If tin pot despots from Africa should ride only in the BMW 745is, with exclusive NAM number plates, what would the sheikhs, kings and emirs of the Middle East ride in when they come to attend the OIC conference in Putra Jaya later this year? Another BMW product, the Rolls Royces? Why? What is wrong with the armour-plated Proton Executives? Or indeed BMW 745is? But with special NAM number plates, it is bought only for NAM. A small squiggle: are these properly registered number plates, or as is normal, decided by a lowly bureaucrat to be used for a conference, and then forgotten? Or has the government decided to buy as many BMW 745is, have special OIC number plates, for the OIC summit?

So it does not matter if Mr Howard meant what he said or said what he meant, that Canberra considers it fair game, in present circumstances, to order pre-emptive strikes on other countries harbouring terrorists. The countries he had in mind are not Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or even Pakistan. Nor South America nor Africa. Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines took Mr Howard to task, but spoiled their case in needless rhetoric. In this hysteria, Malaysia and Indonesia are accused of harbouring Islamic terrorists; Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines have Islamic irridentists fighting for their own homeland -- in southern Thailand, Acheh and Mindanao, respectively. Australia's security fear for decades have been the unwashed Asian hordes in countries to its north who, it believes in its simplistic and racist view, to unsettle its middle class values and existence. The fear is raised a notch by now targetting the Muslim terrorist hordes.

In practice, this does not intrude into the personal lives of citizens. It is their thoughts than their personal habits or practices which conform to the "civilised" norm that force the jackboot and the harsh laws. But when Islamic laws are the issue, as in Malaysia and in several countries in Africa which adopts it as a badge of its arrival in this Muslim world, the local rulers impose it harshly, but only on others, not on themselves. Polygamy is allowed in Islam, but in Malaysia it is possible only with the consent of the first wife. Nor can they marry secondary wives in Thailand. This law is ignored, but who gets caught are the powerless. An UMNO state mentri besar, now a party vice president, married his sultan's daughter in Thailand. A senior PAS politician marries in Thailand, is lightly tapped on his knuckles and told to go and sin no more. If it had been a bus driver or a garderned, whether from UMNO or PAS, he would have been jailed.

There will come a time, as the apartheid South African regime in South Africa found out, when this boomerangs, as it already threatens. A Malaysian non-Malay professional or scientist must migrate if he wants to be recognised for what he does. Especially when a Malay of excellent professional or research credentials cannot survive either: one finds himself in a spot in a Malaysian university when he is publicly recognised by a visiting American professor in a lecture at the university. His colleagues thought his presence amongst them would undermine their mediocrity, with suggestions he ought to be asked to leave.

Malaysia's policy on foreign workers is done on the run, with changes made as holes appear, and this piece-meal changes make nonsense of it. As there is not in any policy announced, not after discussion and thought but in answer to a throwaway question at a minister opening a boutique. So, she does not take into account sensitivities, self-interest, or national need. She accuses others of interfering in her internal affairs when she treats foreigners abominably. Yet she decides it is right she interfere in the affairs of apartheid South Africa or Israel or Yugoslavia. She has not thought through her national self-interest, and pays the price for it. As now.

Sometimes they believe in their own hype. Not realising, as the Berjaya Group chairman, Tan Sri Vincent Tan would tell you of his gambling venture in Chinese, the killing of the magnitude Genting Berhad makes in its casinos in the Genting Highlands is a pipe dream; he must wish he did not venture into China. In all else, whether it is the Lion Group's venture into housing in China or Renong Berhad's venture into steel making in the Philippines, or the Berjaya Group's venture into timber in South America, or indeed, the YTL Group's ventures in Africa, they fail.

When a policy is decided and implemented on the run, it opens up communal tensions, anger, a deliberate move away from the multiracial society Malaysia is. The Malays decide on Malaysia's future with no thought to the non-Malays who reside in it. The non-Malays retreat into a self-contained communal society from which it moves out only when they have to. The government once had a policy of mixing up the races in housing projects. But that fell by the wayside when Shah Alam and Putra Jaya were built. Both are Malay cities to which the non-Malay ventures on sufferance, much like the black in the Orange Free State in apartheid South Africa. The Roman Catholics in Shah Alam cannot build a church on land alloted to them in the Shah Alam Master Plan for that purpose. Nor Hindus a temple. The state government has since decided that promises are meant to be broken to make Shah Alam a quintessential Malay, and by constitutional inference, Muslim city. As Dr Mahathir wants a federal capital that is quintessentially Malay in character and form.

Undecided is where the teachers would come from, how learning English in science and mathematics would make one proficient in it. If I were to learn science and mathematics in Swedish or Swahili, would I, at the end of the day, be proficient in either? I could have a formal nodding acquaintance with either, possibly to make myself understand, as a tourist, in Sweden or Southern Africa but of value no where else. So English to a majority of Malaysians.

When government is personalised in its leader -- as in Malaysia now, in independent Africa in its earliest years of independence, in Singapore -- something must give. Singapore survives better than most because the PAP government replaced the British administration at independence with one more attuned to its needs, and implanted a state which devolved around its eminense grise. The others did not. Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed's impact on Malaysia is no different to President Robert Mugabe's on Zimbabwe. The two men, like others elsewhere, personalised their rule to destroy the independence of the civil service they inherited, now so mired in the deep end, that they must brazen their way through.

Malaysia finds its credibility overseas stunted because one man is in jail. South Africa could insist with greater confidence Mr Nelson Mandel was jailed after a fair trial; the British administration in India that Mahatma Gandhi was jailed according to the laws of the land; as Malaysia now Dato' Seri Anwar is jailed after a fair trial. The apartheid governmentn collapsed, the British left India, the Malaysian government must face the music.

