TMI: The doctor is not in.... By Art Harun

The doctor is not in

By Art Harun

TMI: March 15, 2011

MARCH 15 — Starting from the second instalment of the “Godfather” trilogy, right to the final episode in “Godfather 3”, we saw the chief mobster, Michael Corleone, vehemently attempting to legitimise his “businesses”.

We saw how he bought the Vatican and, consequently, an honorary award from the Church. We also saw his efforts aimed at justifying the murder — at his behest — of his own brother by insisting that “loyalty” was essential for the perseverance of the family.

In fact, the whole thing was, to him, about the family.

It is an irony of course that at the end he lost his family and died a lonely death.

That was of course fiction. But fiction does often take its cue from real life.

In The Rhetoric of Oppression, I postulated that the oppressor often finds the need to legitimise or justify his oppressive acts. It is admittedly somewhat odd for an oppressor to do so. This is because of the untold powers that an oppressor normally has over the oppressed, making legitimacy of his oppressive acts totally unnecessary.

However, nature almost demands that an oppressor should do so. Whether this natural demand is precipitated by a guilty conscience is speculative. It is also beyond my intellect to know.

Whatever the motivation of the oppressor to legitimise or justify his oppressive acts might be, one thing is clear though. The rhetoric of justification or legitimisation is often a tired one. It is often a long rambling of some sorts. Incoherent sometimes. And at others it is so full of irony that one begins to doubt the sanity of the author.

In doing so, the oppressor clings to every single “fact” — even manufactured facts — which might lend credence to his arguments for legitimacy. And quite often — in fact, almost invariably — the oppressor is not about to blame himself or things which are or were under his control.

Umberto Eco, in “Turning Back The Clock”, sums it up thus:
“In general, in order to maintain popular support for their decisions, dictatorships point the finger at a country, group, race, or secret society that is plotting against the people under the dictator. All forms of populism, even contemporary ones, try to obtain consensus by talking of a threat from abroad, or from internal groups.” (emphasis is mine).

Recent events in the Middle East are a case in point. Just look at what Gaddafi was saying a week or two ago. He blamed the uprising on enemy countries which were supporting the “terrorists” in his own state. That he did to justify and legitimise the slaughter of his own people by the army which was supposed to protect the people in the first place.

Such is the warped mind of a dictator. And such is the trend of the legitimisation process of an oppressor or a political tyrant.

On October 2, 1935, Benito Mussolini stood in front of Italians — which, according to him, numbered 20 million! — at Palazzo Venezia. That day he declared his intention to go to war with Ethiopia. He sought to legitimise his planned act thus:

“For many months destiny’s wheel, driven by our calm determination, is turning towards its goal … It is not only an army striving to attain its objectives but an entire people of 44 million souls, against whom an attempt has been made to commit the blackest of injustices: that of robbing us of a little place in the sun …

“We have been patient for 13 years, during which the circle of selfishness that smoothers our vitality has grown ever tighter. We have kept patience with Ethiopia for 40 years! Enough!

“And it is to this People (the Italians) that humanity owes some of its greatest conquests, and it is against this People of poets, artists, heroes, saints, navigators, and those who cross the oceans, it is against this People that they dare talk of sanctions!” (emphasis is mine).

Imbued in his speech were manufactured “facts” designed to legitimise a war. That war was necessary as it was a destiny for all Italians, according to Mussolini. It was also necessary because the Ethiopians have been robbing the Italians from what they obviously deserved. The Italians have been very patient and the time has come to fight back.

And of course, how can the great artists, poets, navigators and heroes — and even saints — of Italy be subjected to such demeaning treatment by Ethiopia?

Awesome!

In Malaysia of course we do not have dictators in our midst. We may have some benevolent absolutists who espouse democracy with “Asian values”. (I have always wondered what is so special about Asians so much so that we should have democracy with Asian values. Do we, Asians, breathe different air or something?)

Be that as it may, in recent weeks we have seen a riot of attempts by Tun Dr M at legitimising or justifying his legacy of oppressions. Those attempts culminated in the launching of his memoir “A Doctor in the House”.

That memoir has of course attracted a litany of scorns as well as ball-polishing statements. No less than Tengku Razaleigh has denounced the memoir for being a trash bin of political lies. Needless to say Anwar Ibrahim pukes all over it.

As for me, well, let’s just say I am in no hurry to purchase it. After all, my copy of the “Malaysian Maverick” was found to have crushed a poor lizard to death in my car’s glove-box compartment some time ago.

It is without doubt, in my mind, that “A Doctor in the House” is Tun Dr M’s attempt at legitimising his legacy. And he did so with the finesse of Paul Gascoigne in an English pub.

Mussolini’s war speech reminds me very much of Tun Dr M’s greatest bogeyman for the Malays in Malaysia.

This country belongs to the Malays. It is the Malays’ destiny to occupy and own this Tanah Melayu.

The pendatangs have come to rob us, the Malays, of what little rights that we have here. The Malays have been patient. Enough with that! How can we the Malays, the heroes, warriors, kings and rulers of this land be treated like this?

Let’s unite. Let’s protect our rights. Or we will be beggars in our own lands.

Classic!

How about Operasi Lalang? Oh, the police did that.

The ISA? Well, I wanted to repeal it but the police said no.

Umno? Well, Tengku Razaleigh, whom I defeated in an election — where he (Ku Li) and his cohorts paid money to the delegates — fairly and squarely caused it to be declared as unlawful by the court.

Tun Salleh Abas? Well the King had wanted to remove him because he complained that the renovation work at the King’s palace was too noisy for him. Anyway, I did not dismiss him. The tribunal did.

Anwar Ibrahim? He is a freaking sodomite. He is a sex maniac. I have seen four women who said they had sex with him. He just had to go.

Daim Zainuddin? He is the best thing to happen to Malaysia since Parameswara a/l Sri Vijaya.

Lee Kuan Yew? He is just a mayor of a small town.

Memali? Musa Hitam did it. I was away.

Of course, he is also not to be blamed for the forex losses, the BMF scandal, the Proton debacle (hey, Proton is a success!), Maminco, Perkapalan Nasional bailout, the one-way highway concessions, the independent power producer robberies, the various human rights abuses, the shrinking of the natives’ rights, the AP porn, money politics in Umno, the total subjugation of the judiciary to the Executive, the royal constitutional crisis, the weakening of almost every public institution and their consequent subservience to the Executive, rampang cronyisms, blatant nepotism, the whatever else.

And the story goes on and on and on.

Everything he did, he did it his way. And he did it in the best interests of the country.

The bad ones by the way were not even done by him. Get it?

On April 29, 1945, a guy with a small moustache over his lips sat down and softly dictated a letter to his secretary, one Frau Trudl Junge. That man was one of the worst — if not THE worst — animal the Earth had ever had the misfortune of hosting.

Adolf Hitler was his name.

That morning he was not feeling too happy. The Allied Forces were pressing on and he sensed that his days were numbered. The sword of Damocles was hanging on his head and inching its way downward.

He had to legitimise his acts. He had to justify the nightmare which he had managed to enveloped the world with. The six million souls whom he had mercilessly forced out from the bodies of the olds, the young, the women and the children were screaming in his head.
He just had to legitimise and justify.
And so he wrote:

“It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. I have made so many offers for the reduction and elimination of armaments, which posterity cannot explain away for all eternity, that the responsibility for the outbreak of this war cannot rest on me. Furthermore, I never desired that after the first terrible World War a second war should arise against England or even against America. Centuries may pass, but out of the ruins of our cities and monuments of art there will arise anew the hatred for the people who alone are ultimately responsible: International Jewry and its helpers!

