Malaysia moving backward on human
rights By Ioannis Gatsiounis
KUALA LUMPUR - The Malaysian government
has long held that promoting human rights over
national security would undermine the country's
economic development. As a multi-ethnic country
with a history of racial and religious
antagonisms, relaxing restrictions on individual
freedoms would invite destabilization and
undermine progress, officials have long claimed.
That philosophy was deeply entrenched
during Mahathir Mohamad's 22-year rule as prime
minister, when the country leaped from being a
backwater to an industrialized powerhouse despite
an abysmal rights record. Hopes ran high that
Mahathir's successor, current Prime Minister
Abdullah Badawi, would reverse that trend and
allow for more political and social openness.
Nearly three years into his term, however, those
once-high hopes have waned as Abdullah has chosen
to leave in place
many
of the strictures that characterized Mahathir's
rule.
Compared with Asia's more dynamic
democracies, social progress has badly lagged
economic development in Malaysia. Government
officials are still grappling with how to
cultivate a dynamic, progressive-minded citizenry
without relinquishing control. At the same time,
class disparity is widening, corruption runs
rampant and many argue that the courts and police
long ago lost their moral legitimacy as impartial
arbiters. After years of affirmative-action
programs, race relations between the majority
Muslim Malays and minority Chinese and Indians are
still on edge.
Abdullah has been credited
with acknowledging these concerns and has paid lip
service to the crucial connection between human
rights and nation-building.
"Abdullah has
allowed for greater public dialogue regarding
promotion of human rights," said lawyer Param
Cumaraswamy, a founding member of Malaysia's Human
Rights Committee. "The climate has been more open
and we're seeing more discussions between the
government and civil-society groups."
At
the same time, there are doubts Abdullah has the
political will to put his more liberal rhetoric
into action.
"Badawi is hiding behind the
impression he gives that he's a good man with a
soft approach," said human-rights lawyer P
Uthayakumar. Of the hundreds of letters
Uthayakumar says he has written to Abdullah about
specific instances of human-rights abuses, he
said: "Almost none have received a response."
Malaysia's mainstream media, though still
tightly controlled and, in the main, servile to
Abdullah's United Malays National Organization
(UMNO) party, has been allowed to touch lightly on
certain sensitive race and religion issues under
Abdullah's watch. Yet behind Abdullah's nice-guy
image there have been a string of developments
that raise serious doubts about his commitment to
protect and promote human rights and more
democracy. Chief among those concerns are media
freedoms, police conduct, religious persecution
and his administration's continued reliance on
draconian legislation to curb dissent, say rights
advocates.
The 1984 Printing Presses and
Publications Act, which through annual
re-licensing requirements keeps media owners on
guard against offending the government, is still
firmly in place. Moreover, Abdullah has frequently
reprimanded the local media when it falls out of
step with the government's news agenda. On June
26, a Mandarin-language call-in radio program,
The Mic Is On, With Love, Without
Obstacles, was ordered by the government to
change its format after airing a segment critical
of a controversial order affecting
Chinese-language schools.
Nor has
Abdullah's government been above overt censorship.
Mahathir's recent criticism of Abdullah's
policies, in which he has referred to his
successor's reform agenda as a "big bluff", has
notably been blacked out of the mainstream media.
Mahathir has instead vented his criticisms over
the Internet-based media he once sought to
silence, including an exclusive interview with
Malaysiakini.com. (Through a legal loophole,
Internet media in Malaysia are not constrained by
the renewable-licensing requirements the print and
broadcast media face.)
"We've seen some
opening up and at the same time a strong
willingness to black out issues to suit
[Abdullah's] political agenda," said Sonia
Randhawa, executive director at the Kuala
Lumpur-based Center for Independent Journalism.
"He may not have the dominant personality of
Mahathir, but he has quietly cultivated close
links with the media to informally pressure them
to pursue the agenda of the government."
One example: a bloody police crackdown on
a peaceful demonstration against Abdullah's
decision to raise fuel prices sharply in May was
not carried by any mainstream media.
