THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' SERI Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, is shocked by the devastation of Banda Aceh after the tsunami struck. "I've never seen such destruction. I never saw World War II, so it is hard to imagine. It is very bad." Indeed, but need one be old old enough to witness World War II to relate to the horrors of the tsunami? It is a trite political statement as 'sound bites' for television news ...

MALAYSIA HAS ALL BUT forgotten its tsunami victims, as National Front (BN) cabinet ministers, led by prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, pulls no stops so aid is dispensed to Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Their need is seen as more important than our own victims. The Malaysian mainstream media ireports in copius detail the havoc and destruction overseas, but not the horrors on our own backyard – Kuala Muda, Langkawi, Penang. The official callousness beggars belief ...

A CALLOUS MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT lost its nerve, cordoned off where the tsunami struck in Penang, Langkawi, Kedah on Boxing Day, prevented aid reaching the area, and prided in its incompetence and arrogance. The immediate reaction were of rats scuppering off a sinking ship. No one took responsibility, nor allow anyone else to. Government agencies and departments which should have rushed in automatically did not since they were not ordered to.

Those private groups and individuals who rushed in to help with specialist vehicles equipped with winches and cranes, at the request of agencies like Mercy Malaysia, found a police cordon around the affected centres which allowed no one in. Awaiting patiently outside were rescue groups, which included the armed forces, barred from moving in to help ...

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, orders an instant updating of Malaysia's disaster warning systems. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib, as if on cue, promptly announces the purchase of Japanese tsunami early warning systems. But this is putting the cart before the horse.

There is nothing wrong with the systems; those who manned it were not at their posts when the undersea earthquake and the subsequent tsunami struck ...

WHEN THE HISTORY OF UMNO comes to be written in the cold light of the future, two men would figure prominently in it. Both were drummed out of UMNO for thinking the unthinkable of what it should be. One was forced out for wanting UMNO to be a multiracial party, the other for an UMNO suffused in social justice. The arrogance of its leaders eschewed fresh ideas and change to intrude and question mainstream belief ...

IN ITS PANIC-STRICKEN VIEW, the UMNO-led National Front government and UMNO have decided one man must not intrude into the Malaysian consciousness. It has decreed he is a nobody, a sodomist and corrupter to boot, not worthy of the high trust Malaysians depose on its leaders. The mainstream newspapers, under its leaden hand, will not allow him to sully their irrelevant pages and ignore him unless he echoes what they want to hear. In foreign countries, the government moves heaven and earth to insist he be ignored as he is at home ...

THE MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT COULD have done without the year 2004: the new prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi dramatically lost ground with each setback – the general and UMNO elections, the UMNO bete noire Anwar Ibrahim's unexpected release from prison – to turn UMNO into a political battleground of its present and immediate past president for political control. This in turn undercut the National Front (BN) coalition in office, but with the UMNO leaders at each other's throats, with UMNO warlords on the march, all it could was to cling to office, duck the bullets, protect its leaders, and pray they would not be pawns in this fight for political control. The bald uncomfortable truth is that no one is in charge, the government drifts uncontrollably, But little of that seeps out because all this is fought within the accepted code of feudal fealty.

The non-Malay parties from the peninsula in the BN coalition, having for so long clung to UMNO's coattails, are in terror for what is to come if this infighting in UMNO turns into a political civil war; but those from Sarawak and Sabah, Muslim and non-Muslim, native and Malay, sharpen their knives to forestall any federal attempts to impose its will or crush their demands for a more localised polity. There is no public talk of it, the media here are famously known for only a sanitised view through the rosy spectacles of the UMNO president. Few Malaysians therefore will even consider that all is not right ...

THE MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT BARRED, cavalierly, any mention of Jesus Christ in carols sung at a christmas party it would host. When a Roman Catholic priest objected, in public, it was denied, and blamed on an overzealous civil servant. But it would not go away. It happens too often ...

ONE YEAR IN OFFICE, and the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, flounders but continues to take on more tasks than he could do justice, insists all do as he says, not as he does. When his leadership beckons, he palms it off with platitudes and demands for which no one, not even his immediate staff, care for. The deadwood UMNO-led National Front (BN) cabinet of warlords and incompetents withers from within, made worse by the four shibboleths that controls it, as in politics and the civil service: Malay fanaticism, Islamic extremism, corruption and incompetence. As his hold loosens, he is held to ransom by a motley collection of UMNO warlords, growing anger from within his political heartland, his missteps in foreign policy, notably how handles talks with Singapore, his own short attention span, his refusal to address problems ...

Bilateral ties between Malaysia and Singapore are grouted in a joint history shaped by colonialism, and defined by culture, religion, race, xenophobia and politics. In the four decades they have lived apart, the relationship is frustrated by race and xenophobia, though neither would admit it.

In each a significant minority continue to insist their divorce in 1965 was fatal to both, and future ties must take this into account. Little has changed in the four decades since, and the bilateral ties are predicated to the same set of issues that caused the separation.

Each has gone its way in the world, each is successful in its own way, and sees the world most of the time through the same prism. But what holds them back is the slew of unresolved issues, most of which can be resolved if each or both put their minds to it.

But it is typical of the relations that when one is ready the other is not; and it is all but impossible to arrange a meeting to discuss a final break of the divorce.

So the two nations divided by the Tebrau Straits have made their own arrangements amidst taunting each other, but they are so firmly interlinked that they cannot but act in conformity when one’s interests are stake vis-a-vis the other. But such deep-seated distrust of each other prevails in Malaysia and Singapore that even a discussion of the issues today are not possible unless one side bites the dust.