“But I left no doubt about the fact that if the peoples of Europe were again only regarded as so many packages of stock shares by these international money and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is the truly guilty party in this murderous struggle would also have to be held to account: the Jews! I further left no doubt that this time we would not permit millions of European children of Aryan descent to die of hunger, nor millions of grown-up men to suffer death, nor hundreds of thousands of women and children to be burned and bombed to death in their cities, without the truly guilty party having to atone for its guilt, even if through more humane means.”

Yes, Mr Hitler. The Jews started the war. And you were just defending yourself.

And finally the “truly guilty party have atoned for its guilt” through “more humane means.” I suppose being gassed in a chamber and having their skin scaled out from their flesh and turned into a lamp shade was “humane means” to you.

We all know that.

And oh yes, Tun Salleh was rude to the King and so he was dismissed. Tengku Razaleigh destroyed Umno.

Anwar Ibrahim has his brains in his crotch.

Quick. Call the doctor.

Oh wait.

The doctor is not in.

* Acknowledgement: “Turning Back The Clock”; Umberto Eco, Harvill Secker 2006.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

malaysiakini: Mahathir's irrationality?... by KJ John

Mahathir's irrationality?

KJ John
Mar 3, 2011, 1:15pm

 

This column is probably my most severe criticism of Dr Mahathir Mohamad's logic system currently made apparent by some of his incoherent statements. The New Straits Times quoted him as saying with a headline that, “having too many parties will split the nation.”

He was of course agreeing with the Registrar of Societies who had given a professional opinion on the matter. The registrar's logic was defensible from a public policy point of view, although yet debatable but probably meant to elicit comments.

As for Mahathir's (left) comments, I failed to see his logic. In the 1980s when Mahathir became prime minister, among the first and earliest books he instructed senior government servants to read was Kenichi Ohmae's The Mind of a Strategist. I was registrar at Intan and was advised by the director to read the book. In fact, the entire leadership of Intan also read the book.

Among the ideas promoted in this book is the skill of how to deconstruct reality into relevant base parts and then to reconstruct the same reality into new wholes but of different permutations or combinations. Therefore, I fail to understand why and how Mahathir's current logic system operates; it appears that he does not understand this model of the strategic thinking any more.

Many small parties or groups can conceivably always still form new governments (BN has 14 parties at last count) and therefore regardless of what they believe as their party positions on issues, they have to finally coalesce into two alternatives for governance, right? Even in Thailand this is already happening so evidently.

What is the new and shifting reality of the newer world order? At the ELLTA, the Leadership and Learning Conference I attended, one of the questions we discussed and debated was whether “theories are still universally valid?”

There were of course two distinct schools of thought and arguments about these alternative models. One, belonging to the school of objectivists, mostly of the physical science alma mater, argued the need for some kind of applied universality. The other were subjectivists and from the school of ethnicists who argued for local and contextual imperatives for all realities, including their Universalist theories.

Defying rational logical deduction

But, even that statement about reality was only relative or, an oxymoron at best, in terms of logic systems. It defies rational logical deduction.

Now, let us revisit the Mahathir hypothesis that, “too many parties will split the nation.” First, there are two levels of units of analysis involved in any such discussion. One is the obvious but idealised level of reality we call the nation-state. The other is the reality of “numerous parties,” as political and legally approved formal organisations.

Mahathir is saying that too many small splinter political groups of sub-optimising and will lead to the destruction of the nation-state ideal. True?

I think his logic system is erroneous. Why? The nation-state is always an ideal in one's mind or heart. Vision 2020 was the idealised picture that Mahathir himself painted about Malaysia “as a developed society in our own mould.” Najib Tun Razak has called this same or similar dream or envisioned reality into the future, as 1Malaysia. That is now our brand of nation-state ideal.

Our very Distinguished Professor of UKM, AB Shamsul, will call this a pipe dream because he rather vehemently states, “we are only a state but not yet a nation.”

So, Mahathir, whither are you really headed with this kind of logic system of yours? And the mainstream media blindly quotes you and repeats the mantra for the whole world to appreciate such 'illogical logic?' Good and able leaders must send younger nations in newer directions coherent with newer realities.

Colonel Muammar Gadaffi is now finding out that managing and leading a nation is more than those of a mere battalion. He must not have gone to strategy school.

But, who then is Mahathir's real audience? At the 1st NCOI, I publicly applauded Mahathir's first seven years of leadership in Malaysia as “those of a statesman.” I was immediately and severely attacked and condemned by some NGO-types present; for they described his leadership as “the destroyer of the judicial system in Malaysia”, and rightly so I think now.

But, was it not in the second half, after the Umno A and B split that the period of rot set in?

Are his statements today therefore consistent with his first period of leadership of the nation, or are they only reactions now, in the third generation period of leadership? And, that too merely to “protect and preserve the failed Malay Agenda, as defined by himself?”

But, why blame others for the failure? Mahathir had all the time and opportunity but he failed? Why then did you really fail, Mahathir? Is that not why also you cried over spilt milk with your, “perjuangan yang belum selesai” poem?

What then can we all learn about true, good and real paradigm leadership of Nelson Mandela (left), or Martin Luther King Jr, or Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa ? Can you ever achieve their paradigm leadership status, Mahathir?

'Begin nation-state politics of statesmanship'

I honestly do not know, but I do think that you still can; but your role and posture must change radically. You should move beyond the politics of parties; you should begin to assume the role of a retired mentor-minister and begin the nation-state politics of statesmanship.

So dear Mahathir, please stop all your petty politicking and start becoming a statesman as you can and have the capacity for. Please get all the other equally qualified “famous Tuns” and start a Wise Person's Council which we can call our national treasury of knowledge or National TOK. And yes, include Tok Nik Aziz of Kelantan too and ex-minister Rafidah Aziz. 

Some others too who should join that group sooner and retire from active politics. But please do include NH Chan; for he is not your eternal enemy but really someone who thinks differently from you and holds to different worldviews and values. Giving him space is also wisdom.

Finally, Mahathir, worldviews are never wrong but only always different. A worldview can be inconsistent but never wrong; they are the deeply held belief system of values, morals and ethics, reflected by attitudes and behaviours of individuals. We do not really know others until we get to understand and listen more comprehensively to the actors themselves; without relying on false reports and lies about others.

Therefore, to me, while you became prime minister and did many good things; my frank and greater admiration and respect is rather currently reserved for people like YB Lim Kit Siang (centre in picture) who transcends three generations of quality service to this nation. To me he is a true nationalist politician par excellence, much like the late Dr Tan Chee Khoon.

This column is also therefore dedicated to LKS for his 70th birthday. Happy Birthday Brother Kit and May the Good Lord richly bless you.

KJ JOHN was in public service for 29 years. He is now dean of the Faculty of Economics and Policy Science at UCSI University, Malaysia. The views expressed above are truths that matter to him as an individual citizen wearing private and civil society hats and therefore are not opinions of the university or faculty. Do send feedback to him at kjjohn@ohmsi.net

malaysiakini: Mahathir was right, wasn't he? ... by Josh Hong

Mahathir was right, wasn't he?

Josh Hong
malaysiakini, Feb 11, 2011
11:23am

 

Mahathir Mohamad had wanted to read law in London. Despite his outstanding results, his application for a scholarship to do so in London was allegedly overlooked by the British colonial administration during the post World War II chaos. Philip Bowring, a senior columnist, once conjectured this bitter experience deepened Mahathir's subcontinental anti-colonial stance.

Yet the failure to follow in the footsteps of Tunku Abdul Rahman (right) and Abdul Razak Hussein - both of whom later became prime minister - to obtain a law degree did not stop the eloquent but sharp-tongued man from establishing himself as a ruthless politician whose career would span more than five decades.

In fact, his flair for wordplay and ability to manipulate people's intelligence have been so impressive that even a seasoned commentator by the name of Tom Plate is willing to reconsider the definition of 'Islamic fundamentalism' and acknowledge him as a 'moderate Muslim Machiavelli'!

