IT TAKES LITTLE TO CHANGE matters around. What afflicts the Ampang Jaya municipal council is correction. As more details are revealed, it was more: the Selangor mentri besar, Dato' Seri Mohamed Khir Toyo, and a senior state executive councillor, are dragged in. And other municipal councils. The Anti-Corruption Agency raids the two men's homes and offices, and of their relatives. Then as quickly the focus changed. It is not corruption in Ampang Jaya, but that the enforcement officer, a retired army captain turned taxi driver, who did not reveal his bankruptcy, as required by Civil Service rules. A committee is set up and finds him guilty, and he is quickly dismissed. The corruption charges are referred to the Anti-Corruption Agency for no purpose than that no further action would be taken. Aadminitrative honour is satisfied. All is well. Corruption in Ampang Jaya? What corruption?

WHEN RAJA TUN MOHAR RADA Badiozaman died an octogenarian last week, he was revered, rightly, as a giant amongst men in independent Malaysia. He served every prime minister from the first, and a sane Civil Service voice when politicians overrode and terrorised civil servants to do their bidding. He had retired gently out of the limelight a few years ago. He continued to do yeoman service behind-the-scenes. All but those who knew him and his immense contributions had cast him into the dungheap of Malaysian history. Official Malaysia forgot him until his death. The newspaper accounts of his death and his contributions did him no justice. He was a greater man than he is made out to be. Since he was, at death, a nobody, it was a perfunctory farewell. I did not know him, although I had met him, socially and as a reporter, several times; I knew better his younger brother, Lieut.-Gen. Raja Dato' Rashid Raja Badiozaman, who retired a few years ago as director of military intelligence.

Since then, the government privatised all government vehicles, for a peppercorn price payable when able and at leisure, to a company called Spanco; if you look closely enough, you would find its ultimate owners to one Daim Zainuddin and his equally shadowy sidekick, Robert Tan. The pair made a killing. At least one High Court judge I know continues to use his private Mercedes Benz than the official Proton. The only man I know who uses his Proton Executive proudly is the reclusive business man, Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar al-Bukhairy. There is a Civil Service convention that cabinet ministers and high government officials are allowed to buy their five-year old official cars are a fraction it is worth on the market. All they have to do is to pay the duties and excise and other taxes. Which they can sell after a few years at double what they paid for them. The Proton official cars do not have the same cache or interest.

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.

These secret cabals decide with the deliberate design to shortchange the non-Malay. There is already a small group of religious fanatics in almost every government department, which takes on its self-appointed task to make it "clean" by ridding it of all non-Muslims, and impose an Islamic regimen so frightening and pervasive that the politicians in UMNO and the BN is powerless to even moderate. They are bluntly told that if they did not agree, electoral disaster follows. Political affiliations here do not matter, a more Islamic regimen is what they desire. This makes the role of the non-Malay civil servant one of sufferance. He is a non-entity, often shut out from important deliberations, no matter how high up the Civil Service ladder he is.

The syariah courts are merciless in prosecuting the Muslim man-in-the-street for khalwat, but not when he is someone high and mighty. If the religious affairs department insists on prosecution, all pressure is borne to bear on them to cease and desist. The one former minister against whom khalwat, "zina" (adultery) and sex with a minor charges were laid now sues all and sundry who dares even suggest he is guilty of them. A senior UMNO leader, now in the cabinet, was caught, in a raid during an UMNO gathering in Port Dickson, with a lady not his wife. Nothing happened. His political career continues to flourish and looks set to go higher. One cabinet minister came to politics when he had to resign from the Civil Service when, in a foreign country, he raped the wife of a senior official of that country. An UMNO vice president married in southern Thailand for which ordinary mortals could be charged in the syariah court. In the states, it is more prevalent. There is hardly an UMNO mentri besar in the peninsula whose keeping of mistresses is an open secret. There is one block of apartments in Kuala Lumpur where several ladies are lodged, kept by high-flying UMNO politicians from the states. One Malaysian high commissioner was recalled recently when the wife of a locally-recruited Malaysian alleged he had raped her.

