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.

What mattered was the annointment of Pak Lah. It did not work as planned. His advisers pushed his luck so far that the delegates came to the assembly determined to take control of their vote. An informal committee of delegates, from Sabah, spread the word to vote into the supreme council only those who hold no position in government; another to vote against any candidate who bribed delegates; still another to boycott any candidate overtly identified with Pak Lah; Besides the two groups backing Pak Lah and the deputy president, Najib Abdul Razak. No one talked about it, but amidst the talk of Anwar Ibrahim and vote-buying, this raised some excitement.

The incoming UMNO deputy president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, said yesterday: "We don't want to be sidetracked by one issue over one individual." Besides the general assembly is bigger than that. Which is why he wants it to focus on the future of the Malay race, Islam and Malaysia. "It should not be sidetracked by one issue over one individual," he reiterated. His views are a consensus of UMNO leaders about Dato' Seri Anwar and the UMNO general assembly. Which is not surprising when official reactions are formulated on the well-known monkey see-monkey do principle. So the mess UMNO is in, is thoroughly understandable.

He is returning to his former political position without holding any office. Too many were quick to dismiss him as an irrelevant nobody. He could not be prime minister if he did not rejoin UMNO. He is still a convict, the Malay ground looks askance at convicted corrupters, that UMNO would not accept him, so his political career is dead before it starts. This assumes much that is untrue. Dr Mahathir's political future was declared dead when he was sacked from UMNO in 1969. He ended up prime minister. The jailed former mentri besar (chief minister) of Selangor, Dato' Harun Idris, was elected UMNO youth chief from prison in 1974. Besides, UMNO is no more the only political path to high office. Kelantan, Trengganu, Penang, Sabah and Sarawak states showed that an opposition coalition could turn the UMNO-led BN out of office. With Dato' Seri Anwar with the opposition, there is no reason why it should not capture the federal government. He laughs at the UMNO dissarray, and if it continues, could well have the last laugh.

It is this self-confidence that frightens UMNO, which is beleaguered no matter what he does: in UMNO or out of it, he threatens UMNO and its stalwarts, most of whom had moved ahead because he was in jail. Now that he is back, the nightmares begin. Besides Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib, others like Dato' Seri Hishamuddin Hussein could find their political careers cut off mid-stream. It is the worse that he postpones what he would until after his returns from his surgery overseas. That he says something is enough to frighten; that he does not gives them nightmares. The government mishandled Dato' Seri Anwar, but with its penchant for half-measures, did not see it through. It wanted to destroy Dato' Seri Anwar once and for all, but somewhere along the line, it believed it had in the arrogant belief that he in prison cannot hit back. He did. it now wishes it would rather face the natural disasters that countries like Japan and the United States than Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

The letters in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) for instance is lively and raises issues the mainstream would not touch. Besides malaysiakini, there is now Malaysia Today (www.malaysia-today.net) which presents news and views from a different perspective, and both gaining a reputation for news they cannot get in their regular newspapers.

Besides, the deputy minister's comments are not as 'juicy' or 'exciting' as the front page story where this should have been: the detention, not arrest, of a 'notorious' criminal. The NST is not alone. All newspapers and media in the mainstream resort to diversionary coverage of crime. The heavy diet of crime, especially horrific ones like murders, are reported in loving details, often in isolation, does give even the casual reader that this country is crime-infested.

Besides, the threat of a mid-term elections in Kelantan if the election petitions went against PAS was enough to sober UMNO. A divided UMNO cannot fight an election in Kelantan and hope to do better than it did in the March 21 general elections.

It is impossible for political parties to print them in the time between dissolution and elections. The opposition parties, Besides, face such setbacks as printers refusing to accept their orders for fear of being on the government blacklist. There may not be one, but all believe there is. In business, discretion is of course the better part of valour.

And on the face of it Pak Lah abused his power a la Dato' Seri Anwar. Should he be returned, unopposed or challenged, there could be a clamour for the anti-corruption agency to step in. Besides, if there should be a contest, he knows starkly that he would be flattened in the landslide that could form. The forces ranged against him are a motley crowd of his nominal supporters, the pressure groups upset at being sidelined, his own organisational disorders which stem from fear in his camp of its fate should he be defeated. He knows he is pushed gradually and incessantly into a corner, no matter what he does.

He suddenly realises his ground is cut from under his feet by the Pak Lah camp, that the infighting between his and Pak Lah's supporters is more serious than the doctrinal differences UMNO has with PAS over Islam. Besides, he realises that should Tengku Razaleigh be in the race, he could still have a future in the government that may not not be his in a Pak Lah administration. It may not save him from breaching the the code of ethics, but it gives him a line that could in extremis save him from sinking.

Pak Lah did not file his election expenses after the 1999 general election. His PAS opponent had challenged his candidature on that ground at the nomination centre. It was rejected. He filed an election petition. The government gazette records if a candidate did or did not file his election expenses within the month allowed after the election results are gazetted. Pak Lah is not on that list. Besides, the DAP candidate for the Subang Jaya parliamentary constituency was disqualified because he did not file his election expenses in time in 1995. If he does not file it in time, he is automatically disqualified to stand for elections for five years. By this rule, the DAP candidate had cleared his disqualification. But not Pak Lah. Even his staunch supporters concede he is in serious trouble.

That, you understand, is bad. UMNO elections must be fair. What he did not say is that it is all right to be unfair and biased about nominating themselves. When you get pearls of wisdom like this one can understand why the campaign to elect Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib has run to ground. Besides, who decided this? The UMNO supreme council? The Penang state liaison office? The two divisions? Or the two men? This could be illegal. Once a rule forced all divisions to nominate candidates for all posts in the UMNO supreme council; missing out one would nullify its other nominations. Now it is not to nominate anyone for the two top posts.