Recently, many have been outraged by Mahathir's rancorous remarks that the Malay peninsula used to be widely known as Tanah Melayu and non-Malays should readily accept the language and culture of the 'dominant' race. Mahathir, of course, became a 'constitutional Malay' by ditching the Indian side of his heritage and would love to see the entire Malaysian population do the same.

But why do the non-Malays only protest out loud whenever the resentful man says things that are seen to be racist against us?

Over the years, no politician has insulted the Malay community more than Mahathir, the self-styled 'Malay prophet'. Time and again, he trampled on the dignity of the ordinary Malays, almost turning the practice into pastime.

In the book, The Malay Dilemma, that made him an overnight superstar, he adhered to the colonial understandings of the Malays and argued that the community must fight pervasive 'indolence' tooth and nail in order to become successful like the Chinese and Indian immigrants. Whenever his political fortunes were threatened, he would not hesitate to resort to blaming the non-Malays while chastising the Malays for being 'ingrates'.

Clearly out, but not down

At the height of the reformasi movement, he openly criticised the Malays who had turned against him for being 'haprak' (useless), and lamented their 'forgetfulness' (Melayu mudah lupa) just before he 'stepped down'. He is clearly out, but not down.

In all these instances, virtually no non-Malay lifted a finger and rebutted Mahathir. In fact, many were quietly gleeful because Mahathir had spoken on something that they had long perceived to be the 'Malay disease' but would not be able to say it publicly.

For all the cry over racism and ethnic divisions among Malaysians, I am rather surprised very few have actually realised whenever Mahathir churns out race-centric statements, he only aggravates the mistrust between us.

To unite the Malays behind him, he would say the Chinese (and the Indians to a lesser extent) are a threat because they are 'economically dominant'. Many Malays would perhaps nod in agreement. He then turns around and tell the world he has 'failed' to raise the Malays as a successful people because their 'laziness' is too ingrained. This time, the non-Malays would applaud in private and feel vindicated.

Hence, each and every uproar that Mahathir creates only ensures there is plenty of heat but absolutely no light. Where does all this lead us?

Back in the 1990s, when the economy was booming and the stock market flourishing, much of Malaysia was indulged in making money while looking for a more affluent future. It was during these 'good old days' that Mahathir dismantled public integrity with corruption and an iron rule.

He also continued to sow seeds of racial and religious discords as the wider society was blinded by a false sense of material comfort. In other words, we were all bought off although all the evil legislations and injustices that we look askance at today had always been there.

I still believe The Myth of the Lazy Native by the late Syed Hussein Alatas is a seriously under-appreciated book, at least in comparison to Mahathir's racist and ill-researched Malay Dilemma.

As Syed Hussein Alatas rightly points out, it was the Spanish, Dutch and British colonialists who, having been disappointed by the refusal of the native populations in the Philippines, Java and the Malay peninsula to participate in the exploitative colonial capitalism, came up with the theory of 'native indolence' which also assessed the contribution of the migrant communities rather positively.

The Malays, with land of their own to toil, were naturally uninterested in working for a colonial administration that would suck up most of the benefits at the end. But the migrants had no option but were forced into a form of slavery, especially the Indians. For the Malays, it was a rational choice to be out; for the non-Malays, it was a compulsion to be in.

This divide-and-rule policy ensured minimal contact (and hence understanding) between races, and effectively prevented a cross-ethnic anti-colonial movement from being formed.

Distorted by colonial discourse

When colonial rule became untenable in the 1950s, the British were ready to hand power to Umno in return for economic interests. The MCA and the MIC joined in as freeloaders. The extent to which the race-based coalition went to exploit race issues in the latter years clearly put the British to shame.

Precisely because our perception of race is so much distorted by the colonial discourse, we often feel Mahathir is right to run down the Malays, not knowing that much of the Malay community holds the same stereotype of the Chinese and the Indians.

We never really believe the Malay fisherman in Terengganu, the street wantan mee seller in KL, the Indian rubber-tapper in Kedah and even the seriously marginalised Penan in Sarawak are equally hardworking and facing risks of various kinds. Why should they be stigmatised by politicians who only seek to divide the working class people just to safeguard their ill-gotten gains?

Mahathir may appear to be a Malay fighter, but he has been internally colonised for much of his life. He would go around the country urging the Malays to work hard, but is never bothered to explain how did his children become billionaires at a young age.

Twenty-two years of his rule only has only left the country with an entrenched culture of corruption and disappearance of public integrity. While we must respect and defend even his freedom to speak, we must search deep in ourselves as to whether we, too, have been poisoned by his racial profiling.


JOSH HONG studied politics at London Metropolitan University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A keen watcher of domestic and international politics, he longs for a day when Malaysians will learn and master the art of self-mockery, and enjoy life to the full in spite of politicians.

MySInChew: No solo race, but multiculturalism — by David D. Mathew

No solo race, but multiculturalism — by David D. Mathew

February 10, 2011

Feb 10 — There is a non-profit organisation in Malaysia called the Perdana Leadership Foundation which was set up to be the leading institution for the study of Malaysia’s prime ministers.

Every former prime minister has a page on the foundation website and there is a quotation attributed to the late Hussein Onn on his page which reads as follows: “Our successes have been founded on moderation. In a multiracial country, moderation requires strong disciplines. It demands sacrifices by all communities in the overall interest of the nation. It requires us to seek solutions which are acceptable to all communities rather than to any particular community.”

The nation’s Father of Unity believed in a very important fact — that the nation’s success was dependent upon policies that suited all communities. He subscribed to the fact that the overall interest of the nation was more important than any particular community.

In a speech he delivered as Umno president during the party’s 32nd general assembly on June 26, 1981, Hussein told Umno members that: “We inherited a multi-racial nation. Umno, as the most important party in our multi-racial nation, has to give attention to the problems of all citizens. This fact has always been acknowledged by Umno and it is with this understanding that Umno has been fair towards all races. In fighting for the welfare of the Bumiputera race, we do not ignore the interests of the other races. What we seek is the opportunity to progress with the other races.”

Due to poor health, Hussein passed away on May 29, 1990 at the age of 68.

One wonders whether the Father of Unity was listening from above when his successor Mahathir Mohamad delivered a speech at the Tun Hussein Onn Memorial on February 1, 2011.

In his speech, Mahathir said that “this country belongs to the Malay race.”

He told his audience at the talk on “The Malay race and the future” that “we must be sincere and accept that the country is Tanah Melayu.”

Mahathir went on to say that the former Philippine President Aquino was Chinese but she identified herself as Filipino and Thaksin Shinawatra is Chinese but he speaks the Thai language and lives the Thai culture.

According to Mahathir, things are different in Malaysia because “we still introduce ourselves according to race” and “this is why the question of race will continue to haunt us.”

Apart from conveniently ignoring the fact that a Chinese had no problem becoming president and prime minister of the Philippines and Thailand respectively, Mahathir’s comments were an insult to the memory of Hussein Onn. To add salt to the wound, his comments were made at the Tun Hussein Onn Memorial.

Do we really introduce ourselves according to race?

Maybe up there in Mahathir land people go about introducing themselves by saying with a smile “Hello Mahathir, my name is Mammooty and I’m Indian Malaysian, originally from Kerala. How are you?”
I don’t know. Maybe that’s because Mammooty carelessly assumes that Mahathir is from Kerala.

But down here where the rest of us live, race does not form part of a casual introduction.

In fact, it does not even form part of a formal introduction. No one says “We now invite Nazri to say a few words. He is Malay. A round of applause please.”

When Malaysians are overseas, they introduce themselves as Malaysians. Not Indians or Chinese.
The question of race is, however. present in other places.

Think scholarships, there is race in the mix. Think government contracts, there is race as a factor.
Fancy a discount on a new apartment? What race are you?

