KUALA LUMPUR - In preparation for
Malaysia's golden anniversary next month, banners
have been hung on the streets around the Petronas
Towers in downtown Kuala Lumpur showing Malay,
Indian and Chinese children blissfully bicycling
and running through a village at dusk. The sign
reads: "One legacy. One destiny."
But
behind the message of unity, the United Malays
National Organization (UMNO), the conservative
race-based party that has
run
Malaysia since independence, is ushering in the
country's 50-year anniversary by ratcheting up its
trademark fear-based communal rule. Last week
Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak controversially
referred to Malaysia, which includes 40%
non-Muslims, as an Islamic state. "Islam is the
official religion and we are an Islamic state,"
Najib said.
It's unclear whether the
incendiary statement was an election ploy, but his
comments have engendered a political firestorm
here. (On Wednesday, Najib ordered component
parties of the National Front (Barisan Nasional,
or BN) that UMNO heads to prepare for an election
by early next year.) More likely, the comments
were the result of a desperate politician and
embattled political party resorting to desperate
political measures. Najib's aspirations to become
prime minister are well known and have been cast
into doubt by an ongoing murder trial in which the
main suspects - including prominent political
analyst Razak Baginda and two elite police
officers - have been closely linked to Najib.
Opposition leaders and the murder victim's
cousin say there is a photo linking Najib with the
Mongolian model found blown up with C4 explosives
in a patch of jungle outside Kuala Lumpur. Najib
has refused to answer questions about the woman
and he may be spared having to testify.
Nonetheless, the ongoing case has hurt UMNO's
political standing, and the party appears to be
appealing to its well-worn tactic of playing the
race and religion card to divert attentions.
In the larger scheme of things, Najib's
comments might have been meaningless. UMNO has
long relied on communal rhetoric to sustain its
five-decade grip on power. But the comments also
come at a time when the nominally secular country
is undergoing what some view as a pronounced
Islamization; when several court decisions have
denied individuals the right to be recognized by
the religion of their choosing; when race
relations are on the skids; and when official
provocation is on the rise - all as the country
finds itself in the throes of a mid-life crisis.
In response to Najib's remark, the
Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), a component
party of the BN coalition, issued statements
assuring its constituency that Malaysia is a
secular state. UMNO Youth chief and Education
Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, famous for speeches
in which he brandishes Malay daggers and warns
Malaysia's minority Chinese and Indian communities
not to question Malay "supremacy", hit back by
telling the MCA (sans dagger this time) not
to issue "any more statements that Malaysia is a
secular state".
Internet
opposition A few years ago, when the
state-run print and broadcast media monopolized
public opinion, Najib's and Hishammuddin's
comments would have been spared public probity.
But with the recent proliferation of weblogs and
independent news websites, the ruling elite are
increasingly being exposed to outside
criticism.
Take, for instance, Minister in
the Prime Minister'S Office Nazri Abdul Aziz, who
during a recent parliamentary session repeatedly
shouted "bodoh" (stupid) across the floor
at a fellow parliamentarian. The nine-minute clip
was posted on YouTube, and Malaysian bloggers had
a field day asking in effect, "Who is running our
country?"
On Monday, UMNO information
chief Muhammad Muhammad Taib filed a police report
against Raja Petra Kamarudin, the editor of
popular Web portal Malaysia-today.net, for
allegedly degrading Islam and stirring communal
tensions. The website has built a name for itself
by aggressively reporting on alleged abuses of
power at the highest levels, including within
Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi's inner circle.
UMNO probably didn't foresee what happened
next. By Monday afternoon, with news of the police
report out, the site's pages loaded slowly as its
server hit 97% capacity, according to Raja Petra.
By Tuesday, Raja Petra had posted a warning to
UMNO as clear as that which the party was trying
to send to him and bloggers. In an article titled
"See you in hell, Muhamad son of Muhamad", Raja
Petra reminded readers of the former state-level
chief executive's attempt to bring 2.4 million
ringgit (US$693,000) into Australia in 1997.
Raja Petra's style of recalcitrance is one
of UMNO's biggest fears: dissenters who refuse to
go quietly, dissenters who could inspire others to
speak out just as fearlessly over the Internet.
His is arguably not a common response in feudal
Malaysia. And UMNO, through remarks like Najib's
and the crackdown on bloggers, are putting
Malaysians' tolerance to an important new test.
On Tuesday the government said it would
formulate new laws that would potentially allow
for detention without trial to punish "offending"
bloggers. On July 13, Nathaniel Tan, a webmaster
for the opposition People's Justice Party (PKR),
was detained for five days by police after he was
said to have "classified" documents alleging that
Deputy Internal Security Minister Johari Baharom
had taken bribes to free known gangsters from
prison.
Not only did the circumstances
surrounding Tan's detention draw attention to
Johari, it also put the spotlight back on Najib.
Some bloggers speculated that Tan's arrest was
meant to distract the independent online media
from the Mongolian-murder trial.
A few
months ago, around the time that Malaysia's
arch-conservative Information Minister Zainuddin
Maidin announced that the government had to
control bloggers and classify them as
"professionals" or "non-professionals", several
prominent websites, including Malaysia Today,
added blog roundups to their homepages (with one
of the blogs therein proposing to extend the
"professional or non-professional" label to
politicians).
But bloggers are not the
only Malaysians concerned about UMNO's mounting
crackdown on dissent. Former UMNO chief and
longtime prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and his
onetime deputy and current opposition figurehead
Anwar Ibrahim have both in recent weeks concluded
that UMNO has "rotted". Meanwhile, a band of
academics has begun campaigning against Akujanji,
a pledge of loyalty to the government that every
college student must sign and over the years has
been used to suppress free expression.
Last week, meanwhile, the Internal
Security Ministry ordered all the major media not
to publish on the question of whether Malaysia is
an Islamic state. Only the prime minister and
deputy prime minister are authorized to comment on
it, said the ministry. But on Wednesday a diverse
group of Malaysians held a forum to discuss the
matter, in short emphasizing that while the
constitution declares Islam as Malaysian's
official religion, the secular-based constitution,
not sharia law, was intended as the country's
legal framework.
Despite this dissent,
many political analysts predict an UMNO-BN
landslide at the next general elections, which
will occur when the prime minister decides to call
them. That, they say, is because most Malaysians
have been indoctrinated by the government to fear
political change and still vote on ethnic lines.
In an ironic twist, Mahathir, who ruled with an
iron fist for 22 years, recently suggested that
Malaysians tend to vote blindly and said, "The
country deserves the government it gets."
The real victim in all this is the Malay
community, whom UMNO claims it is serving and
protecting. By politicizing religion, UMNO has
tarnished Malaysia's international and domestic
reputation as a bastion of moderate Islam.
Meanwhile, UMNO's unwavering support for an
affirmative-action program favoring ethnic Malays
over minority Chinese and Indians has bred
animosity among non-Muslims and become an excuse
for them to scapegoat Malays for all the country's
shortcomings and ignore their significant
contributions to nation-building.
That
racial divide has and continues to play into
UMNO's hands. The government elite and a growing
band of concerned Malaysians have set the stage
for country's 50th anniversary. Malaysians of all
ethnicities must now decide where they will stand,
if it's best to leave nation-building primarily in
government hands, or if now is the time to become
more active stakeholders in the country's future.
Ioannis Gatsiounis, a New York
native, is a Kuala Lumpur-based writer.
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