MALAYSIA AND THAILAND SIGNED on Dec 2,1989 an end to the communist insurgency with the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) that had begun five decades earlier. The insurgency had spluttered to a stop by 1960. Why it did must await the judgment of history. Malaysia insists the CPM was defeated by superior force and strategy, but a commissioned book on the Emergency suggests otherwise: the CPM had decided in the early 1950s that the insurgency could not be sustained.

The Baling Talks between the future prime minister, Tengku Abdul Rahman Putra, and the CPM leader, Chin Peng, provided it an excuse, and the insurgency faded away ...

THE SINGAPORE Prime Minister, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, visits Indonesia and Malaysia. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia vists Singapore and Malaysia. The Malaysian Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, visits Singapore and Indonesia. Each of these official visits on taking office were dressed up as bilateral visits when it should have been as part of the ASEAN mechanism ...

BEHIND EVERY INDONESIAN GENERAL stands a successful "cukung" (Chinese businessman). That is as true today as at the fight for independence from the Dutch, when supplies and money was scarce. A link forged through decades, the cukung betting on the young officer getting to be a general and higher; a relationship in which the general holds the trump cards. In Malaysia, we have the Ali Baba system, in which Ali, the Malay, gets the licences for the Baba, the Chinese businessman, to run riot ...

THE BOOK HAS A TITLE guaranteed to inflame: "Khairy Jamaludin Bakal Perdana Mentri?" (Khairy Jamaludin a prime minister-to-be?). His father-in-law and prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, was so shocked and incensed that he summoned the author to express his displeasure. Every effort is made to have the book off the shelves. The New StraitsTimes has warned its news vendors they would be dropped if they had the book for sale ...

PRIVATISATION of government assets and an over-reliance on management consultants, so wet behind their ears, most in their late twenties and early thirties, is, if truth be told, to gut the companies of its valuable assets, run them into unrepayable debt, give up the ghost, and force the government to step in. But since all this is done in private, with no accounting, market talk is full of rumours of how it is done, how its senior officers rape the assets for private gain, dress up the accounts, and decamp when the pack of cards so elaborately created threaten to fall.

But since the government assets are all in crucial and critical areas where in the past the private sector was not interested in, the government has no choice but to take it back. In Malaysia and, no doubt, elsewhere, privatisation has a dirty name and future: the ruling party and its acolytes muddy the pool as its untested management in their twenties and thirties run into debt and for personal gain ...

THE FORMER PRIME MINISTER, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is an angry man indeed. His successor, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, pulls no stops to ensure he is put to pasture once and for all. He does not want another ghost hovering over his shoulder. One, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, is bad enough and, try as he might, cannot shake him off ...

THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN Sabah gets out of hand. What political crisis, you ask? In Malaysia, when politicians attack, and the newspapers, radio and television slavishly report in, usually out of context or for no apparent reason, it is a sign all is not well. Sabah UMNO's misguided, unilatera, ill-thought attempt, with the undoubted connivance of federal BN and UMNO, to abolish the rotational system of chief ministers amongst the three broad groups – the Muslim, the non-Muslim and the natives; the bureaucratic gobbledygook beloved of our politicians and administrators describe it portentiously less elegantly, but this is what it means – to make the UMNO Sabah leader the permanent chief minister, backfired.

The chief minister, Dato' Seri Musa Aman, then unilaterally extends his term first from two to five years, then asserts the post for UMNO in any National Front (BN) government ...

THE CHIEF SECRETARY, TAN Sri Samsuddin Osman, should have retired two years ago. But so towering and well-rounded a civil servant is he that the prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, cannot let him go to seed. The nation needs him. If he should go now, it would disrupt the projects he is responsible for ...

DATO' SERI ABDULLAH AHMAD Badawi, should be on top of the world. He led the National Front (BN) to its best ever electoral showing four months after he succeeded Tun Mahathir Mohamed as prime minister in November 2004. Two months later, he was elected unopposed as UMNO president. On paper, he had more power, and control, of Malaysia, UMNO and BN than any of his predecessors ...

KOTA GELANGGI COULD be what it is, though not what it means: a thousand-year-old lost city in Johore that pushes Malaysian history back one and a half millenia. Malaysian history is older than Tun Sri Lanang's Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), but its discovery is to enhance newspaper circulation than serious archeological or historical inquiry. The location is a secret, we are told, to forestall bounty hunters and other greedy deizens of the modern world. I suspect it is to control what happens there, allowing in only the politically correct who accepts the modern UMNO-centric political view of what Malaysia is or ought to be ...

