It is impossible, unless you are well connected, to get ranks of office and uniforms without a warrant card. Yet 8,000 did. How widespread is this: one, an opposition MP, met a colonel, an old class mate, in Kota Bharu in a coffee shop. On the wall was a photograph of the state executive councillors. The colonel pointed at it and said all but the Tok Guru must be "eliminated". He laughed it off, but when he checked, the man was not a colonel. In turned out he was a FSFM member. How many of them roam around throwing their weight around and behaving as members of the Armed Forces? No one knows. But one thing is certain: FSFM is the tip of a political iceberg, so widespread that no one wants to do anything about it.

Singapore does not understand or accept this. Which is why a think tank in the republic holds a seminar next month on the Malay mind, with two prominent Malaysians, neither Malay, leading it in an attempt find an instant answer. Could cultural forms be understood and learnt at seminars like this if the national mood is to drag the other side's nose to the ground? When Singapore positions itself, with Israeli help, as a Chinese island in a hostile Malay sea, as Israel in the Middle East, and believes its military might could flatten its neighbours armed might at the onset of hostilities, and conducts its talks with its neighbours as it does, is it not inevitable that many in Malaysia believe that this issue must result in open hostilities? Especially when it was Singapore that began the military arms race with Malaysia when she bought tanks in the late 1960s. And continue to taunt the Malaysian Armed Forces by her military aircraft straying deep into Trengganu and Kelantan and back into international waters when the RMAF jets scramble from Kuantan.

THE SILLY SEASON IN MALAYSIAN POLITICS is upon us. The air showers with rumours of impending general elections. Even if that is not probable so long as the Greatest Malaysian of All Time is still Prime Minister. Nothing works. There is breakdown in law and order, the administration, the judiciary, the Armed Forces, in every section of the country. Smuggling cost customs department, by its own admission, RM1.2 billion in lost duties and excise. Billions of ringgit worth of projects are awarded, without the funds or relevance for no reason than to be seen to be doing something.

I now hear similar courting of KeADILan leaders by UMNO bigwigs. Dato' Mokhzani Mahathir, an UMNO Youth leader and the son of one Mahathir Mohamed, who once had a medical practice in Alor Star, has suggested to one KeADILan leader his political future is assured in UMNO. As no doubt is of the UMNO youth leader he suggested as mentri besar of Selangor, Dato' Seri Mohamed Khir Toyo. Every mentri besar is talking to likely KeADILan defectors. Dr Khir is in the game too. He recently invited the KeADILan activist, who goes by the name of Raja Kommando, a member of the Selangor royalty and a retired commando in the Malaysian Armed Forces. He was seen about a fortnight ago entering Dr Khir's private lift in the Shah Alam government complex. Other moves are made in other states. There is a pattern in these contacts which suggests official sanction. I do not yet know if any has taken the bait.

Water is only one of several contentious issues which both decide to make an example of. The dispute over who owns Pulau Batu Putih (or Pedro Branca, as Singapore knows it) is with the International Court of Justice. Malaysia's crazy plan to build a bridge over the existing causeway which links the two countries for no reason than to massage the national ego is another. Singapore wants the right for its Armed Forces to intrude into Malaysian airspace. There would be more as the years creep by. These could be resolved if they are looked upon as mere administrative matters and negotiated within a framework of give-and-take. But in every negotiation, the two countries talk at cross purposes. That reflects deep-rooted problems that has nothing to do with the sanctity of contracts or international law. It begins with the cultural xenophobia in each. Unless that is resolved, these bilateral pinpricks would continue.

In other words, it has lost the propaganda war in the Arab world. The war planners assumed that there would be only one view of the war. Great care was taken to ensure that reporters did not stray on their own, but kept on a tight leash within the Armed Forces units. The death of an ITN correspondent, out on his own, by friendly fire raises doubts if he was not deliberately killed as a a warning to others who had the same idea. But in the end, they were defeated by an Arab TV station that reported on the effects of its bombing. The graphic pictures, including that of a child with her brain half-blown away, and the shocked state of captured American GIs suddenly brought the war into focus back home. It was no more the video games reality with which the war was reported. Great care was taken to not show blood and gore, only the ease with which the targets were targetted and hit. The Angl-American armada is stuck even before it has begun, as hard to move forward as to retreat.

