Civil servants from the Chief Secretary of the day, Tan Sri Samsuddin Abdul Kadir, down were subborned into the conspiracy. The National Operations Council, headed by the then chief of the Armed Forces, General Tun Ibrahim Ismail, governed in the aftermath of the 13 May racial riots. It had a hidden agenda to turn the Tengku into a non-person. Pak Lah was the secretary to the NOC; who later became director of youth who, with another officer, Dato' Seri Aziz Shamusudin, now in his cabinet, had the unrevealed role to contain the growing political role of a prominent student leader, who is today the cause of UMNO's biggest headache. But then this is the fate of those who challenge the status quo.

It happens right down the line. The civil service, the military, the police, the judiciary, the cabinet, the state chief ministers and mentris besar, have their blood flowing in this belief that Malaysia will drop dead if they should ever, God forbid, step down. One retired Armed Forces chief told me, after his retirement, how he initiated changes for the better of the Armed Forces. It was clear he strepped down reluctantly. He is all but forgotten now, often ignored by the very people in whose name he justified remaining in office after retirement. In the police, the IGP is indispensable in office the moment he takes his post, and stays on beyond retirement. It is more difficult for the judges, for they are only allowed a six-month extension when they reach retirement age at 65. No nonsense there about how valuable individual judges are to the country, the judiciary and the law!

But this breached national security. It could have shut down the national grid. Anyone with ill intent could now frustrate Malaysia's defences and national security with ease if top-security installations can be breached at will. TNB should have called the Armed Forces and the police to march in, arrest the intruders and place it under tight security. Since deputy CEO is puzzled, he should be dismissed, along with its CEO, Dato' Che Khalib Mohammad Noh. They take responsibility for what happens in their watch. The breach is so serious that even their detention under the Internal Security Act would not be too severe. (The ISA is for such breaches of national security, not to harass political opponents as now.) TNB must come clean about why it keeps quiet at what happened at Port Dickson. The National Security Council and the Internal Security Ministry must step in. If a contractors miffed at not being given a RM15 million could do what RP Jaya did, would not others be tempted by foreign powers with ill-intent in mind?

The tsunami devastates at random, strikes without notice (even with notice, its destructive force can only be ameliorated, not removed), a random destructive force which the mightiest military force cannot prevent. Pak Lah chose the wrong metaphor; he should have equated the devastation of Banda Aceh with, say, not Dresden but Fallujah, which lay waste to the mechanical and electronic tsunami that is the US Armed Forces. Those who survive, in Banda Aceh and Fallujah, evoke the same emotions, the sympathy going to the victims, not the tsunami which caused it. The tsunami, natural and political, spreads destruction whenever the hidden fault lines collide. If he means what he says, he should fly over Fallujah as he did over Banda Aceh. He need not be born in 1929 for that.

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. One group which went in after hours of negotiating found the area in chaos, with those most affected screaming for help. It was allowed to stay when it quickly made themselves useful. No help had reached the area before they arrived.

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. The senior officers took off for the Christmas holidays, leaving clerks and peons, who could not act except on instructions, on duty. Every system failed: the metereological department, the Armed Forces disaster centres, the police control centre at Bukit Aman, the civil disaster networks. If any country decided to attack Malaysia over holidays, the early warning systems having shut down as these departments.

Malaysia would be independent for half-a-century in three years, but there is little to suggest we are better off now than in 1957. The rule of law is a pastiche of what it was, the dictates of authority defining it more than the law. The civil service has lost its bearings, the once incorruptible now told by the prime minister, no less, not to be corrupt. The police has lost its well regarded place in society, is seen as the goon squad of the government, and corrupt to boot. The Armed Forces is no position to fight a war, its generals more interested in the perks of office and arms purchases than to defend the country. Parliament and state assemblies are but rubber stamps, with no debate of substance. So moribund is it that it caught all by surprise when BN members of parliament demanded questions of a cabinet minister in a tone that in Malaysian democracy is the opposition's.

Thai newspapers have criticised Malaysian officials, along with the Thai, for the sharp upsurge of violence in the South. I understand this attack on the Thai Muslims is a diversion from the more serious crisis there: besides a proxy battle between criminal groups, this is also a fight for control of the region between the Armed Forces and the police. Mr Thaksin is, after all, a former police colonel. Into this melee, and adding a dangerous twist, is the Malaysian meddling which led the two groups to unite against the intruder. As in all cases, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

An apocryphal tale of bribes concerns a state chief police officer who got his post by tender: he offered several thousands of ringgit a month to his superiors and others, and got the post because his was the highest. And of a senior police officer who retired unexpectedly when underworld figures he was beholden to raped his daughter when a sudden police raid netted several of them. Are these true? I do not know. But when retired senior police figures do not discount it, can there be not some truth to it? What should frighten Pak Lah and his government that this practice has now spread to the civil service and the Armed Forces.