The majority of political parties in this country exist to further the interests of the particular races.

This is why the question of race continues to haunt us. It would not be the case if, for example, one thinks about scholarships and the only thing in the mix is the question of need.

It would not be the case if, for example, retired politicians stick to charitable causes and quit reminding a particular race that they are different from the others.

While Hussein spoke about “progressing with other races”, Mahathir speaks about the Malays needing crutches and having to be fearful of other races.

One spoke in 1981, and the other speaks in 2011.

One was a visionary, and the other a living relic.

The facts today are these.

Lee Chong Wei is the world’s number one badminton player. Tony Fernandes is the 2010 Forbes Asia’s Businessman of the Year and Zeti Akhtar Aziz is among the world’s top seven best central bankers for 2010. They have one thing in common. They are all Malaysians.

And they are a testament to the fact that the secret of our various successes lies in our multiculturalism. — mysinchew.com

The Age, Austalia: Malaysia stumbling,,, by Eric Ellis

Malaysia stumbling

Eric Ellis
TheAge
Australia September 23, 2010

ONE of Australia’s key partners in Asia is struggling. Given the way its leaders have taunted Australia over the years, schadenfreude at its plight would be understandable. But this should be resisted, for if Malaysia stumbles, the effects may ripple across the region.

Erstwhile sponsor of the Carlton Football Club, a cash cow for the Australian education sector, Australia’s 10th largest trading partner and a champion of ”Asian values” – whatever they are – Malaysia seems to be brimming with sky-is-falling Chicken Littles. And their analyses are alarmist; ”failed state”, ”deep pit”, ”national decay”, ”ocean-going corruption”, ”useless mega-projects”.

While some of these could be used to describe the Delhi Commonwealth Games – a massive undertaking Malaysia successfully pulled off 12 years ago by the way – it is about a country oft-regarded as an Asian success, whose rampant economy inspired a cockiness among its leaders to take racially tinged potshots at the ”decadent and immoral” West, and at Australia in particular.

And then there was the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to demonise, indeed anyone its mercurial then prime minister Mahathir Mohamad didn’t like on any given day. And there was 23 years of it, the Mahathir monopoly on Malaysian power.

So what’s prompted such painful hand-wringing from a tigerish economy that likes to boast how it ditched traditional models to virtually promise endless riches? The answer is some of the nastiest foreign direct investment (FDI) statistics an Asian economy has served up in a generation.

FDI into Malaysia slumped dramatically last year, falling a whopping 81 per cent. In 2009, Malaysia took in just $1.38 billion of new investment, barely enough to build a half-decent bridge in a land where pork-barrelling infrastructure projects are de rigueur. By contrast, India averaged almost double that in any given month. Malaysia’s FDI take was even less than that lured by the Philippines, long the region’s economic basket case.

This worries Malaysians greatly. For all of Mahathir’s bluster, he was careful to suck up to big business, and his less-poisonous successors since 2003 have done much the same. Foreign investment underpinned the Malaysian ”miracle”, transforming sleepy Penang into an Asian Silicon Valley and industrialising the Klang Valley that surrounds Kuala Lumpur to OECD levels, with $40,000 a year average incomes to match.

So has the sky fallen in? Some of the fall can be explained by the 2008 ”trans-Atlantic financial crisis”, as many like to call it in Asia. Malaysia’s reliance on foreign investment made it one of Asia’s most globally connected countries. So when Europe and North America tightened their belts after the subprime meltdown, Malaysia naturally was jolted. But the same external dramas affected just as connected Thailand – which endured a crippling political crisis to boot – and more so globalised Singapore, and both far outperformed Malaysia in ongoing FDI, as did Indonesia.

Malaysian fingers point at Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and his on-again, off-again will to reform a lop-sided economy Mahathir tilted to favour his bumiputra franchise, the ethnic Malays who comprise about half Malaysia’s 28 million people.

Mahathir advantaged Malays with an aggressive ”new economic policy (NEP)”. Mahathir’s thinking went that Malays were less commercially inclined than their compatriot Chinese and Indian Malaysians and thus needed the state’s help. The NEP’s affirmative action aimed to lift Malays out of poverty, but many analysts have likened it to economic apartheid, a meal ticket that many Malays have got too used to.

The NEP anchored Mahathirism and helped keep him in power for two decades. Malays were lifted but NEP side effects are many and cancerous; corruption, cronyism and an oversized sense of entitlement. Much of Malaysia’s economy is controlled by ethnic Chinese, who pragmatically chummed up to Mahathir. To some, the NEP meant simply installing well-paid and influential Malay placemen on boards to fulfil quotas.

Anti-NEP rancour has been building for years and in 2008, five years after Mahathir retired, voters registered disgust by handing his Malay-centric United Malay National Organisation-led coalition its worst result in history, losing its two-thirds parliamentary majority in a gerrymandered assembly. The UMNO faithful toppled Mahathir’s successor, Abdullah Badawi, and now, as support wavers, his successor, Najib, says he wants to replace the NEP with a ”new economic model”, which he pledges to ”execute or be executed”.

There’s a rising fin de regime tint about the UMNO empire, which has never been out of office and has absorbed Malaysia’s critical facilities of state; the civil service, military, media and the education system. Abolishing the NEP is a particular cross for the aristocratic Najib to bear; it was conceived in the early 1970s by his then prime minister father Tun Abdul Razak.

Najib has a big problem, and it is not just the allegations of corruption and even murder that swirl around his circle. Like Julia Gillard, Najib doesn’t have a popular mandate to govern. Also like Gillard, he got handed office when his party’s faceless men knifed an elected PM, Badawi, in office. Malaysians expect Najib to go to the polls soon to get that mandate, but he doesn’t seem sure it’s a good idea, as a confident opposition calls him to account.

In shades of Gillard’s Labor still, party hardliners are in revolt. While most moderate Malays accept the NEP needs tweaking, if only to keep UMNO breathing and in power, a virulent core of party heavies has organised under the banner of a movement called Perkasa, which means ”mighty” in Malay.

Perkasa claims to be defending the Malaysian constitution, which guarantees Malay ethnic primacy. It says it is fighting for Malay rights against the rising challenge of minorities. But Perkasa feels like a supremacist movement, something a Pauline Hanson might recognise. A former US ambassador to Kuala Lumpur has described Perkasa as ”militant”, while non-Malays condemn it for racial divisiveness. That’s emotive language in a country where people still define themselves by ethnicity over nationality and where the deadly race riots of the 1960s are never far away in thinking and policy – not just in Malaysia but among neighbours alert to ethnic tension.

As he dithers over rolling back the NEP and over an election timetable, Najib seems to think he can spend his way to popularity. Last week, he outlined a Mahathir-esque $500 billion investment plan to transform the economy with mega-projects. He appealed to foreign investors to help. But as China, India and Indonesia boom, they will need convincing it is money well spent.

Aliran: Mahathir: Maverick, Machiavellian or merely mainstream? — Maznah Mohamad

Mahathir: Maverick, Machiavellian or merely mainstream? — Maznah Mohamad

Malaysian Insider, MAY 3 —
My first reaction to the book was, how could this be any different from the several others already written of the man, for example, that of Khoo Boo Teik’s Paradoxes of Mahathirism and  In-Won Hwang’s Personalised Politics (Not forgetting articles and commentaries generated by countless number of print and virtual writers before this)?

After going through the first few chapters of the book I knew that this was going to be different, more impactful and more of a fine strike at the core of the matter.

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has remained enigmatic and so far, seems to be unmoved by the tons of criticisms directed at  him. Perhaps this was balanced by the loads of adulation and fawning by his coterie of loyalists, as exemplified by the quality of the commentators in his own blog (which could number up to a 1,000 comments for a single post, with most starting their address with Yang dikasihi Tun — The Most Beloved Tun).

