting on the grounds that their views are not consulted prior to the reclamation project which would inevitably affect maritime traffic and the PTP.   The Federal and State Government must not hide facts here – if reclamation is allowed to proceed, will the seabed become so shallow that ships can no longer pass safely to the port and subsequently the economy will be affected?

A few words on the small fishermen

Let me come back to the issue of mangrove and local livelihood.  I want to say a few things about our small coastal fishermen.

The Department of Fisheries statistics tells us that there are 2,438 fishermen in Pontian and western Johor Bahru combined.  In Pontian alone, out of 1,825 fishermen, 1,201 are Malays, 616 Chinese and 8 Indians.  710 operates small fishing boats with outboard motors.

It tells us most of our Pontian fishermen are small coastal fishermen.

While fishing might not be the dream job for everyone, without them braving the waves and baking under the hot sun, there will be no fish and prawns as sources of affordable and nutritious food for all of us.

Fisheries contributes to about 1% of GDP for Malaysia. However, the contribution of coastal fishermen to our society, and their important role in shaping Malaysian culture and identity, cannot be assessed and valued based solely on the GDP numbers.

The plight of coastal fishermen amidst rapidly changing environment calls for the attention and genuine actions from the government.  The Fisheries Development Board and the Department of Fisheries cannot blindly push for large aquaculture businesses and encourage ocean fishing by large companies but give no thoughts for the small and traditional coastal fishermen.

Handouts and subsidy payments that are few and far between, do very little to alleviate the fishermen from poverty and help them to move forward in the waves of national development.

The fishermen and the rakyat, are not needy patients, waiting only to be fed with cash handouts and goodies.  We are agents of change, and as stakeholders, we should rightly demand that our voices, rights and values be taken into considerations in national development.

No longer can we accept arbitrary projects such as those that claim progress and development can be brought forward by bulldozing mangroves to build luxury condominiums.  We know the values of our coastal mangroves now, it is not only patches of swamps full of mosquitoes.

The true goals of development as pursued by Malaysia since independence, for me, is to benefit all people, to allow all Malaysians regardless of race and religion, to live a better and fuller life with dignity.  If we are lost in our way as the BN government did by pursuing mega projects blindly without considering local livelihoods and environmental factors, the people will remain oppressed and unfree.

Conclusion

Well, the tides wait for no one and we must get down now before the water rises again.

The 500 mangrove seedlings we plant today is from the species called Pokok Api-Api (note: named after the fireflies living on the tree).  With persistence and care, I hope the seedlings would develop into trees and forests.  I urge you to cultivate the small flame (api-api) of awareness on environmental justice into a beacon of fire and inspire more friends to join forces as the agents of change for Impian Malaysia.

(Speech at the planting of 500 mangrove seedlings  by the Green Team jointly organised by The Malaysian Dream Initiative and NGO JARING movement in Pontian  on Saturday, April 5, 2014)

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 5 April 2014, 3:24 pm and is filed under
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Parliament should close down ESSCOM  next week if after spending RM300 million, all it could say  after the latest abduction in Semporna is that it it is “powerless in Esszone”

The Eastern Sabah Security Command (Esscom) might as well close down if after the Malaysian taxpayers spending RM300 million on it, all it could do is to admit that it is “powerless”  following the abduction of two women from a resort off Semporna on Wednesday.

Not only Sabahans, but all Malaysians, are outraged at today’s  Malay Mail Online report on the statement by the Esscom corporate communication head Newmond Tibin who said it had “no power” over the 10 districts in the Eastern Sabah Safety Zone (Esszone) and that it was under police jurisdiction.

The 10 districts are Kudat, Kota Marudu, Pitas, Beluran, Sandakan, Kinabatangan, Lahad Datu, Kunak, Semporna and Tawau.

“Each district in the Esszone has its own OCPD and they take orders from the police chief. Thus allegations that Esscom is not doing anything is unfair,” said Newmond.

He said Esscom’s role was to coordinate with various agencies.

“We are in no position to give direct orders to the 10 districts on what they have to do. We have done our part to coordinate and cooperate with the authorities.”

Newmond said it was vital to inform the people about Esscom and Esszone.

“We need to explain to the people of Sabah about our role. We have no direct control. The director-general has no power to command,” he said.

This is the latest example of Malaysia’s shambolic governance, with one agency after another denying responsibility and passing-the-buck to another, making fools of the Malaysian people.

Esscom was formed after the Lahad Datuk intrusion in February last year as the guardian of security of  Sabahans in the East Cost of Sabah.

Now, after the expenditure of RM300 million, Sabahans and Malaysians are told that Esscom is not responsible for their security. If so, why set up Esscom?

It is clear that the RM300 million spent on Esscom has been a total waste of money as there can be no excuse to spend such a vast sum of money to erect a superstructure just to play the role of co-ordination of the 10 police districts.

Unless there is a clear and satisfactory explanation for the shocking statement by Newmond, Parliament should move an emergency motion to dissolve Esscom next week as Sabah and Malaysia do not need a RM300 million “white elephant”.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 5 April 2014, 4:10 pm and is filed under
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