Which is why they now pay for it. The Najib gaffe is only one. Why was Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's son-in-law at Dato' Seri Anwar's house on the night of his release? The official spin is to help him obtain a passport quickly so he could leave for Munich. Does he issue passports? What happened to the Immigration Department? If anyone should have gone to see him that night, it should have been an immigration officer, not even its director-general. Or is this a tacit acceptance that the civil servants do not obey the prime minister? Is this why the only beneficiaries of this year's budget is the civil service and other institutions, like the police and Armed Forces?

But the reality is that Dato' Seri Anwar's release has split the top UMNO leaders. Many, if not most, were in the conspiracy that lead to Dato' Seri Anwar's dismissal, arrest and conviction. The UMNO deputy president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, headed the "Destroy Anwar" committee, which manufactured a videotape which showed Dato' Seri Anwar in compromising homosexual positions. But when the supreme council was shown it – at which both Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib were present though not Tun Mahathir Mohamed – several pronounced it so badly done that few would believe it. It was shown nevertheless – to senior civil servants, Armed Forces generals, ambassadors and others of high rank. At several showings, similar questions were raised. One ambassador asked, after he saw the video with others flown in to watch it, why Dato' Seri Anwar had long hair "on the job", but not when he was tired and resting after. Few remembers the botched effort but the perpetrators, now in high political and cabinet office, fear an Anwar backlash now that he is free.

No secretaries-general or heads of federal departments or almost no senior diplomats from the two states. The Armed Forces are seen as an army of occupation. The ministers from Sabah and Sarawak in the prime minister's department grumble because they have no authority, there to show the two states are represented, a token.

MALAYSIA IS BEHOLDEN TO the United States more than ever. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, after a call on President George W. Bush in Washington, announces a "sufficiently big and not just a token" medical mission to Iraq. But in Paris en route to London shortly after the Philippines Government withdrew its token medical presence from its Armed Forces in Iraq in exchange for a Filipino truck driver it held hostage and threatened to decapitate.

This flowered in the 22 years Tun Mahathir Mohamed was prime minister. He disliked civil servants, and amongst his first tasks was to destroy their influence on his administration. He succeeded beyond his dreams. The civil service, and all administrations of governments, the police, the Armed Forces, the judiciary, were putty in his hands.

THIRTEENTH OF JUNE 1971. What happened 33 years ago on this day is remembered by a negligible few, in the Armed Forces, in the 4 Renjer Bn, even in its C Company. I asked several retired and serving officers about it. A few of the former officers remembered. One asked his colleagues at the time by email and SMS if they could remember what happened on that. None could. But at least 4 Renjer (or Rangers, in English) and its C Company should have. On that day the commanding officer of C Company, Capt. V. 'Ray' Mohanachandran SP, died in an ambush on a well-fortified and bunkered Communist Party of Malaya base in Tanjong Rambutan, Perak, on the periphery of a Police Field Force camp, that earned him the Malaysian equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

THE MALAYSIAN Armed Forces should have been proud of the moment, and savour it: a Sandhurst-trained Yang Dipertuan Agung, the first ever, inspecting the guard of honour at his official birthday on Saturday, 05 June 2004, at the Dataran Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur. It is rare for the King to be conscious of military traditions - only one other had that insight. Instead, the MAF let its supreme commander-in-chief down. To the public at large, and all who care not what the Armed Forces stand for, all went well and they had a jolly good time. The old Land Rovers are gone. In its place comes the gleaming Lexus open-hooded sports utility vehicles. And with them, a distinct lack of professionalism that was once its metier. The spartan conditions of old was deliberate: one does not go to war in luxury vehicles.

When the crisis broke, the Thai prime minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, was caught unawares, of what happened in the south and the unexpected call for toughness from the Armed Forces and his cabinet ministers. Talk was heard freely of teaching the southern Muslims a lesson they would not foget. So too was Kuala Lumpur, which did not know what to do. First it said it would not allow refugees across the border, as if it could stop it: one could wade across the Golok River during the dry season, and even today, people flit across the border at will and without the authorities in Malaysia and Thailand the wiser. Kuala Lumpur was caught in the vortex of local politics, that if it did, it would help PAS, which is in power in Kelantan, to which the refugees would come if there is an exodus. Wiser counsel prevailed, and it reversed itself.

THE HONG KONG CUSTOMS officials on Tuesday, 04 May 2004, seized a shipment of 2,800 "second-hand" machine guns, 25,000 unloaded magazines and other accessories enough to equip a military division, its largest ever seizure. Hong Kong allows transit of weapons but they must be declared and licenced, suggesting that this shipment from Port Klang to Oakland, California, were not. The Malaysian home and defence ministries, with the police and Armed Forces chiefs, went into a tailspin, and in their explanations raised the doubt that these "antique" weapons were not for a museum in California but for those it should not be sold to. The Malaysian Armed Forces chief, Gen. Tan Sri Zahadi Zainuddin, told the New Straits Times yesterday (05 May 2004) said the weapons did not belong to its security forces, not the police nor the Armed Forces. He was so confident of this that he awaited a report from Hong Kong's Interpol representative. In other words, he is sure that this was a sinistral attempt to besmirch Malaysia's good and fair name. He did not know the name of the ship, where it was registered or even if it was in transit. The Inspector-General of Police, Dato' Seri Mohamed Bakri Omar concurred.

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