In gossip circles, Mahathir is known to have the thickest skin on the planet and is impervious to any verbal assaults on his character and his ways. People are astounded by his ability to trounce all of his rivals and those he simply could not tolerate even when he is out of power.

Mahathir is perhaps the only person in the world who could evoke sympathy on this by proclaiming that he was wronged by the wrong people he had chosen to be under him, from Musa Hitam to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. He survived at least five major financial scandals and still had the audacity to reprimand his heir-apparent Abdullah Badawi by sniping in one of his blog postings that Abdullah’s “Mr Clean image meant that he had cleaned everything up”.

The following had become standard facts, not just opinions — he destroyed the independence of the judiciary, manipulated democracy and controlled the media to his liking and is still able to say that he had been denied his freedom of expression by the Abdullah government. It appears that there is no remorse in the man, nothing can break him, and he remained confident right up to Barry Wain’s last line in the book that his wrongs would someday be debunked.

For those reasons above Mahathir Mohamad is a tale worth telling and re-telling. What I like most about this book is that it just tells the story as it is, rather than try to link the episodes to some abstract generalisation or grand theories. This makes the book richer because it does not straightjacket the reader’s thinking into a particular direction. The book charts the rise of Mahathir, his stepping down, small-steps, really because he was never a hair’s-breadth away from the centre of power.

Style of book
The book is written in a breezy and enthralling style, at some parts it is almost like a political thriller and would make great material for a film of that genre. The most remarkable thing is that it is not fiction, and were a film to be made about Mahathir it would really be a case of art imitating life.

It is indeed an achievement that Wain’s book manages to focus on the personal, even heart-warming sides of Mahathir, the family man, but ends up as a powerful treatise of the public Malaysia.

The party state
From 1981 till today, Mahathir has given Malaysia its particular feature as a state. The most useful, if not intriguing  concept that Wain has stated (just once on page 53) in describing Malaysia under Mahathir is that he had created a party-state. Hence, the useful contribution of the book is that it has provided much data to chart the birth of this party-state, its peaking and its possible eventual decline.

This concept of the party-state, though not elaborated by Wain, appears as the trademark of the Mahathir-rule.  Elsewhere, studies on the Kuomintang in Taiwan by Karl Fields have indicated the blurring of the distinction between party and state as leading to this particular phenomenon of the party-state. This would be a good time to undertake a comparative study of all the “party-states” of Asia – Umno, KMT, LDP and the PAP, to name the most outstanding ones.

I summarise Wain’s suggestion of this same phenomenon developing in Malaysia which quite clearly originated from Mahathir’s ascendance to power. They are associated with how he had:

1.     weakened state and informal institutions
2.     packed the state bureaucracy with loyalists rather than technocrats
3.     intervened to subdue the judiciary so that it would yield results whenever the leader or the party’s political control is endangered.
4.     downgraded the status of the MCA and the MIC, which were coalition party stalwarts of equal standing with Umno before this.
5.     blended and merged Mahathir the strongman with Malaysia the rising middle-power state.

Malaysia was nothing but Mahathir, but Mahathir was larger than Malaysia. Not that he is unaware of this view as lately he had become quite defensive of his actions. In one of the more recent blog entries, he declared, “Thank you for agreeing that I am a dictator. Tell me which dictator ever resign. (sic)”

Important chapters
Let me now try to excavate the more important insights and revelations from some chapters in the book.

I consider Chapters 3 to 6 to be the most crucial in charting the growth of the party-state helmed by a strong man.

Chapter 3 is especially critical. It showed how Mahathir achieved his crowning moment in deploying his political and Machiavellian skills in saving himself and the party. The manoeuvre to outdo Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and the threat of a legal pronouncement that would spell the death knell for him and Umno provided the greatest motivation for him to upset the separation of powers doctrine of the modern democracy.

What was remarkable was that he resolved this issue in less than four months. The four months that shook Malaysia involved:

1.     the pronouncement of  Umno’s illegality (February 1988)
2.     the registration of Umno Baru
3.     the ousting of Team B from the new Umno
4.     the sacking of the Lord President (8 August 1988)
5.     the sacking of five Supreme Court judges
6.     the transfer of all assets of the old Umno to the new Umno (March 1988)

On 27 May 1988, Tun Salleh Abas, the Lord President was suspended from his office, by the then King Mahmood Iskandar.  This is the most intriguing revelation of the book, as Mahathir had managed to use his skills as a “blackmailer” to persuade the King to sign the letter of dismissal in return for protection from being removed from his throne. There were talks that the King was involved in the murder of his caddy, and was about to be dethroned by his fellow brother-rulers (The Council of Rulers).

Allegations of the killing of a caddy seemed to have been verified by both Mahathir and Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in Wain’s interviews with them.  These are mentioned in Chapter 3, page 73.

I must also add that Mahathir would not have succeeded in saving himself if not for the MCA, although this was not noted in the book. Apparently he owed a great debt of gratitude to Ling Liong Sik, who became the first Chinese to become leader of the Barisan National, a short history worth noting, but missing in Wain’s pages. In the midst of Umno’s deregistration, Ling Liong Sik as leader of the BN had the choice of accepting Tengku Razaleigh’s party (Semangat 46) or Mahathir’s party (Umno Baru) into the coalition.

In Mahathir’s blog entry of Nov 23 2009 he expressed his emotions: “But for Liong Sik, the MCA President who headed BN, accepting Umno Baru and not Semangat 46, life would have been difficult for me.”

Hence a correction to Wain’s rendition — it may not have been Machiavellian deftness all the way which saved the strongman, but a little bit of goodwill had helped too!

Party and business
From the events of 1988, from which Umno Baru was birthed, the episode just spelled an uphill ascendance of Mahathir the astute autocrat — or perhaps  a downhill trajectory for Mahathir the scrupulous and ethical leader, as the other quarter would have seen it.

This is when the notion of the party-state could really take shape — Umno had to get into business and Umno had to undermine the state in order to replace the state with itself.

Wain’s book pointed out that under the Societies Act of 1966, the party was not permitted to do business. For this Umno had to conceal its assets by setting up nominee companies and executives and lined up trusted individuals to hold stakes in various companies, which were in fact Umno-owned.

By 1988, Umno succeeded in accumulating vast amounts of resources under this arrangement. Chapter 5 seems to suggest that the registration and de-registration of Umno had originally put the party’s financial standing in a quandary. Here was where the wizardry of Daim Zainuddin came into the picture. The mix of politics and business towards Umno’s advantage would not have happened if not for Daim and his boys.

Before mixing politics with business, Umno was extremely poor. In an embarrassing detail, the book cited interviews with Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah as to how dependent Umno was on the MCA and Chinese businessmen to fund their election campaigns, including paying for routine expenses such as transport costs to talks to villagers.

But the involvement of Umno in business did not start with the Mahathir-Daim partnership. Way back in 1972, Tun Razak and Tengku Razaleigh created the secret, “Umno Political Fund”, which is discussed in chapter 5.  Ku Li defended this move about getting into business because of the need to be financially independent.

Umno’s involvement in business started with their acquisitions of newspaper shares, the first time of Utusan Melayu’s in 1961 and then in 1972 of the Singapore Straits Times’.

Daim came fully into the picture in 1982, a year after Mahathir had become PM and elevated his role in fashioning Umno as a giant corporation to great heights.

In Wain’s words, Daim “woud be primarily responsible for integrating business and politics in Malaysia”.  Accordingly, Mahathir merely made the “philosophical” connection rather than having a hands-on role in the whole matter.

In one of the  most classic defences of why Daim did not think that there was any conflict of interest between making money for himself, for the party and the nation, he declared a series of “why-nots”,

“If I think the government can make money with me, why not?...since I have details of the company and I think it is good investment for my family, why not?... If everybody is going to make money, why not?” (pages 133 - 134)

Chapter 6 titled, “Scandal, What Scandal?” is also a fascinating, if not troubling read. In this chapter, Wain revisits Malaysia’s past financial scandals by presenting them as a series of Mahathir failures. From the mid-1980s till the late 1990s, this was the decade of serial failures for Mahathir. Financially, he was a serial failure.

