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At last, the 'Great Malaysian Debate'
By Ioannis Gatsiounis

KUALA LUMPUR - First its permit was rejected, then it was rejected again. When police finally agreed to the terms of what was officially slugged "The Great Malaysian Debate", one of the two slated participants, Mohamed Nazri, a minister in the Prime Minister's Department of the long-ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO), said he had a prior engagement. Any optimism that this Islamic "democracy" might begin to live up to its tag line looked ready to undergo yet another setback.

But on Tuesday evening, against all odds, the show went on (only after tacking on 11 conditions, including no questions from the floor and the right for police to videotape the event, and Bazri changing his mind ). And what might have seemed like an every-day affair in many neighboring countries became a milestone in fast-developing and stable but socially and politically restricted multi-ethnic Malaysia.

The topic was the highly controversial Internal Security Act (ISA), a 44-year-old law that allows for indefinite detention without charge and trial and which has been used to jail suspected terrorists - as well as peaceful protestors.

The ISA has remarkably shaped the public's sense of entitlement and its willingness to express itself. This made the recent ISA public debate all the more noteworthy, particularly because the ISA has never before been publicly debated by a government and opposition leader - let alone debated in parliament.

"Let us show to the world we are [ready to hold an open debate]," Transparency International Malaysian Chapter president Abdul Aziz said in opening remarks before the 1,000-plus guests (as well as 100 uniformed and plainclothes police offers) on hand for the debate.

The debate itself was little surprise to anyone who has ever doubted the government's insistence that Malaysians are not mature enough to disagree and that a more open society will lead to economic fallout and chaos. These same people know Malaysians on the whole to be a civil and rationale lot, disallowed the freedoms to prove their potential.

Nazri's opponent and leader of the Chinese opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) Lim Kit Siang, who has been a victim of the ISA twice in his long political career, spoke first in "The Great Malaysian Debate - ISA: Yes or No", the goal of which was to debate whether the ISA should remain at the disposal of the government or be repealed.

Lim's argument on Tuesday focused mostly on how the ISA's application has strayed from its initial intentions, to a gross form of abuse that has curbed "legitimate dissent". "Repeal the ISA," he thundered at the outset, raising a chest-level fist to fervent applause. "It is the mother of all undemocratic practices in the history of Malaysia."

He said whereas other East and Southeast Asian nations have turned from dictatorships to democracies - from the Philippines to Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia - under the ISA, Malaysia has "slipped to the status of a puff democracy".

The ISA, Lim said, was originally drafted in 1960 as a piece of wartime legislation to deal with a communist insurgency, to be applied only in a state of emergency. Lim said that that time had come and gone. That the act has been used all this while means "we are in a permanent state of emergency", he said.

Application of the ISA falls under the jurisdiction of the home minister, currently the prime minister himself, Abdullah Badawi, who has long been an enthusiastic supporter of the ISA.

Lim indirectly urged Badawi to reconsider his thinking when he cited comments made last Wednesday by former home minister, Ghazali Shafie. During his reign (1973-81), some 4,000 people were arrested under the ISA. According to Lim, home ministers have consistently held a cavalier attitude toward human rights, and their decisions regarding the incarceration of ISA detainees are often made with haste. Quoting from a book belonging to Shafie's deputy Rais Yatim, Lim said, "It is common practice that the minister of Home Affairs sign detention papers purely basing his findings on the briefs supplied by police." However, detainees' detention papers have often been signed by home ministers within hours of their expiration.

Lim said the long list of Malaysians detained under the ISA who have never been found guilty in an impartial court of law for their accused crimes indicates the government's desire to silence any form of opposition that might jeopardize its stranglehold on power and has given rise to a "state of confusion in the real accepted meaning" of a state of emergency and what constitutes a threat to national security.

Proponents of the ISA say that terrorism has taken the place of communism as the main threat to national security. In defending the ISA they often point to similar legislation in the world power Malaysia most admires, the United States. To the ISA's detractors, this represents a fundamental flaw in the Malaysian government's logic: it has tended to look to other country's shortcomings in the area of human rights to rationalize its own.

At the time of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal involving US military personnel and Iraqi prisoners of war, long-standing accounts of maltreatment and torture of ISA prisoners resurfaced. But the prime minister and the subservient media were swift to shift the lens back outside Malaysian borders.

Lim's opponent, Nazri, distanced himself from such thinking when he said, "I'm not going to talk at all on terrorism. What we do in Malaysia we don't have to find solace or comfort from what other people do."

Minutes later, however, perhaps unconscious of how entrenched the mindset has become within the government, he mentioned that the United States and the United Kingdom had similar legislation. His defense of the ISA then centered mostly on the threat of terrorism.

Indeed, Malaysia has avoided a major terrorist incident, and of the nearly 100 current detainees under the ISA, whose detentions can be renewed on a two-year basis, most are suspected of terrorist activity. Although the government has yet to prove that any of them were involved in terrorist activity, Nazri said this is because "they were nipped in the bud. The crime was not committed because we caught them."

He said the fact that evidence has not yet surfaced linking detainees to terrorist plots is being investigated. Because their activities are highly covert in nature, he added, investigations usually require much deliberation. Moreover, he said that prolonging the arrests of those who are a threat to national security could abet them in their plans to destabilize the nation.

According to Nazri, the ISA is preventive in nature: "There is peace and stability in this country because of the ISA," he said. Detention without trial, he said, has proved more helpful than harmful.

Nazri urged the audience to consider the people's expectations of their the government. "If something happens, the people will not blame the opposition or NGOs [non-governmental organizations], but the government," he said, adding that the public's continued support of his party and its coalition implied endorsement of the ISA. "If you choose BN [National Front], then you say 'yes' to ISA. If you support DAP, then you say 'no' to ISA."

In response to why the ISA was never discussed in parliament, Nazri said the government has the majority in parliament and would always win the motion.

Some observers complained of the quality of the debaters' arguments. But then in Malaysia, not even parliamentary officials are used to open discussion - they're either neophytes, or have been made rusty by years of being muzzled.

"The Great Malaysian Debate" may not set a trend, but at least it sends a clear message: in the words of the moderator Aziz, "It is a display of maturity" that the event ended without a hitch. He, like many others, looks forward to a future "where many issues, which we all agree need to be addressed, can at least be ventilated."

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Jul 30, 2004

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