Where
Abdullah has pursued substantive reforms, he has
often met firm resistance. For instance, his plans
to set up an Independent Police Complaints and
Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) to address the
police force's long record of corruption,
inefficiency and abuse was widely lauded by rights
advocates. It would be "the single biggest
advancement in human rights in this country",
contended Uthayakumar. However, the official
police website promised retaliation and threatened
to allow crime to escalate if the proposed new
watchdog body was established.
Some Kuala
Lumpur-based analysts suggest that the most
worrying trend is creeping Islamization through
the judiciary. A number of recent court decisions
have set the sharia (Islamic law) courts against
the civil courts and have challenged the supremacy
of Malaysia's secular constitution, which
guarantees equality and freedom of worship.
One recent decision involved a woman who
was born Muslim but had renounced Islam in 1998 to
convert to Christianity. However, sharia courts
refused to recognize or accept her apostasy and
punished her under Islamic law. The other
controversial decision involved a Hindu-born
soldier who was buried as a Muslim after sharia
courts decided that he had converted to Islam. The
courts refused to hear testimony from his widow,
who steadfastly insisted her spouse was not a
Muslim.
Malaysia's parliament last year
passed a new Islamic Family Law that aims to
provide legal protections for Muslim men to engage
in polygamy and divorce. The bill led social
activist Marina Mahathir to say, "Only in Malaysia
are Muslim women regressing. In every other Muslim
country in the world, women have been gaining
rights, not losing them." Abdullah has since
agreed to review the bill.
Abdullah's
defenders say he should not be held accountable
for the rising tide of conservative Islam and its
associated abuses, which they contend were on the
ascent before he assumed power. Moreover,
Abdullah, a religious scholar, has championed what
he calls Islam Hadhari, or "Civilizational Islam",
a moderate brand of the religion that stresses
technological and economic competitiveness,
moderation, tolerance and social justice.
Critics point out that Islam Hadhari's
moderate vision has been used to entrench Islam
into Malaysia's multi-ethnic fabric. For instance,
Islam Hadhari played prominently in the recently
promulgated Ninth Malaysia Plan, a five-year
socio-economic policy template.
"This is
the first time the nation's economic and social
plan has used religion to shape the national
agenda," said Lim Teck Ghee, director for the
Center for Public Policy Studies at the Asian
Strategy and Leadership and Institute in Kuala
Lumpur.
Ethnic favoritism threatens
Malaysia's delicate social balance. Non-Muslim
members of parliament recently withdrew a formal
letter addressed to Abdullah requesting better
protection of religious minorities' rights after
the request sparked a backlash in UMNO. They were
reacting partially to a state-approved demolition
campaign of a number of Hindu temples that
officials have claimed lack proper registration
documents.
"I said that they should
withdraw the memorandum and they agreed," Abdullah
was quoted as saying without explanation. "So it
is over."
A close ally of Abdullah,
Minister in the Prime Minister's Department
Mohamed Nazri, called on non-Muslims not to
interfere in discussions about Islam and
threatened to use the Sedition Act against those
who insulted Islam.
Cut of the same
cloth Ironically, some argue that recent
abuses are rooted in Abdullah's
non-confrontational, self-effacing style - which
marks a stark contrast to former prime minister
Mahathir's forceful leadership. That, political
analysts argue, has opened the way for competing
interest groups to more openly speak their mind
and pursue policies that favor the majority Malays
over minority Chinese and Indians.
"It's
partly due to the opening up of the system," said
Joseph Roy, director of Amnesty International's
Malaysian chapter. "But Badawi has to be stronger,
clearer where he stands, otherwise people will
take advantage and there will be more human-rights
abuses on a systematic level and few fundamental
changes on the ground."
Ivy Josiah,
executive director of Women's Aid Organization,
said, "Badawi needs to set the bar on human rights
standards."
