The Australian: The maverick who had a way with us

The maverick who had a way with us

APRIL 3 —Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s favourite song is “My Way”, the lugubrious anthem with a French melody and English lyrics by Paul Anka that was made famous by Frank Sinatra, who hated it. “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again, too few to mention,” it goes.

Mahathir’s regrets do indeed remain too few to mention. In Barry Wain’s new biography, “Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times” (Palgrave Macmillan), we are reminded of how intriguing and pugnacious a figure we have lost from the front lines of regional and global politics.

Malaysia’s former prime minister is no longer causing such strife for Australia as he once did in his full, resplendent recalcitrance. But he remains constantly in the public eye at home, where he has become an insatiable blogger, in a mix of English and Malay, stirring trouble for his successors.

Mahathir is a bundle of contradictions, according to Wain, who brings the complexity of the character alive through layers of convincing and meticulous detail.

He has been simultaneously “a Malay champion who was the Malays’ fiercest critic and an ally of Chinese-Malaysian businessmen; a tireless campaigner against Western economic domination who assiduously courted American and European capitalists; a blunt, combative individual who extolled the virtues of consensual Asian values”.

Wain is an important Australian media figure in Asia, having worked in the region for 37 years, chiefly for The Wall Street Journal Asia, of which he became editor, and the late, much lamented Far Eastern Economic Review. He shifted to Asia after a promising career in Australia, where he worked for the Nine Network, the ABC and The Australian.

Wain is now writer in residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. His book has topped the bestseller lists in Singapore, where it rapidly sold out three printings and is in its fourth. The Malaysian Home Affairs Ministry is more circumspect, not sure whether to permit its publication there.

No matter: large numbers are being carried into the country anyway, including by Malaysians returning home over the Causeway from visits to Singapore.

Wain interviewed Mahathir three times for the book, although it is by no means an authorised biography in the sense of being initiated by the Malaysian maverick who “delighted in bucking the system and opting for the unconventional course, especially if told he could not, or should not”.

The author adds: “Even while exercising tight political control, Mahathir never embraced the Malaysian establishment, preferring to try [to] create a new social and political order more to his liking.”

Wain says he was attracted to Mahathir as a subject because he is “one of the most outstanding and fascinating leaders of Southeast Asia since World War II. A person with really strong ideas.

“He became a doctor to gain a professional qualification to gain standing as a young person in the Malay community in order to go into politics. He evolved into a spokesman for the Third World and on Islamic issues, one who fitted into a pattern of authoritarian leaders who included Lee Kuan Yew, Ferdinand Marcos and Suharto. He is a bundle of contradictions.” Wain says Mahathir is a relatively softly spoken person one who stressed at home the traditional and religious values that had been drummed into him.

He and his wife, Siti Hasmah — a doctor who was his first girlfriend — had four children, then adopted three more when they were in their late 50s.

His grandfather, or possibly great-grandfather, had come from India, and his father, Mohamad Iskandar, was a Penang Malay, a locally-born Muslim with Indian ancestry. Mahathir grew up the youngest of nine children in Alor Star, in a lower middle-class family of battlers. He was precociously obstinate, Wain says.

Later, as national leader, “he would throw people into jail without trial, but would also break down in public and weep”.

“Neither was put on,” he says, “although his opponents would say, give him an Oscar.

“He had an ability to compartmentalise things. He never discussed politics at home. After a momentous day, the family would have to watch TV or read the newspapers to see what had happened.”

But there was nothing nuanced or ambivalent about his views of Australia. Several variations have circulated through the years, but Wain has unearthed what is likely to remain the definitive version.

Mahathir was invited to visit Australia under a programme that is still in place and that many countries run: rising stars are spotted by embassies abroad and taken on an all-expenses-paid tour intended to instil a friendly, informed understanding of the country. But he lost his parliamentary seat in the watershed 1969 elections that resulted in seat gains for a largely Chinese opposition party and precipitated Malay-Chinese race riots, and soon afterwards — a few days before he was due to leave — the Australians postponed the visit, citing variously a lack of funds and an overloaded visitor programme.

Mahathir ‘would throw people into jail without trial, but would also break down in public and weep’. — Reuters pic

He believed it was because of his political failure, which also involved him being expelled for a time from the dominant Umno. Mahathir said he was hurt. Two years later, he paid his own way to a seminar at Monash University in Melbourne and was then invited by the government to visit Canberra, “only to find the official hospitality in the capital as bleak as the wintry weather”, Wain says.

