BANGKOK - As Malaysia
approaches a general election season, opposition
politicians claim Prime Minister Najib Razak's
ruling party and government are stoking racial
politics to gain a popular edge with the ethnic
Malay majority.
A year after the World
Bank warned Malaysia over its acutely debilitating
race-based brain drain, veteran opposition leader
Lim Kit Siang has said the government is
compounding the damage by blatantly playing the
"race card" in the run up to the next election,
which must be called by next April.
The
ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition's ambitions
to lift the economy out of its disappointing
holding pattern can go hang when it fears losing
for the first time since independence in 1957, he
has argued. "They talk all the time about being
world beating
and wanting to get all
Malaysians behind the economy ... but it all goes
overboard when the focus is on the Malay
identity."
The grand post-independence
"social contract" that for the sake of national
harmony favored Malays in business, state
education and government jobs over minority
Chinese and Indians has proven a bitter racial
bargain for one-third of the population. Lim said
fear-mongering over race has been a sporadic
feature of Malaysian politics but rarely has it
come so close to the "dangerous ... reactionary
maneuvers" of the current administration.
A great swathe of Malaysians have gone
overseas for better job opportunities in recent
decades - one in five of the country's college
educated if Singapore permanent residents are
included - undercutting the ruling BN government's
vow to achieve developed economy status by 2020,
according to the World Bank.
The
overwhelming majority of the departed are ethnic
Chinese, historically the entrepreneurial drivers
behind the economy. In neighboring Singapore,
where around half have relocated, 90% of Malaysian
passport holders are Chinese. The story is similar
in other popular emigration destinations,
including Australia, the United States and
Britain.
"The brain drain - the migration
of talent across borders - touches the core of
Malaysia's aspiration to become a high-income
nation ... Discontent with Malaysia's
inclusiveness policies is a key factor," said the
World Bank in a widely cited 2011 report.
Over one million Malaysians now live
overseas, and the true figure is likely to be much
higher, with one-third of them making up the brain
drain. Many Singaporean professionals also leave
their country, but the city-state has been more
than able to replace them with highly educated
expatriates.
Malaysia is not only losing
its brightest, or at least those with the most
marketable skills in global demand, but has also
seen a sharp decline in the number of high-caliber
expatriates in recent years. Unskilled foreigners,
including low wage-earning industrial workers, it
has aplenty.
Government ministers have
repeatedly admitted that ethnically skewed
discrimination is inappropriate in today's
globalized world. Najib said two years ago in a
speech that "it is my belief that Malaysians have
reached the level of maturity necessary to discuss
some of the tougher issues that we face".
Deputy Prime Minister Tun Musa Hitam
argued at around the same time (and was also
quoted in the World Bank report) saying that
"Race-based economic policies do not sit well with
the realities of globalization and free trade."
In practice, however, the dominant United
Malays National Organization (UMNO) party in the
coalition, as well as its grassroots sympathizers,
have issued a stream of allegations and
insinuations that a government loss at the
upcoming polls would be catastrophic for ordinary
Malays.
For instance, Deputy Prime
Minister Muhyiddin Yassin recently hinted to a
youth assembly that disloyalty to UMNO might
result in a reoccurrence of the Malay-Chinese race
riots that resulted in scores of deaths and rocked
the country in 1969. "We don't want a repeat of
May 13," Muhyiddin said, referring to the
historical date of the bloody ethnic clashes.
A prominent security official recently
made the bizarre claim that Islamic terrorists and
former communists, in league with malevolent civil
society groups based outside the country, had
infiltrated the political opposition. Some of
these "infiltrators" were allegedly even ready to
stand as candidates in the election, he said.
The strong popular support shown for an
anti-government demonstration in April calling for
clean elections - known as Bersih 3.0 - appears to
have rattled the authorities. The protestors were
roughly handled by the police when some pushed
through barricades. The prime minister later made
the preposterous claim that the rally had been an
attempt to topple the government.
Ambiga
Sreenevasan, the ethnic Indian former president of
the Bar Council who has campaigned for freedom of
religion and a Bersih leader, has been the target
of a noticeably crude, racially-tinged, hate
campaign.
"They [the coalition] really
fear [the election] ... So they have been pounding
of the racial drum, trying to promote alarm and
fear. Whipping up [Malays] with the idea that they
are going to be swamped or marginalized,"
opposition leader Lim said.