Releasing him to restricted residence is a dangerous option. If he defies it, as he well could, and goes about the country, daring the police to arrest him, his tormentors are in deeper trouble. They would not want another high profile trial. If he should, on his release, go about the country, making no speeches but only let himself be seen, he would not as Nelson Mandela in South Africa or Mahatma Gandhi in India but as a synthesis of both. That could well throw UMNO out of office for ever.

When it cracked down hard on the movement, its potential provided the grist for the Anwar campaign. For what now looks to be the right reasons, it is kept small, shedding off the large groups that once surrounded it. The African National Congress in apartheid South Africa could not be broken because it was run by a small committed group of activists, with silent sympathisers all over the country. When its leaders were arrested or detained, it looked as if its backbone was broken. All it did was the get more silent sympathisers on board.

It is not the first time law and justice confronted in a court of law. President Sukarno, as a student, saw it in his first trial with the Dutch authorities in Bogor in 1927. Mahatma Gandhi saw it in his numerous brushes with the British in South Africa and in India in his fight for a fair deal for the Indian and for Indian independence. Nelson Mandela saw it when he was sentenced to life in the 1964 for his opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Aimee Cesare -- whose polemic "Discourse on Colonialism" underpinned the intellectual framework, though not now, of the Non-Aligned Movement -- saw it often in his principled opposition to French colonisation of his Martinique.

The list of those who did not include Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who was convicted of sodomy and corruption after a failed putsch against the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed. He was offered, in lieu of a certain jail sentence and public humiliation, exile in South Africa or London with funds so he could live as a deputy prime minister-in-exile and did not return so long as Dr Mahathir was in office. He went to jail. So, the former Selangor UMNO strongman and chief minister, Dato' Seri Harun Idris. He refused an earlier offer to be Malaysian ambassador to the United States.

So, we have the tallest twin towers in the world, we have a futuristic capital that would gladden a Pharoah of ancient Egypt, with Kuala Lumpur turned into a Third World nightmare with First World pretensions. Everything is larger than life. We have all the structures that would show us to be a third rate city of the First World. But it cannot last. For the building of this new larger than life city is not so it would develop into one but as a sign of arrival in the world of nations. The mistake that newly independent African nations committed in the heady days of independent Malaysia does four decades later. The goodwill and worldviews we inherited in 1957 is bartered away on frivolous ego trips. If this is sustained by ensuring all else works, with the much-vaunted confidence and ability of the civil servant, in its broadest sense, in evidence, this could be justified and enhanced upon.

So, as almost always, this manufactured end to a manufactured crisis undermines official confidence. Even the deputy prime minister, in charge while the Oracle was on official visits outside the country, believed racial discrimination and segregation could occur in apartheid South Africa, not in Dr Mahathir's Malaysia. If on a matter of such importance, indeed a cornerstone of Malaysia's multiracial policy, it fumbles and bumbles through, can one trust its intentions and actions in other serious issues. If the prime minister has to step in to defuse a crisis, it suggests a cabinet which knows not what it does, happy to fan it into a conflagration, and shut up when the Prime Minister steps in. And this is the best solution the National Front could come with? Where were the Indian and Chinese ministers, who know what happened and kept quiet.

Does not Malaysia fight hard for racial unity in Ougadougou, and South Africa? Is not its commitment to racial equality elsewhere in the world proof of its policies at home? But its rhetoric outside has no relevance to its policies at home. The National Front (BN) government would not address this deliberate downgrading of the non-Malay in national politics. In almost every government department, one or two Malay officers hold it to ransom to ensure the non-Malay is boxed in his seat, denied his promotion, forced to accept they are there under sufference. The senior (Malay) officers who disagree are sidelined or forced out. This small group behaves as the the UMNO Youth education bureau undergraduate spies to report to it of professors and lecturers who do not support UMNO and its vision.

He is the trusted crony who decided to teach Zimbabwe how to privatise the Hpwange hydroelectric plant he was to build; the electricity board resigned en bloc; he was given the project under heavy opposition. He has yet to build it. He had the contract to build homes for the ANC veterans in South Africa. He has yet to. Strong rumours in the market say President Mugabe sent money, said to be in the hundreds of millions of ringgit, to Malaysia through him for safe-keeping. The Malaysian government gave him US$10 million to build houses for the ANC veterans; he did not. Sources in South Africa say the former president, Mr Nelson Mandela, soured on Malaysia with this and other promises Malaysia made that were not honoured.

Does it? US investors, especially pension funds, of which Calpers is the largest, use politics as a yard stick on where they invest. They would not, for invest, invest in Cuba under any circumstances. In the 1970s, they would not invest in South Africa because of the apartheid system then in force. The world, including Malaysia, was happy they did, even if Pretoria, like Kuala Lumpur now, protested. Politics is behind any investment, not just by the United States but of every country. No Malaysian leader asked Calpers why.

So, military intelligence was involved in this. Buying arms from Latin America and Africa and flown to Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Mindanao. Many army officers were involved in this, many retired early to continue with it. The Philippines government accused one director of military intelligence of involving in the Mindanao imbroglio. To make Malaysia more acceptable to the Middle East, Arabs and Muslims from Africa could come into the country with few checks, and had carte blance to do as they pleased. It made very easy for plotters like those who crashed jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington to gather here. One head of military intelligence, now retired, is said to orchestrate the arms shipments, and remains a special adviser in the government after retirement.

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