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SPEAKING FREELY
Malaysiakini raid: Politics
of fear
By Manjit
Bhatia
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
The police raid on award-winning
online newspaper Malaysiakini.com was
politically motivated after the right-wing cadres in
UMNO Youth, an arm of the ruling United Malays National
Organization (UMNO), last week complained that a letter
written by "Petrof", a reader, and published on
Malaysiakini's website was seditious. What's
treasonable, UMNO Youth says, is that the writer likens
Malays, or bumiputera (sons of the soil), to the
Ku Klux Klan in the United States. These cadres say the
letter threatens Malaysia's "national interest", which
it interprets in this case as undermining the security
and balance of Malaysia's fragile multi-racial
relations.
Police confiscated computers and
servers belonging to Malaysiakini, apparently to
"investigate" this and other "seditious" material that
could be stored on computer hardware, and for which
Malaysiakini and those responsible for their content
could be charged. But this is a desperate attempt by a
government, which is quickly gearing up for an election,
probably in September, to silence a growing number of
critics, mostly the well educated, of a regime that has
continued strenuously to pursue the politics of racial
division and a feudalistic patronage system which
continues to entrench rampant cronyism, nepotism and
corruption.
It's a pity the illiberal Malaysian
government, until recently, had not used such sweeping
police powers - since boasting its police and other
intelligence is among the world's best - to root out
Islamic terrorists and fascists who had holed up in
Malaysia for more than a decade and who had used
Malaysia as the regional center for their cowardly acts.
It's far easier for the government to deploy
state-terror on political dissidents, especially these
days when the police are used to doing the ruling
party's political dirty work. Moreover, pusillanimous
state action is easily justified and legitimated
nowadays by the cover of the war against terrorism, and
backed by repressive laws.
Malaysia has learned
little from history, including its own. And most
Malaysians either remain blissfully complacent or
ignorant of increasingly ugly political developments or
they are scared by ruthless state power. And that's just
how UMNO and the government of Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad like it - rule by law. The latest raid hardly
surprises given previous crackdowns on political
opponents and dissidents since the race riots of May 13,
1969. May 13 institutionalized, probably forever, the
racial codification of Malaysian politics. It also
entrenched a reworked bargaining arrangement among
political representatives of the three main ethnic
communities by which "consensus" is reached on policy
matters. But all these have only bastardized notions and
practices of justice, freedom and equality.
Abuse of power has become a fundamental part of
the Malaysian state system, and repressive laws mete out
oppression by which successive regimes have governed the
nation in the name of Malaysian democracy - one that is
only as good as the valueless five-year cycle of general
elections amid charges of gerrymandering and voting
frauds. Democracy, freedom and justice died in 1969. The
image of Malaysia's economic successes - rising national
income and export-oriented industrialism - belie the
dark underbelly of unequal politics and socio-economic
development, and disguise a litany of power abuse by the
political elite and the ruling class.
Since
1969, human-rights abuses by successive Malaysian
governments have been rife. Press freedom was among its
early victims. So was Malaysia's first prime minister,
Tunku Abdul Rahman, then the chief nemesis of the Malay
right-wing nationalist Mahathir Mohamad. Although press
freedom was later relaxed to allow the growth of media
outlets, their owners consistently exercised
self-censorship as part of the new deal. By 1984,
though, Prime Minister Mahathir had launched blistering
new curbs on press freedom - an issue that became a bane
for Malaysiakini editor Steven Gan when he worked for
the Sun newspaper in the mid-1990s. In Mahathir's time,
mainstream media is owned and controlled either by
sections of the political elite or by its business
cronies.
It's nonsense that UMNO should fear a
letter written by a reader. So what really frightens
UMNO? To be sure, it fears a growing backlash against
the government by educated Malay and non-Malay voters,
many of whom, in various ways, could easily influence
other voters, particularly in ethnic-party heartlands.