IT COULD BE THE Selangor public account committee's belly dancing tour of Egypt, the Malacca state government's golfing tour of the United States, Muslim patrons in nightclubs or Muslim contestants of a beauty contest harassed and humiliated by the Selangor Religious Affairs Department (Jawi), schools so badly constructed that they have to be shut down within months of its opening, hundreds of millions of ringgit earmarked for major educational projects which are abandoned mid-way with no explanation, mentris besar annointing Umno division chiefs with dato'ships if they are elected to high party positions, private secretaries of cabinet ministers signing official papers they have no authority to, the list is endless. But every revelation is greeted in thunderous silence.

Once the National Front (BN) governments could pull this off with equanimity and aplomb. The political repercussions on the citizenry to challenge official dictates became too fearsome to contemplate. The BN government instilled the collective fear that walls have ears, and the collective view that the citizen's sole right is to elect the BN to power, that he stands to lose his self-respect in society if he should ask too many intrusive questions or, indeed, if he should vote those it does not like to Parliament or, God forbid, elect an opposition to power in a state.

So dominating is Umno in the BN and Malaysian politics – since 1955, it has governed at the centre and all 13 states, except on occasion it lost control of no more than four states, and only one in the 2004 general election, the opposition by and large still sees its role only to limit the BN's two-thirds majority in Parliament and the states – that even the BN parties allowed Umno to do as it likes. It is Umno which controls the levers of power, and allows BN party leaders to be as autocratic and irrational towards their constituents as Umno towards all Malaysians.

It ignored Lord Acton's dictum: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely ...

THE FORMER MALAYSIAN DEPUTY prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, is now in residence at St. Antony's College, Oxford. When this was made known to one grandee of the Establishment, whose post-retirement role include attempts to prevent him access to the Saudi-Malaysian funded Oxford centre for Islamic studies, all he did not have was a heart attack. He calmed down only after he was told the centre will remain Anwar-free ...

SOME state assemblymen and officials decided on a holiday at public expense. They thought of Morocco but in the end settled Egypt. Of the thirteen eligible, three opted out of the tour. So no one would have qualms, it was dressed as a study tour ...

THE 30 JANUARY ELECTION is not what is made out. It is not so Washington could leave Iraq in safe hands. It is not to usher representative democracy in Iraq. It is not to prove democracy is inherently superior to dictatorship ...

SABAH chief minister Musa Aman sups with the gods. He, as state Umno chief, led the National Front (BN) to another stunning victory in last year's general election. He is as powerful as the other megalomaniac in Sabah politics, Tun Mustapha Harun. His political patron is Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi ...

THE DEPUTY CHIEF MINISTER of Sabah, Dato' Seri Joseph Pairin Kitingan, is a worried man these days. Sabahans are getting out of hand. When they should be discussing, in coffee shops, how they could help the government to develop the state, they discuss rumours – these are rumours, mind you – of a cabinet reshuffle after Dato' Seri Musa Aman steps down as chief minister. He implies the chief minister would not resign, and therefore no cabinet reshuffle ...

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, inconvenienced and angry he had his lunch in candlelight ( "fortunately the fish I ate had no bones"!), wants an immediate report on the blackout, has ordered Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) not to ever have another. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, is inconvenienced and angry a meeting he hosted is without electricity. The energy, water and communications minister, Dato' Seri Lim Kheng Yaik, jokes about how his wife heckles him about it. His predecessor, though with a different cabinet title, Dato' Seri Leo Moggie, is chairman of TNB, defends the staff over the blackout: he insists TNB staff acted promptly and did well to restore power ...

THE ORACLE HAS SPOKEN: The Tenaga Nasional Berhad is as much in the dark as many Malaysians yesterday about the blackout which hit them. The TNB deputy CEO, Dato' Abdul Hadi Mohammad Deros, is puzzled: "It has never happened. Should not have happened. Cannot happen", nor why or how. He is in the same boat as Che Mat Endot, Kuppuswamy, and Ah Chong who does not what happened and why, and, like him equally puzzled ...

NOTHING petrifies the National Front (BN) government than Anwar Ibrahim: if he keeps quiet, if he does not, if he stays in Kuala Lumpur, if he moves about the country, if he travels abroad, if he does not. It wants to see the last of him, tries its best to make him disappear, metaphorically if not physically. It tried to but failed each time. It thought it had him when he was convicted in a series of trials kangaroos would applaud, but few else, for corruption and sodomy and corruption ...

SABAH IS IN FERMENT. The National Front (BN) state government is, as elsewhere, led by its nose by UMNO, and wreathed in scandals that its leaders have become so comfortable without even the pretence all is well, a mirror image of the BN government in the centre. A spark is all it needs to implode. The people are so immured of the corruption, the sleaze, the arrogance, the scandals that they ignore it and get on with their lives ...

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