“An embarrassed junior official tried to save the occasion on his own initiative by hosting a dinner for Dr Mahathir.”

On his only official visit, in 1984, Wain writes, “he was immensely sympathetic to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who broke down and wept during their meeting, having just learned of his daughter’s potentially fatal drug addiction”.

“Responding both as a fellow patient and doctor, Dr Mahathir went to considerable lengths to get information that he thought might help the Hawke family. But politics was something else.”

He responded to Australian MPs who complained about detentions without trial: “Please concentrate on fair treatment for the Aborigines and Asians in your midst, and leave us alone.”

At various times he delivered a stream of caustic comments while hosting a state dinner in Kuala Lumpur for Malcolm Fraser and complained that Hawke’s description of the execution of two drug dealers as “barbaric” applied to the entire Malaysian population. He lambasted Paul Keating for calling him “recalcitrant” for not attending the first Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation leaders’ summit. And he attacked John Howard for expressing concern over his former deputy Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s first arrest and trials. Tensions are inevitable, says Wain: “He’s a prickly character, and Australians are outspoken.”

Mahathir introduced the affirmative action Bumiputera scheme to privilege Malays. Foreign investors flocked in even as he lambasted the West. “This time of easy money masked a lot of problems, though,” Wain says.

Now confidence has drained away and Malaysians are not investing in their own country. Mahathir doesn’t say his affirmative action politics was wrong but berates Malays for failing to seize the opportunities they have been given to get ahead. Umno has ruled the country for more than 50 years, since soon after independence from Britain. Wain says Mahathir turned it into one of Malaysia’s biggest business conglomerates.

Since the worldwide resurgence of Islam, Umno also has been steadily bidding on religious values against the main opposition PAS.

As a result, Wain says, it has become more extremist than PAS on some issues; for instance, Umno, unlike PAS, opposes the use by Christians of Allah for God, a usage that pre-dates Islam on the Arabian peninsula but one that has sparked riots and violence in Malaysia.

In part because of its state-sponsored religious surge, and also because of its economic slump, “the country is in a lot more trouble now than most people realise”, Wain says.

“But at the government level Malaysia is so inward looking, it hasn’t noticed this decline compared with other countries, such as neighbouring Indonesia.” Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who replaced Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, the successor whom Mahathir worked hard and successfully to undermine, understands the problems and talks up inclusiveness and reform, Wain says. “But at the same time, parts of his own party, Umno, are spewing vitriol against other races and religions.”

The police and judicial process is also under a cloud of suspicion.

Teoh Beng Hock, 30, an aide in the opposition party led by Anwar — who was dramatically ousted as Mahathir’s deputy and is facing fresh sodomy charges — was interrogated on the 14th floor of a building in Selangor by officers in the anti-corruption commission for nine hours in connection with claims that his boss acted improperly over the purchase of RM2,500 flags. His body was found at the base of the building the next day. He was to have been married that day. The coroner’s finding was, bizarrely, simply “sudden death”. No charges have been laid, months later.

Malaysia inherited functioning institutions from Britain. But, Wain writes, “apart from turning Umno into a powerful patronage machine that eventually slipped from his grasp, leaving the party singularly ill-equipped to face a globalising future, Dr Mahathir cut Malaysia adrift institutionally”, emasculating institutions so he would meet no obstruction, creating a culture that rewarded only obedience. He says Malaysia has escaped much of the scrutiny to which it might have been subjected in recent years because of the succession of dramatic events in neighbouring Indonesia and Thailand.

When he was living in Malaysia in the 1970s and 80s, Wain says, “the country was always doing better than people said in public. Now it’s just the opposite.”

Mahathir’s timing, in other words, was impeccable. He quit in 2003 while the going was good, a very rare attribute in a national leader, especially one so long in office, 22 years in his case.

Now, as a crucial piece of unfinished business from the Mahathir epoch, Umno remains engaged in what Wain describes as “a life-and-death struggle with the forces of reform, skilfully marshalled by the articulate and resurgent Anwar Ibrahim”.

This struggle has already disposed of Abdullah, “jerked in all directions until he was thrown out”. Now Najib is trying to ride the tiger, with Mahathir jeering from the sidelines, still championing the claimed Asian way, but most of all his way. — The Australian