Already, one of the ruling coalition's partners, the
Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), is deeply split by
protracted brawling between its incumbent leader and his
No 2, with the growing likelihood that Chinese voters
will punish the party by backing the opposition, mainly
the Chinese Democratic Action Party, instead.
If
the MCA had helped save UMNO's (and the ruling Barisan
Nasional's) bacon in the last election in 1999, when its
total vote was hammered - its worst performance since
the 1969 elections - there are mounting fears the MCA
will be completely ineffective this time around. In
fact, UMNO genuinely fears it could get badly whacked
again, and far worse than in 1999, by the opposition
fundamentalist Islamic party, PAS. And there's no
shortage of reasons for this. For one thing, the
political power-transition process from Mahathir to his
anointed successor, deputy Prime Minister Abdullah
Badawi, is far from fully transparent.
Also
troubling is Mahathir's glaring support for the United
States' war against terrorism, which many Muslim Malays
see as the superpower flagrantly targeting Islamic
countries while Mahathir launches only obligatory and
seriously subdued criticisms of the US. Domestically,
Mahathir is cracking down on Islamic schools, which he
thinks could be sources for future terrorists, while he
liberalizes aspects of Islamic precepts, especially on
polygamy, which has enraged many Muslim women. All these
are adding more woes to Malaysia's sputtering economic
recovery. The anger among middle-class Malaysians badly
hurt by the Asian economic crisis has not subsided
sufficiently to be translated into votes for the ruling
coalition.
And contrary to popular opinion,
neither has the specter of former Mahathir protege Anwar
Ibrahim, who was jailed on trumped-up charges by his
former boss. Indeed, the police raid on Malaysiakini is
certain to resurrect memories among Malaysians of the
lengths to which the Mahathir government will pursue its
authoritarian grip on political power. And worsening the
problem is uncertainty about the government's ability to
secure sustainable economic recovery. Although external
shocks remain one of the economy's biggest obstacles, a
series of recent policies will strongly test UMNO and
the Mahathir government's true form on economic
governance.
The underperforming stock market has
been given a sudden boost with the entry of ValueCap,
whose three main stakeholders are state-owned financial
institutions armed with RM10 billion (US$2.63 billion)
in cash. There's mounting speculation that ValueCap,
registered as a private company, seeks to lift the share
values of debt-sick "blue chip" crony-linked companies
such as Renong and UEM so as to avert a serious
bank-debt problem. And Malaysian banks are being forced
into second round mergers, after the first round failed
miserably. There's also renewed speculation that
Danaharta, the state agency charged with ridding
Malaysia Inc's bad debts by selling off assets, has been
only partially successful. Add to this the latest
scandal brewing over the RM1.02 billion road project on
Penang, which is not the brainchild of the island's
administration as claimed by Barisan Nasional but in
fact the federal government's.
None of the
mainstream media is willing to run hard-hitting and
investigative stories, exposing the rise in government
shenanigans after the late-1990s economic crisis, but
Malaysiakini. Disgusted by the mainstream media's
gutless journalism, and their status as no more than
government mouthpieces aimed at dumbing-down Malaysians,
more than 100,000 mostly educated Malaysians and others
have turned to Malaysia's only independent "newspaper"
since 1999. Malaysia's press freedom was shot to pieces
a long time ago, but what has truly been shredded here,
once again, is Malaysia's image abroad and at home.
Mahathir's assurance of press freedom while
promoting his Multimedia Super Corridor has been gutted.
Investors will be scared off by UMNO's latest terrorism
and the specter of a government increasingly in
disarray. Mahathir may well have undermined press
freedom as he has justice and equality; now he's in
danger of undermining UMNO and its coalition partners,
who haven't moved beyond the 15th-century feudal
mindset. UMNO Youth's small-mindedness, though not
surprising, will only push more Malaysians toward
Malaysiakini. With brave Malaysians behind it,
Malaysiakini could show the growing irrelevance of the
country's political dinosaurs and could help pave the
way to a democratic Malaysia with a responsible and
accountable government that's not a law unto itself.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have their
say. Please
click
here if you are interested in
contributing.
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