The events and background of the tin trading fiasco, the BMF affair, the forex trashing and the Perwaja mess were all skilfully traced in this chapter. The conservative estimate of the worth of these failures was RM100 billion. What is useful about this chapter is not that any of these shenanigans had not been exposed before, but having them all documented together in one read allows one to discern a certain pattern of the party state.

Mahathir lamely claimed to have been misinformed about many of the dealings, or that he was not fully culpable of the acts, by justifying that:

1.     he  needed to rescue the faltering party from financial ruin (Maybank and BBMB ended  up paying for the costs of Umno’s Headquarters);
2.     Umno needed to be involved in business as a means of creating the new Bumiputra entrepreneurial class, basically in the form of Daim and his boys;
3.     Malaysia needed to stand up against the West — “to take on the developed countries at their own gains”. For example the tin and forex trading misadventures were manoeuvres to outfox the Western economies.

Besides the unsuccessful plan to outdo the West, all that the above had succeeded in generating was endemic and appalling corruption within the system. The masterminds behind the BMF and Perwaja affairs remained unpunished. To date nobody has ever been prosecuted under Malaysian laws for any of the above misappropriations.

Chapter 7 is about Mahathir’s penchant for big projects and colossal structures. But by the time he had built Putrajaya, the new administrative capital, he was already on his last legs as premier — the swan song before exit.

Chapter 8 is another invaluable chapter as it describes in great detail how Mahathir tamed the Malay Royalty by getting rid of their judicial immunity. The amendment to the federal Constitution allowed for a sultan to be tried in a “special court” if caught breaking the law. Another change was to get rid of the constitutional provision which prohibited any member of Parliament or of the state assembly from saying anything about the King or sultans without being liable to proceedings in court. But in looking at the current situations involving Umno and the royalty — in Terengganu, Perlis and Perak — it doesn’t look like the amendments have much bite in preventing royal intervention and meddling.

Chapter 9 is about Mahathir’s use of pragmatic Islam to shore up his credentials, which in the end he had little control over. Chapter 10 is about his performance on the foreign relations stage. I would say that he was most successful in his Third World persona, admired by outsiders as the champion of the Southern underdogs. But even so he did not go the full mile in resisting the West, as he was quite easily persuaded into supporting many unpopular resolutions such as the one which approved the invasion of Iraq in 1990; he even worked hard under questionable circumstances to get a meeting with Bush in 2002.

While the book is an excellent account of events from a vantage point of having Mahathir as the central, arresting character of the plot, the picture of Malaysia is not complete without considering bit players and marginal actors. In this regard Wain’s book says little about the involvement of civil society or even Mahathir’s detractors in being responsible for many of his reactions and backlashes.

Nevertheless, Wain has featured DAP leader Lim Kit Siang prominently as the most consistent admonisher of Mahathir’s wrongdoings and transgressions. Almost every chapter features Kit Siang’s parliamentary dressing-down of the Mahathir malpractice. I would think that another book on the former would be a welcome addition to the list of political biographies of Malaysian leaders.

Platform for other theories and generalisations
There are many ways of looking at history. One way is to have all analysis centred around one person, which Barry Wain had expertly done. But the other way is to look at the entity in which this person operates from a larger, long-duree perspective which is to look at transformational moments rather than emblematic personalities. Looking at history this way I could view Malaysia differently. For example what were the iconic moments in Malaysia’s transformation?

My take is that there were three:

1.   1969 — not just because of the riots but because it triggered a structural revolution in the form of the NEP for Malaysia. This changed race-relations and entrenched Malay dominance as the foundational politics of Malaysia.
2.   1982 — this marked the take-off stage of state Islamisation in Malaysia.  Anwar’s entry into government provided the wide discourse of Islam in government and private lives. Umno began to build on Islam for its legitimacy not because the party became more Islamic but because the state was made to perform that role and carry on such an image. This may have masked all the financial scandals and mismanagement by diverting the Muslim masses’ concern onto other seemingly transcendental issues.
3.   2008 — the 12th General Election was iconic for several reasons; it was  only the second time  that the BN lost its two thirds majority and it was the first time that all opposition parties succeeded in becoming governments — PAS in Kelantan and Kedah, the DAP in Penang and the PKR in Selangor.

If we were to look at all of the above moments, where was Mahathir in all these? Surprisingly he was not the main actor or the primary mover of these moments. 1969 and the NEP were Razak’s moments, with Mahathir a bit player with his Malay Dilemma needlings.

1982 was Anwar’s moment with Mahathir playing a role in getting him into the party though Mahathir was not at all central in the Islamic resurgence movement.

In 2008, Anwar and Malaysian civil society (Raja Petra and the internet come to mind) were the main players and galvanisers of that event.

Mahathir may be here, there and everywhere. But all the time he was in fact fighting for regime-maintenance, as asserted by In-Won Hwang in a previous work on Mahathir titled, “Personalised Politics”. Mahathir was full of grand visions according to Khoo Khay Jin in an earlier article, written in the 1980s.  But by Mahathir’s own admittance he failed in reforming Umno or the Malays. Was he then too afraid of going against the status-quo?

Let me just conclude by posing more questions than can be answered about the subject matter of the book:

1.     Was he a failure or a success as a leader? Many of his legacies today are leading to a lacklustre rather than a brighter Malaysia.
2.     Was he a maverick or a mainstreamer? He was more obsessed about saving and functioning within Umno, unable to discard neither the content nor the shell of the party.

If Anwar had succeeded in inheriting the position of prime minister, would he have continued the Umno legacy of the party-state and party capitalism? Could it be that even Mahathir was cornered into ridding Anwar, lest Umno would cease to be the party-state?

Stirrer or shaker?
My own conclusion is that Mahathir had stirred many events but he did not shake the system; a provoker of headline news, not a wrecker of vestiges and structures.

Despite the seemingly iconoclastic and non-conformist positions and posturing that he took, how much of the world or Malaysia did he change?

The fact that I find myself asking these questions attests to the valuable contribution of this book and I’m very sure that it will fly off the shelves for many reasons, not least because it is a riveting, thought-provoking, if not disquieting read.

For journalists and scholars, Mahathir’s paradoxes will continue to serve as a veritable textual goldmine in the production of more papers and books.

To the Malaysian citizen and taxpayer, this book is a sobering testament that you almost always do not get the government you deserve. — Aliran

* Dr Maznah Mohamad, an Aliran member, presented the above commentary of Barry Wain’s Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, published in 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan, at the book launch in Singapore on 4 December 2009.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.

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

Malaysiakini-Manjit Bhatia: Soros was dead right about Mahathir

Soros was dead right about Mahathir

Manjit Bhatia
malaysiakini, Jan 26, 10, 12:40pm

What's the difference between former Malaysian premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Nothing.
Both are charlatans. Both are racist to their core. Both must be condemned without hesitation and reservation.

Ahmadinejad has been adamant that the Jewish holocaust during Hitler's reign was a figment of Western imagination. Worse, it was a conspiracy to hoodwink the rest of the world into offering sympathy to the Jewish race and the Jewish state of Israel.

Mahathir is renowned for his anti-Semiticism. Recall, during the height of the late nineties financial crisis when he blamed billionaire George Soros and his Quantum Fund for trying to bring the Malaysian economy to its knees.

All that without a shred of evidence. For which he was pasted by Soros, calling Mahathir a 'menace to his own country'. Soros was dead right.

Nevertheless Mahathir has continued with his imbecilic rants. Last week he suggested that if Americans can make 'Avatar', the world's top-grossing film, so spectacularly and convincingly, then they must have also manufactured their own bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York and elsewhere in and around Washington, DC and all this just to pin blame on the world's Muslims.