A civil servant could aspire to no higher sinecure. On leave before retiring next week, the deputy state secretary, Dato' Ahmad Shah Abdullah, 56, is, to his shock and surprise and of all and sundry, including the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, is the new Yang Dipertua (governor) of Sabah. Few had heard of him, his Civil Service career checked firmly early so he could not be state secretary. Indeed, his greatest worry was if he could survive on his pension. Dr Mahathir had to call for his files to find out who he was. But his appointment revealed, and rekindled, the intractible and inherent divisions in UMNO Sabah, and made every Sabah UMNO warlord look over his shoulder, fearful of what the other plans behind his back.

UMNO does not slap down the guilty of what you are I can get life or more in prison. A chief minister sues all and sundry for alleging he had a sexual affair with an under-aged jail; and opposition leader goes to jail for pursuing it. A cabinet minister gives her son-in-law a sinecure of about RM1.5 million a month, and insists it was all above board. Another raped a prominent woman in a country he was then in, is made to resign from the Civil Service and, after a suitable interval, is in the cabinet and the higher ranks of UMNO. An UMNO vice president, when chief minister, took RM2.4 million in foreign currency, against the laws of Malaysia and Australia, but remains the king maker in UMNO's highest circles. A former cabinet minister is charged with diverting to his own account tens of millions of ringgit meant for the hardcore poor. One cabinet minister got, in one form or another, all of Malaysia's failed privatisation efforts, and could not explain how UMNO funds under his control, running to nearly RM2 billion ringgit, disappeared. None have been charged or otherwise slapped down. They have absolute protection from the Prime Minister, and so are safe.

The Royal Malaysian Navy Chief, Admiral Dato' Ramly Abu Bakar, who is where he is because he is a Malay, now finds it politic, now that he has reached the top of his line, to plead for more non-Malays to join the armed forces. But he, like the other generals who now spout the obvious, during their long career in the armed forces, did little to ensure they are. It is official policy not to allow non-Malays into the armed forces, except as a token: in the first flush of the political arrangements after the 13 May, 1969 racial riots, the token non-Malay became official policy and enforced in vengeance. Only two non-Malay police officers were taken in the first recruitment after the riots. It has not improved by much. In the latest naval recruitment, of 645 recruits, only 50 were non-Malays. The ratio of four Malays to one Malay in the Civil Service became, in time, eight-to-one and wider. The non-Malay was reduced to a token. The army, for instance, allowed for only three generals amongst the Indians and the Chinese: one major-general and two brigadier-generals. This rule is varied only if these officers would convert to Islam; if they do, they would be promoted as Malay officers.

This pervades through the Civil Service. Wisma Putra micromanages embassy finances, ambassadors have a long list of dos and don'ts which often make nonsense of their plenipotentiary task. How can you demand that wine, or pork, not be served at embassy premises? This attempt to control pervades through the system. Officers with the power to control do not hesitate to. What happens then is that Merlimau is created in Madrid, Simpang Rengam in Seoul, Kajang in Canberra. And like penghulus in Malaysia, they are kept on their toes by petty bureaucrats at home. And we wonder why our diplomatic missions are so ineffective overseas. I have heard of ambassadors being asked, at dinner with high level officials from the country they are in being asked by a visiting functionary from home if the food is halal or if the wine is bought at government expense.

Malaysia is a nation of tokens. In the Civil Service, there is the token Indian, Chinese and other non-Malay secretaries-general, in the armed forces, there is the token major-general who is either Indian or Malay, in the diplomatic service, there is the token non-Malay ambassador. It is to prove to the world -- and, more important, to itself -- Malaysia's multiracial credentials. Once it was. Today, it is but a tired slogan brought out, when the non-Malay recoils at the injustices and impediments meted out to him or when a Chinese political party elects a non-Chinese in a sensitive party post, to reassure him that not only is Malaysia a haven of multiraical peace but how lucky the non-Malay is living here than from where his ancestors come from. It is impossible, in today's political climate, for a political party to have as its head one who of a different race from the majority of its members.

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