Dato' Hishamuddin wants to be returned unopposed with his running mate. But he works at it by pressuring UMNO youth leaders to give way in their favour. The New Straits Times of 08 June said four announced candidates for the deputy youth leaders, all members of its executive committee, have withdrawn in favour of Mr Khairy. One of them said he would contest only if Mr Khairy does not. "I am willing to withdraw," he said, " as Khairy is a capable leader who has great potential and can contribute greatly to UMNO youth." Another had offered himself as a candidate because he assumed Mr Khairy was not keen to become UMNO youth deputy chief. However as the mythical grassroots, and the Perak UMNO youth, want the Prime Minister's son-in-law, he would withdraw. Yet another opted out to prepare to oust PAS from Kelantan. Besides, UMNO must be united in the face of untold pressures.

A lieutenant colonel I spoke to thought I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill. I am not. Indian Brigadier Dalve's 'The Himalayan Blunder', his account of the 1961 Sino-Indian war in which he was the highest Indian officer taken prisoner by Chinese troops in that war, recounts that the blunder in the war was that a lieutenant-general from the army service corps was catapaulted into the army chief's job - he was a cousin of the then prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and appointed in the hope that he would be pleased - that led to a litany of bumbling organisation and shortage of key military material and co-ordination. India learnt from that mistake, and the professionalism that it is now famous for comes from that brutal determination not to allow the politicians to decide for it. Besides, it is too professional an army to want to run the country. Its biggest grouse is that it is the most professional of Indian arms and it baulks at being called for be part of the forces putting down civil disorder. There is a similar tradition in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is returned to office by too wide a margin, and he cannot revamp UMNO or the government as he would have liked. Besides, the opposition within has given notice the old practices on how leaders are selected must make way for new blood. But the UMNO gerontocracy would not allow it. The status quo will remain, where possible. The president and deputy president will be returned unopposed. It is an act of bravado, especially when the UMNO supreme council, the body which makes statements like these, did not call for it. Two gerontocrats, the party secretary-general and soon-to-be Yang Dipertua Negeri (governor) of Malacca, Tan Sri Khalil Yaakob, and the acting deputy president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, took it upon themselves to mislead the party and country.

The matter has died down. There was no discussion about it in the mainstream media. It embarrassed the leaders of every BN party Besides UMNO, and where the leaders cling to office at any cost so what matters is not the organisation he leads but he and he alone. The Malaysian Indian Congress, for instance, is in terminal decline. But its president does not think so. He believes that what needs to be done is change its slogan: from MAIKA (the Tamil initials of the MIC) cares to Maika hears. A cosmetic change he believes would set it right. But the same old noise runs it to ground.

Unfortunately for him, he must wish for a miracle to offset a challenge in September. The messy but indirect involvement of his son in the rogue Islamic nuclear chain is made worse by the arrest under the ISA of a man, for whom his son's company built a factory to make centrifuge parts, is one he must sort out. The man, Mr B.S.A. Taher, was cleared of all wrong doing three months ago, but over the weekend is detained for two years without trial. Pak Lah now says he is a threat to national security. This raises more questions than answers. Why is his son and his company left untouched? An innocent link in the clandestine nuclear weapons trial does not excuse him from detention. If drugs are found in a room shared by four or five people, it does not matter who put it there of it anyone knew of it, but they are presumed of it. That it was there is enough to have them all hanged. Or if one drives a friend's car, and drugs are found in it, one is sentenced to death. When national security is involved, the threshhold of innocence is lower. Innocence is no defence. Besides his company built a company in Shah Alam to make the centrifuge parts. One does not go into that kind of capital expenditure without an idea of what the end product is or what it is for. That is the presumption. It is for him to prove it is not.

So to Dato' Seri Najib the reporters went. He had an interesting spin. The supreme council reflected on the "strong" mandate, the "big" victory, the "trust" the people gave the party leadership in the March general election and decided the two be elected without contest. Pak Lah, he stressed, did not ask for it. Besides, no UMNO division called for elections for president and deputy president. Why could not the supreme council wait, the reporters asked, until after the UMNO branches and divisions had their meetings and elections? He said since the divisions did not ask for elections for the two posts, the supreme council decided they should not be contested. Dato' Seri Najib makes several wrong assumptions. UMNO did not contest the general elections. It stood as a component party of the National Front (BN). The "strong" mandate, the "big" victory, the people's "trust" he talks so highly of was not to UMNO but BN. If UMNO could then decide it won the elections, could not BN parties do likewise and insist on unelectected leaders as proof of democracies within the parties? Could a member then be penalised if he exercised his democratic right to contest for either top post?

THE SELANGOR GOVERNMENT ONCE gave laptop computers to state assemblymen. It had no practical purpose or use. It did not matter. The then mentri besar, Tan Sri Mohamed Taib, believed that the state assemblymen must be at the cutting edge of technology. What better way than give them laptop computers with which they could be connected at all times with the state government and their constituents. It did not matter that perhaps nine-tenths of their constituents did not care for, nor know how to use a, computer. More important, as many state assemblymen did not either. But how could the premier state in the country be so blind to the wonders of technology? It must be remedied. So each National Front (BN) state assemblyman was given a laptop computer, and ordered to make use of it. The miniscule Opposition, of course, should not enjoy the wonders of modern technology at state expense; they can buy their own. Besides, if you gave it to them, they could well use it to advance their cause, and perhaps defeat a few sitting BN members at the next election.

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