A man honours the office he holds, not, as often in Malaysia, the other way around. Which is why those taking office want to prove how inefficient and off the mark their successors are. It does not matter if the man (or woman) is chief justice, cabinet minister, Armed Forces chief, the chief secretary, or even speaker of parliament. All of them fondly and mistakenly believe that they bring honour to the office. That is where the corruption begins. When they are appointed for their political reliability than for competence, the office suffers. When all this is, as under the Mahathir administration, for an express political purpose, all is lost. When this is accepted, and when they should be concerned about dignifying the positions they hold, they are bothered about irrelevant and unimportant details of their work, all is lost. The problems and difficulties Tan Sri Ahmad Fairuz faces are real and must be corrected. But it cannot be done piece-meal. When judicial integrity is on the mend, and there are no signs it is, the judges themselves would ensure that it is. Tan Sri Ahmad Fairuz has started on the wrong foot.

Malaysia swamped the conference with a security so tight that it annoyed many a delegate. Mobile phones, radios andn other electronic devices were banned, but with no provision to park them when they could not be taken into the conference complex. It was made worse by those of the visiting delegations. For the first time, the Armed Forces was comandeered to provide the security surrounding the Putra World Trade Centre where the NAM Summit was held. It showed. The police took charge of security in the city at large. The Malaysian organisers of the conference worked on their own, unable to resolve conflicts that arose over the five days of the conference. To all this, add an abysmal ignorance on who is who, and a belief that the only VIP that matters, besides the foreign guests, are the ministers and officials they recognised. One retired and ailing VIP, whom Dr Mahathir wanted to be with him when he had breakfast with the delegation leaders, was only allowed to enter the complex in his car after a long hassle, but his car could not fetch him after it. He had to find his way to a spot a kilometre away, as he told me, in front of a KFC fast food outlet in Jalan Raja Chulan.

The BN political leadership is both powerless and dysfunctional to right it, even to make the effort to do what it must. It is caught in a myriad of agendas, only one of which is an Islamic state, and over which it has lost control of. And when the instruments of the state break up similarly, as the police and the civil service already has, other dangerous trends emerge. An ongoing study in the Armed Forces discusses anew the lessons of the 13 May 1969 racial riots, if it could happen in 2003, and what its response would be.

THE FORMER DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, Lieut.-Gen. Dato' Abdullah Samsuddin, said, in a letter in the New Straits Times (26 Dec '02), raised the spectre of ethnic cleansing as happened in Kosovo if Malaysia excluded the non-Malays from its Armed Forces, and the dangerous fallout of that in the trial of Malaysian soldiers at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. The letter is remarkable in what he did not say, although he reveals obliquely, and between the lines, what in Malaysian society one should not publicly discuss: that racial and religious exclusivity which ignores nearly half the population is a recipe for disaster. He refers to Fiji as an example of an army of one race in a biracial or multiracial society. But a more apt example would be Malaysia, whose once proudly multiracial Armed Forces is now one only in name, where the non-Malay recruit and officer is told, by word and deed, that he is there on sufferance, and that he should aspire no higher than lieutenant colonel.

But the more one looks at the Bali bombings, the more the official explanations looks skewed and plainly wrong. Far from Al Qaida and JI being the culprits, subsequent events point to other more sinister groups. There is the nationalist Indonesian with a bone to pick with Australia for its role in forcing East Timor out of Indonesia. There is the Tentera Nasional Indonesia (the Armed Forces) still smarting from the secondary role they are forced into after President Suharto was forced out of office in 1997. What about those groups which lost power when President Megawati Sukarnoputi took office, and who want to isolate her? It could be comeuppance, as John Pilger says in a commentary, for the close co-operation Australia has with Indonesia in security matters that enables Jakarta to rein down hard on Muslim groups, and this is a retaliation for that. And let us not forget, that it could be a deliberate attempt by the United States to force both Indonesia and Australia firmly on its side in this war on terror that loses steam by the day.

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