Mahathir has never been one to depend on cold, hard evidence. He banged up Anwar Ibrahim without a cantlet of evidence, and countless other times when he willfully nabbed and jailed under the Stalinist ISA his critics and opponents.

You can be sure people like Ahmadinejad who are Mahathir's ardent fans would have applauded him.

And Malaysians across the races have long put Mahathir on a pedestal. They even called him an international 'statesman'. Je was even named him 'Man of the Millennium'.

Go figure: Why reward a desperate xenophobic and devious dictator with ludicrous titles and banal praise?

Racist neo-nationalism

So what's Mahathir's motive for making such inane comments? Is it politically calculated?
Mahathir is a crass populist. Always has been. Read Barry Wain's book 'The Malaysian Maverick', thus far 'refused sale' in Malaysia. It's code for banning the book.

Such oft-contradictory idiocy by the Malaysian ministers and their bureaucratic class has stopped amazing me a long time ago. Idiocy is expected, by nature, in Malaysian political life.

Mahathir has always used his brand of Malay-ness (despite his Indian ancestry, of which he refuses to discuss or even accept, wholly usurping his Malay mother's side and crafting his 'Malay' identity through this), his brand of racist neo-nationalism, his brand of Islam, which can warp from time to time depending on his political agenda, and melding all of these into pushing forth his authoritarianism by centralising power in his hands for 22 years.

Except for the reprehensible sections of the world who see authoritarianism and the brutalising of human rights as a virtue whilst they cronyistically siphon off the wealth of their own countries, the rest of the world has ignored Mahathir. And this cuts him up.

The US embassy in Kuala Lumpur refused to comment, not because they didn't want to buy into his tired baloney, but because he's just not worth their time.

Mahathir is a tired, angry old fogey who craves attention. He fears his growing irrelevance amongst his adoring Muslim brotherhood, at least of the monied class, and even amongst those in Malaysia who have supported him.

The next generation of Malaysians, including Malays, may not know Mahathir any more than they will know much else given the parlous and shameful state of Malaysian education, which borders on the lunacy of inwardness, irrelevance and incompetence.

Which explains so-called policies such as '1Malaysia' and the National Civics Bureau - all baldfaced attempts that seek, in fact, to ideologically indoctrinate innocuous Malays, pitting them against non-Malays on the basis of barefaced lies and institutionalised racism.

Even the Malaysian constitution, so bastardised since independence by ruling Malaysian politicians, defends and embeds institutionalised racism, almost on par with the former apartheid system in South Africa.

Such massive corruption
Mahathir is a menace to his country, even in retirement. Nobody is telling him to shut up. He has every democratic right to voice his opinions. It's a pity that he disenfranchised these same democratic rights from the rest of the Malaysian citizenry during his 'lordship' except for his cronies, whom he helped enrich at the expense of the bulk of other Malaysians.

Mahathir not only lied to them; he also cheated his 'own' Malays, many of whom continue to live at the same level of poverty that previous generations had in the 1950s and 60s. The New Economic Policy was a spectacular failure.

Mahathir's 'The Malay Dilemma' was a joke aimed at delivering him and his cronies to the pinnacle of power.

Mahathirism is laughable because it only fanned such massive corruption throughout Malaysia that today it reaches every echelon of the cabinet, bureaucracy and security forces, including the hopelessly incompetent police force.

Mahathir had presided over this corruption in full knowledge. He should be hammered from all sides for this, and for his diehard racism.

He must be constantly reminded that he's not god, any more than he may think that he's above the law. But the gutless Najib Abdul Razak regime won't even dare touch him.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.

Malaysian Insider: Malaysia’s mercurial Mahathir — Hal Hill

Malaysia’s mercurial Mahathir — Hal Hill

JAN 19 — Few countries have matched Malaysia’s stellar record of development over the last several decades: Annual GDP growth has averaged around 6.5 per cent since independence in 1957, and the nation of 27 million people now boasts the world’s 31st-largest economy. But no discussion of this Southeast Asian nation’s economy would be complete without due attention to Mahathir Mohamad, who held the reins for 22 years from 1981 to 2003.

Mahathir’s personal story, as recounted in Barry Wain’s “Malaysian Maverick,” tracks the country’s broader post-war history. The prime minister’s origins wouldn’t necessarily have augured a great political future. Born in 1925 to parents of modest means, he grew up on the “poor side of the river” that bisected the town of Alor Star, in northern Malaysia.

Of mixed Indian and Malay ancestry, he was a member of neither the Malay aristocracy nor the ethnic Chinese business class in a country where race did, and still does, significantly determine a person’s prospects.

As a child, he was driven, impatient, energetic and intelligent. His teenage years were overshadowed by war and the Japanese occupation, when he became a street hawker to eke out a living. Returning to school after the war, he excelled and found his way to Singapore to study medicine in 1947. He was stunned by the relative wealth and sophistication he found on the island, a stark contrast with colonial Malaya.

Returning home in 1953 to practice medicine, it was only a matter of time before politics beckoned. Mahathir entered Parliament in 1964, representing a local Kedah constituency for the ruling United Malays National Organisation (Umno).

The ’60s were turbulent for the newly independent country: “Malaysia” was officially birthed in 1963 by combining Malaya with Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah, but in 1965 Singapore broke off as an independent city-state.

Following the general election in May 1969, brief but vicious conflicts broke out between the Chinese and Malay communities. Mahathir also lost his seat at that election and, following some bitter political infighting, was expelled from Umno.

His retreat from politics provided an opportunity to reflect more deeply on national issues. He penned “The Malay Dilemma,” arguing that the country’s ills resulted from the country’s extreme ethnic imbalances. The book was immediately banned, but it became an influential political document. It asserted that the Malays were the country’s original “definitive race” and that this should be embedded in national institutions and policies.

Mahathir was by now a national figure, and the departure of Malaysia’s founding prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, with whom he frequently quarrelled, opened the way for his re-entry into politics in 1974. He quickly rose through the ranks, winning the premiership in 1981 — the first “commoner” to hold the post. He quickly set about implementing his vision of modernisation: developing a vibrant Malay business class while also embarking on a “Look East” strategy of heavy industrialisation.

Mahathir saw himself as a nation builder and a champion of third-world causes. He liked to think big, whether it was the construction of the nation’s north-south highway stretching from Thailand to Singapore or the new capital he started at Putra Jaya.

Inevitably, these and other projects became entangled within the complex web of Umno money politics. They tended to be very expensive, rely on no transparent bidding and favour contractors with ties to Umno. But the book presents little evidence that Mahathir saw these projects as vehicles for personal enrichment — even if it is alleged some of his cronies and family apparently did.

More than his economic programme, however, Mahathir’s personality has attracted attention. As Wain makes clear, he displayed a well-developed authoritarian streak and a propensity to lock up dissidents. The most infamous of these was the jailing of his former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, in September 1998 on charges of financial and sexual improprieties, an event that deeply shocked the nation. Mahathir has denied the charges were politically motivated, and Anwar was later acquitted.

The international media were also targeted, including this newspaper, which was banned for a period for its articles about the economy and then Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin.

This new biography contends that Mahathir cemented his rule in part by weakening institutions like the judiciary, media and professional civil service that could have challenged him.

Although Mahathir contests that claim, he did introduce press controls, bypass the civil service with his own direct appointments and dismiss the lord president of the Supreme Court during the constitutional crisis of 1988. His personalisation of power “cut Malaysia adrift institutionally,” Wain writes, rendering more difficult the country’s transition to modern statehood.