Especially when the powers-that-be in both countries have grown up in their own environment and have only contempt for the other ...

POLITICAL DEBATE DOES NOT exist in Malaysia. It is discouraged. By the government and opposition. Only one view is allowed to exist, that of whoever is in charge ...

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' SERI Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, warns the civil service not to be corrupt; the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, requires Malaysian politicians only to sing the government's praises when overseas; the deputy finance minister, Tengku Putera Tengku Awang, admits UMNO-controlled National Front (BN) states have mismanaged their states so badly that they cannot survive without federal help. A Petronas transfer of RM25 billion to the federal coffers, we are told, is proof all is well, but that its reserves have been depleted by the government's use of it as a private bank for the hundreds of billions which Putra Jaya and other official extravagances cost. But the government continues to insist its treasury is so flush with cash that tens of billions are set aside for arms purchases and other pump priming projects for no reason than to assure us all that this country is run well.

There is only one small problem with this upbeat view of the Malaysian economy. All one can say in defence of the government is to paraphrase Tengku Putera's comment on the fiscal irresponsibility of the Malaysian states: it will "not go bankrupt" as it has "a lot of assets" ...

BRICKFIELDS, IN THE BUKIT Bintang parliamentary constituency in Kuala Lumpur, witnessed a small miracle on Sunday, Dec 5: for the first time in living memory, a politician came acalling for no reason other than he wanted to.

The former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, came to celebrate Deepavali with the people of Brickfields, a rare gesture from any politician, as few could remember a similar function there in the past two decades.

There is one reason for this: it is so electorally docile that the election commission, in its wisdom, redrew it as an adjunct to several parliamentary constituencies in every constituency delineation over 30 years: Damansara, Siputeh, Lembah Pantai, Bukit Bintang.

We know why: to ensure a BN win ...

MALAYSIAN POLITICS DOES NOT travel well: it is too fragile to face the oft strident questions and comments about it that the Malaysian media ignores it unless they are of fulsome praise of its leaders. Let there be a major conference of world-shattering importance: all that matters for the slavish Malaysia media accompanying the Prime Minister is the hackneyed speech he utters; he is the centre of all attention, the issues unimportant unless he raised it.

Criticism of Malaysia is ignored, his routine courtesy calls on world leaders, full of anodyne remarks, is banner headlines in the Malaysian media and main news on prime time television and radio. The National Front (BN) government once controlled what is said in the Malaysian media ...

NO CORRUPTION IN UMNO, so the anti-corruption agency (ACA) cannot step in, says the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak. Yes, it can, says the ACA director-general, Dato' Seri Zulkapli Mat Noor, and anyone can file a report. Of course, it can, says the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. "If in money politics, there are things that violate the law," he said, the ACA could act on its own or on complaints lodged ...

IRAQ UNFOLDS IN WAYS thought possible; a stalemate in less than two years that in Vietnam took 12; each held to a single-minded righteousness in their clash of fundamentalisms but framed in a battle for self-respect against a cynical invader.

In Vietnam, the backdrop was the Cold War, a proxy war between the free world and communism; in Iraq, of Islam and Christianity; in both, each sure of his singular righteousness. It does not stop here. Both wars began on false premises, and brought to a stalemate with only one credible aim: how Washington could extricate from the mess with a semblance of honour.

Washington dismissed the fundamentalists - communism and Islam - as beyond the pale, belittling the nationalism that bound them, invaded their countries with no understanding of the ground, and forced into a stalemate in which it force lost its will as the native regained his.

The bloody aerial bombing firmed native resolve against the invader. The first use of it as an apparatus of colonial control was in 1911 when the Italians attacked an isolated oasis outside Tripoli and since, an important tactic in the colonial armoury: Kenya, India, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, the Philippines, Palestine, Vietnam, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Indochina ...

THE PAHANG MENTRI BESAR, Dato' Seri Adnan Yaakob, now rewrites the Malaysian constitution: the sultan must consult and accept the advise of the state government on all matters but the award of honours and titles. The 1983 constitutional amendments made the rulers constitutional monarchs handmaidens to political power. The man who engineered that, the then prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, wanted to transfer the native inherent powers of the sultans – the awarding of honours and titles was one – to political power. But it was flawed ab initio, though no one would admit it then ...

TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND MALAYSIANS and others, so we are told, thronged the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur for Aidil Fitri for six hours to greet the prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and his cabinet. In normal years, it would have been the prime minister's show; this year, Pak Lah brought them in as co-hosts.

For a good reason: for the first time this year, and after the fractious Umno elections, talk was in the air of several cabinet ministers being boycotted for the occasion. But it raised another: did 200,000 come by; could a fifth of a million people gather in the confined space where 20,000 at an Umno general assembly leaves no standing room? But reality matters not when spin doctors take over.

The crowds work out at 35,000 an hour, or 10 a second ...

TRADITION DECREES THAT MALAY homes invite neighbours, friends and others on festive and religious occasions. So it was until politicians and politics took over. The Malay traditions of my youth, half a century ago, is far different from the Malay traditions of our politicians and politics today. In those days, enmities and grudges were forgotten for the occasion, friends and enemies met in amity, with no one taking notes of who came and who did not ...

"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act," said George Orwell in 1984. This happens every day in Malaysia as Umno, and the National Front (BN) coalition it leads, insists truth is what it insists it is, not what it is. The mainstream media helps it along, but it - radio, television, newspapers - is disbelieved because it defies the public interest.

The Umno-led BN needs all the help it needs, but it cried wolf, and imposed its authoritarian will, once too often and instead chases its own tail. It believed it had the monopoly of truth, and damned any other, and its supporters ...

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