Najib
shoots pre-election
messengers By Anil Netto
PENANG - Malaysiakini, a leading
independent news portal, and Suaram, a
human-rights organization, have come under heavy
government pressure in the run-up to what is
expected to be a hotly contested general election
in Malaysia. Both independent groups have reported
on politically damaging scandals surrounding Prime
Minister Najib Razak and his ruling United Malays
National Organization (UMNO) party.
In
particular, Suaram has exposed and Malaysiakini
reported allegations of irregularities in the
procurement of Scorpene submarines from France at
a time when Najib served as defense minister. The
murder of a Mongolian woman, allegedly the lover
of a Najib aide connected to the deal, has raised
the political stakes of the scandal.
Suaram has taken the issue to France with
the help of French
lawyers and initiated a
high-level judicial investigation into the
Scorpene deal. Malaysiakini has provided
considerable coverage of the exposes surrounding
the deal, as well as countless other instances of
alleged corruption and abuse of power in Najib's
administration.
Both have come under
concerted criticism by establishment figures and
the mainstream media. An official investigation
involving half a dozen government agencies has
been initiated against Suaram. Authorities are
pursuing allegations that Suaram paid bribes to
civil servants for access to secret government
information.
Home Minister Seri
Hishammuddin Hussein has said the investigations
are not linked to Suaram's actions in the
submarine scandal. He and other government critics
have charged that Suaram's and Malaysiakini's
receipt of foreign funds, including from the US
Congress-supported National Endowment for
Democracy, has undermined their independence and
influenced their agendas.
In particular,
Malaysiakini's link with the Media Development
Loan Fund, which owns a 29% holding in the news
portal, has recently been put under the spotlight
in the state-influenced mainstream media. One of
MDLF's funders is the Open Society Foundations, a
US-based organization founded by philanthropist
and financier George Soros that promotes the
development of civil society in developing
countries.
Soros has long been a
convenient whipping boy in Malaysia. In the early
1990s during the Mahathir Mohamad administration,
Malaysia's Bank Negara bet on the British pound
against Soros' position and ended up losing
unknown billions of ringgit. The bad blood behind
the scenes bubbled over when the 1997-98 Asian
financial crisis broke out, with Mahathir famously
referring to Soros as a "moron" for his alleged
role in undermining the region's currencies,
including the ringgit.
But the charges of
associating with Soros don't have the same
political resonance today. Malaysiakini noted last
week that Najib himself met with Soros two years
ago during a visit to New York. Still, UMNO
politicians are taking aim at Western funding
agencies to target critical civil-society and
media groups and distract popular attention from
their own political troubles ahead of national
polls, which must be held by the first half of
next year.
While Malaysiakini and Suaram
are being criticized by supporters of the ruling
coalition for accepting funds from US government
and other Western groups, critics of the
harassment note that the Malaysian military under
Najib's command holds regular joint training
exercises with the US. The US Embassy in Malaysia
notes on its website that Malaysian armed forces
and police hold between 14 and 16 bilateral and
multilateral exercises with US counterparts each
year.
Though Najib remains popular,
suffering only a slight dip in recent opinion-poll
ratings, the same cannot be said for his ruling
Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, for which public
support has significantly eroded. As elections
approach, even non-partisan groups such as
Malaysiakini and Suaram are seen as a threat to
the credibility of the coalition, which has held
uninterrupted power since independence was
achieved from colonial rule in 1957.
In a
political landscape where the print and broadcast
media are dominated by ruling-coalition parties or
their media-organization cronies, Malaysiakini's
independent reporting has undermined the
government's control of the news. Since it was
established in 1999, Malaysiakini has played a
central role in shifting perceptions among
urbanites, including once-ardent supporters of the
BN, about the country's state of affairs.
That has been seen in declining readership
figures at pro-government mainstream media. For
example, the top-selling Malay-language newspaper,
Utusan Malaysia, saw its circulation fall by 19%
from 213,445 for the year ending June 30, 2006, to
172,859 in the second half of 2011, according to
Audit Bureau of Circulation figures. Similarly,
the circulation of the leading English-language
daily, The Star, fell 7% from 310,008 to 287,204
over the same period.
In the 2008 general
election, Malaysiakini's news coverage is believed
to have contributed to discontent among urban
voters who voted in record numbers against UMNO
and the BN. Not surprisingly, three of the five
states won by the opposition - Selangor, Penang
and Perak - were the most urbanized and developed,
with among the highest Internet penetrations in
the country. Perak was later taken back by the BN
after a few assembly members crossed sides.
If the coalition underestimated the reach
and influence of the online media and websites at
the 2008 polls, this time it is making no such
oversight. The BN can now count on its own band of
propagandists on websites, weblogs and social
media like Facebook and Twitter. But they have
their work cut out for them, as many ordinary
Malaysians are tweeting and expressing themselves
on Facebook and forming online networks like never
before.
All the bashing of Malaysiakini
and Suaram is apparently having little effect on
their popular credibility, and if anything, may
even be helping to give them wider recognition in
the mainstream media, where they would have
otherwise been blacked out. Alexa.com, which ranks
websites based on their traffic, puts Malaysiakini
at 15th within Malaysia.
In contrast, the
website of The Star, owned by the Malaysian
Chinese Association, part of the ruling coalition,
ranks only 21st. Utusan Malaysia, controlled by
UMNO, trails even further at 43rd. Now, some
political analysts wonder whether those figures
may presage the upcoming election's result.
Anil Netto is a Penang-based
writer.
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