To illustrate her point,
Josiah mentioned a recent forum held in the
northern state of Penang organized to discuss
overlapping jurisdictions between civil and sharia
courts. Five hundred Muslim protesters under an
"Anti-Inter-Faith Commission Body" banner demanded
that the event be canceled. Rather than taking a
clear stand and providing protection to the
seminar goers, according to Josiah, Abdullah said
merely that it was a sensitive issue and he
refused to intervene. According to witnesses, the
event was canceled at the request of police, who
feared that the demonstrators would barge into the
premises.
Moreover, many of Abdullah's
more progressive policies have been slow in the
implementation. For instance, his much-vaunted
National Integrity Plan (NIP), which aimed at
reducing inefficiency and corruption in government
by imbuing Malaysians with a greater sense of
right and wrong, has badly lagged in actual
implementation. Most Malaysians remain unfamiliar
with the plan's key principles and only in April
did UMNO's powerful youth wing agree to draw up an
action plan to implement it, a full two years
after it was first promulgated.
"If
Mahathir were Abdullah with Abdullah's agenda,
things would move," said K S Nathan of the
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
"A strategy would be in place, backed by strong
convictions. Mahathir was the first to say the
buck stops here; Badawi is passing the buck
around."
Though different in style, the
two Malaysian leaders share similar political
instincts - if not tactics. Like Abdullah,
Mahathir promised liberal reforms during his first
three years in office, including allowing more
freedom of expression. Soon after assuming the
premiership, Mahathir famously released a batch of
prisoners who were then being held under the
Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for
indefinite detention without trial.
Yet
both Mahathir and Abdullah have relied heavily on
the ISA and other draconian laws aimed at
promoting national security over individual rights
to crack down on political opposition. Both
leaders have also displayed a tendency to justify
their own abuses by harping on other, usually
Western, countries' policy discrepancies. Mahathir
famously lashed out at the United States' Jewish
population, which he often claimed sought to
undermine Muslim nations.
Last month
Abdullah drew a sharp retort from US-based Human
Rights Watch when he called for the closure of the
United States' prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. An
HRW report last month noted that more than 60 of
the estimated 100 detainees held under the ISA are
allegedly associated with the Islamist group
Jemaah Islamiah, adding, "The government has
recently expanded its use of the Internal Security
Act to include individuals accused of
counterfeiting and forging documents." Brad Adams,
HRW's Asia director, said: "Abdullah has urged the
US to close Guantanamo, yet his own government is
holding detainees indefinitely without trial."
To be sure, human-rights considerations in
a multi-ethnic country such as Malaysia are seldom
black and white. Some contest that there are
reasons for rights proponents to feel encouraged
by developments under Abdullah, says Elina Noor
with the Institute of Strategic and International
Studies (ISIS) in Kuala Lumpur. Top ministers in
Abdullah's cabinet, she points out, rejected a
plan by authorities in Melaka state to set up a
moral police force to spy on people and deter
behavior considered indecent under Islamic law.
An Islamic body tried to set up a similar
force in Kuala Lumpur that was disallowed when
Abdullah told his cabinet that no group has the
right to spy on people. "The government is
actually doing a lot to moderate these issues,"
Noor said. However, she also conceded that many
Malaysians are understandably worried about "how
sporadic the efforts are".
Three years
into Abdullah's term, many Malaysians are unsure
where his government comes really down on
promoting rights. Political historians believe
that, similar to Mahathir, Abdullah will show his
true colors some time during the three-year mark
of his five-year term.
But with little
passed in the way of legal reforms to deter
human-rights abuses, he "is left with everything
in his palm to be used should he feel insecure or
threatened, when he feels the need to fight back",
said Elizabeth Wong, secretary general of the
National Human Rights Society in Malaysia. "And
politicians in possession of the trump card rarely
fail to use it when they feel the need."
Ioannis Gatsiounis, a New York
native, has worked as a freelance foreign
correspondent and previously co-hosted a weekly
political/cultural radio call-in show in the
US.
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