Wain’s book is biography at its best. The author, a former Journal editor and Malaysia bureau chief, builds on extensive interviews with Mahathir, his family and close associates. But Wain also gives plenty of airing to the critics, and he has meticulously sifted through the Malaysian press, the scholarly literature and “underground” commentary, offering no fewer than 1,236 footnotes to support his rich narrative.

The result is a balanced, comprehensive and nuanced study that apportions praise and criticism in equal measure. It replaces a much earlier work, Khoo Boo Teik’s 1995 “Paradoxes of Mahathirism” as the seminal study of Mahathir.

Yet Wain could have stepped back a little more and asked whether Mahathir fundamentally changed the course of Malaysian economic development. Under his leadership growth was no more impressive than under his three predecessors or two successors.

Arguably, Malaysia’s growth record is attributable more to the country’s consistent openness and prudent macroeconomic management — it has never suffered the fiscal crises, hyperinflation, financial collapses that have afflicted other developing countries — combined with its rich natural resources.

While this debate deserves more attention, Wain’s important biography sheds light on a fascinating character. As the winds of reformasi and the inexorable rise of the Internet pry open the country’s controlled print and television media, there will likely be further revelations about the tight nexus between politics and money that flourished under his rule. — Wall Street Journal

* Hal Hill is the H.W. Arndt professor of Southeast Asian economies at Australian National University.

* This article is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.

2008: Annus Mirabilis: The year that was... Part 2

6. The foundering disappointment of the Abdullah Badawi government
When he first took over the helm of Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi was seen as the next hope for change toward a gentler, less corrupt, less autocratic government. He did promise to clean up the act. But alas, the wheels of change under his watch, were truly grinding under the weight of ponderous inaction and torpidly unconvincing pledges—some talk, but generally no action. At least, none worthy of institutional progress.

If anything, he let his cronies, his fourth/fifth floor gatekeepers led by his son-in-law KJ, control the engine of his listless administration and the nation's projects for development. As a result the country literally stalled, with gross incompetence, venal and shameless bartering for ill-gotten gains and extravagant wastage!

It was as if the wealth and direction of the country now hinged on the grandiose if untested whims and fancies of a small coterie of young 30-something year-old Oxbridge graduates, beholden only to the ambitious Khairy Jamaluddin.

Rumours of his excesses are probably just that. But the unflattering perception became disastrous for the Premier, who seemed unwilling or unable to rein in this appealing if brazen young man (in closer circles, he had been quoted as having said that he would become prime minster before the age of 40!)

His impatience and his greater-than-life belief in himself and his worth clearly antagonised more than just the ordinary Malaysian, his UMNO brethren began to openly question and challenge his stature and his ambition. Thus, began the break-up of the cosy unity of purpose of UMNO-dominated largesse and its shattered myth of political goodwill. It finally boiled down to everyman for himself, as they wrangled for the spoils of dominance, influence and connections.

The strong 2004 electoral mandate given by a hopeful rakyat, was therefore quickly sapped and frittered away, with escalating disenchantment with Pak Lah's lethargic style of leadership. Ambitious and impatient political rivals skirmished and began to sorely test his mettle, and left in its wake, a lingering if haunting disservice to his vitiated legacy.

Some kinder pundits have equated him, Pak Lah to be Malaysia's Gorbachev—a sort of an enlightened leader who espouse a new beginning (sadly, equally nebulous in the final anaylsis), an openness, a glasnost, for greater democratic space—perhaps, they were right...

But ultimately, being benign and gently ineffectual (perhaps even a seat-warmer?), is never enough to hold on to power in this hurly-burly world of politics... Pak Lah would soon have to relinquish his mantle of power, (one which we sense he was uneasy to begin with anyway), brokered through an uneasy truce with his number two.

His tenure of Premiership is best summed up as forgettable, even as he tried at the last gasp to enact new laws (the watered-down MACC, JAC) which would lend some spotted burnish and meaning to his lacklustre administration.

Still, it is true that Malaysians were given a chance to become more outspoken, more willing to question the status quo, braver with the uncensored anonymity of free-expression aided by the mushrooming alternate media—the blogosphere, YouTube and the world wide web through the internet. So, in a sense we should be grateful.

But, perhaps, it is also the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist of a new interconnected world, where civil liberties and expectant human rights have matured with presumptuous free expression, information ubiquity and where knowledge access is de rigueur, even inevitable...

7. The ex-PM who would not go away...
Mahathir Mohamed, now Tun, our ex-Premier for 22 years, must be that permanent fixture on any Malaysian political scene, who refuses to fade away.

There is much that can be said of this singular man, but there is also sadness that having achieved so much, he has clung on to his cast-in-stone ideas that Malaysia must be the Malaysia of his own, and perhaps his only image.

There can be no doubt that Mahathir placed Malaysia on the world map pedestal. He developed modern industrialised Malaysia in the mould of strong and autocratic man of yesteryears. Malaysia is made known globally because of his untiring efforts to promote a Malaysia that Can, i.e. Malaysia Boleh!

His grandiose schemes while criticised by many of his detractors, might be temporally opportunistic, but his landmarks have become household names in the region as well as globally, e.g. the Petronas Twin Towers, Putrajaya city, the KLIA, the Penang Bridge, Proton cars.

But alas, his other legacy isn't so sparkling or benign, but may be even more painfully enduring and inimical. In his determined quest to modernise Malaysia and uplift the indigenous Malays in particular, he began with unique bold ideas which were beneficent. As a result Malaysia's hard core rural poverty had been drastically reduced, and a sizeable middle class had been created.

However, many of these quickly became blemished as these created a spectacular if exclusive brand of government-linked corporations, and government-aided multimillionaires, very closely tied to or even dependent on the leadership's patronage system.

He did well in removing the scales from the eyes and the parochial mindset of many bumiputeras. He gave them a much-needed self-belief which is undoubtedly important and laudable, for which they can at last become more confident and conscious of their self-worth. He must be credited for having unabashedly promoted the Malay agenda so that as an ethnic group, they can confidently become more fully engaged in the business and affairs of the nation and its development—and hence, could compete on equal footing in this globalised world.

Thus, in times of plenty, when the economy was growing at a vigorous clip, there was enough wealth to be spread around, and every Malaysian appeared to benefit. Hence, in many ways he also made Malaysians of all races, proud to be Malaysians, because of his visionary leadership. But his continued sanction of this affirmative action has also created a subclass of dependency, of crutch-mentality and easy handouts, of rentier capitalism and political largesse.

He also brooked little opposition, challenge to, or restraints on his style and his power, believing that as popularly-elected Premier and government, he had the mandate to rule without interference from the constitutional royalty, the oversight judiciary or the minority opposition. His idea of majoritarian rule appears to be one of absolutism.

His brand of power politics and autocratic rule unfortunately and systematically emasculated these same institutions—the judiciary became beholden and capitulated; the royalty had its wings clipped, and the pliant police were offered unfettered power in exchange for its unquestioning loyalty. Corruption and political patronage practices reached its height, and UMNO-supremacist ideologies pushed to its ultimate arrogant peaks.

Following the March 8 election debacle, he openly led the huge chorus of criticisms casting his blame on the weak leadership of Pak Lah and his family connections. Since then he has all but undermined our hapless prime minister. He has since found a new dimension to his once silenced voice—the resurgence of his acerbic tongue through his immensely popular blog chedet.com!

It appears that Mahathir has issues of not being able to forgive or forget, as he relentlessly pursue his Machiavellian vengeance on whoever crosses him... At 84 years old, he continues to remain as sharp and as artless as he had always been. Until Pak Lah leaves the scene, there is little doubt that Mahathir will continue to badger him and his administration, pulverising whatever little that's left...

As he has already commented, as long as he is alive, he will not keep silent when he feels things are not going his way, neither would he allow Malaysia's fortunes and gains (which he had bulit up over the decades) to be 'jeopardised'. I foresee that Dr M will continue to figure prominently in the coming 2009, health and God willing!