Complicated
mix To be sure, Malaysia's politics are a
complicated racial mix. The ruling BN coalition is
dominated by the pro-Malay UMNO, but also includes
Chinese and Indian parties that have previously
shared in the halal meat barrel politics in the
years of robust economic growth. The opposition
includes former UNMO stalwart Anwar Ibrahim's
Keadilan Rakyat party, the Democratic Action Party
with its core of ethnic Chinese, and the strongly
Islamist party PAS.
Many political
observers believe the government has been
encouraged to take vicious racial swipes because
it fears being outflanked by PAS on religious
grounds. The UMNO-led government coalition could
still win, given its advantages of incumbency,
patronage and demographics, despite its poor
reform record.
The situation is all very
different from when the doyen of Malaysian-style
machine politics, Mahathir Mohamad, stepped down
after 22 years as national leader in 2003 and was
replaced by the more mild-mannered and
reform-minded Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
Abdullah surprised the country with his
promises to clean up the cronyism and corruption
that had flourished in the shade of racial
preference and religious backstopping under
Mahathir's authoritarian rule. Several officials
were arrested in corruption investigations and pet
projects commissioned under Mahathir were brought
to sudden halts in a clean governance campaign. He
also promoted inter-racial sympathy and equal
opportunities for minorities.
Separating
politics from vested interests and religion in
Malaysia is, however, like untangling a basket of
snakes. Abdullah's reform gains were hotly
contested and ultimately short-lived. After the
BN's worst ever showing at the 2008 election, when
it won just 140 out of 220 seats contested and
ceded control of five out of 13 federal states to
the opposition, Abdullah was replaced by his then
deputy, Najib, the following year.
One
legacy of Abdullah's reformist rule was an upsurge
in political debate. Malaysian politics have, for
better and worse, since become feistier and in
places even less tolerant.
Islamists have
become noticeably more aggressive, labeling any
move to reduce the prevailing racial tilt of
society as an attack on Islam. The religious
affairs department, with police state powers of
entry to check on breaches of shariah law, and the
religious courts have become more aggressive and
ambitious. Hindu temples have been attacked and
destroyed by both state and non-state actors in
rural areas across the country.
"The
political moves have opened up the space for
greater intolerance. So people who used to not
have much credibility or much power under normal
circumstances are feeling more justified in
instigating hate crimes. Very nasty things -
against racial and religious minorities," said a
prominent local human rights expert, who asked not
to be named for legal reasons.
When
Malaysia's post-independence constitution was
drawn up in the 1950s it was accepted that some
positive discrimination might be necessary for the
sake of racial harmony. The country's different
races had tended to divide along racial lines
during World War II and during the communist
guerilla war that followed. However, the charter
drafters suggested that such preferences be capped
at a generation, a suggestion that was rejected by
Malay leaders.
"It has been a very great
shame for Malaysia that this discrimination just
rolls on and on. This is all about race, but it is
wrapped up in religion so anyone who attempts to
untie it is cut down by the chauvinists," said a
Malay financial consultant in Kuala Lumpur who
also asked not to be identified.
Non-Malay
minorities now complain that there effectively
exists a system of higher education apartheid,
forcing non-Muslims to either pay high fees for
private education or pursue their studies abroad.
Many who venture overseas for their studies fail
to return home due to a lack of opportunity for
minorities, including in government and the civil
service.
As the national brain drain
gathers pace, Malaysia's economic growth has slid.
Gross domestic product growth averaged 4.6% a year
in the first decade of the 21st century, down
significantly from the 7.2% average witnessed in
the previous 10 years.
The country now
appears to be firmly stuck in the dreaded
middle-income country trap, where the easy gains
from investment and factory-building have already
been won but the move up to a higher value
generating economy appears out of reach due to a
lack of human resources.
The chances that
Malaysia will escape this trap have been sharply
reduced by the flight of so many of its most
talented citizens who, as polls show, would likely
consider returning to a more meritocratic and
racially equal society.
Instead of looking
for ways to reverse the trend, UMNO politicians
and their political allies are only deepening the
divide and the economy's morass through their
race-based pre-election politicking.
"Something has gone wrong with this
country," said opposition leader Lim. "We should
not be fighting like this. The world is
competitive enough as it is."
William Barnes is a veteran
Bangkok-based journalist.
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2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
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