So, the earth-shattering news of preserving national heritages get a fillip when the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, announces, with a trace of embarrassment, that the "historic" Merdeka Stadium and the nearby covered Stadium Negara, would be preserved as national heritages. What saved the two stadia is not for thought of the Tengku. When the two stadia was given to UEM in a building scam to build sports facilities for the Commonwealth Games, the Cabinet, including, if I remember correctly, one Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (strange, that the preserver and destroyer of national heritages should have the same name!), decided national heritages should not stand in the way of progress. The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, could not hide his contempt at moves to preserve the stadius as, yes, national heritages. The cabinet then, with dollar signs in their eyes, could not care less for national heritages then.

As a senior Malaysian cabinet minister, her action has profound implications for policy in Malaysia. So that other Muslims are not so harrassed, she implies the Malaysian police must disband its dog unit, half of whose handlers are Muslim, which are widely used in Malaysia to sniff out contraband from luggage at airports. Indeed, it is possible her luggage was checked by Malaysian sniffer dogs. She did not make a scene for if she had, it would have created a larger scene here than it did in Australia. She misunderstands what is permissible in Islam, and makes an issue of it in foreign countries. Why has she not called for the disbanding of the police dog unit in Malaysia? Does she imply the police dogs are for non-Muslim crowd control and for checking non-Muslim luggage only? During the reformasi demonstrations, the ferocious police dogs kept a largely Muslim crowd at bay at the Dataran Merdeka and elsewhere. She did not demand then the police dogs be withdrawn for it was poised against Muslims. Why? Does she imply police dogs in Malaysia should check Muslims but not police dogs in Australia?

[Only one man is alive who took part in the Merdeka negotiations at Lancaster House in London in 1955. He is in his eighties, ailing, and forgotten. He is Tun Omar Ong Yoke Lin. He was to have written his autobiography. I was to have been his amenuensis. But as we talked, he thought I was too hot a political potato, and dropped it. A pity it was. He had a story to tell and would probably never be told. One would suffice. When the Tengku decided to invite MCA to join UMNO to present a common list for the KL Municipal elections in 1952, he nominated Mr (later Tun and now, alas, the late) Ismail Ali, the brother-in-law of Dr Mahathir, and the MCA, Mr (later Tun) Ong to work out the details. They met for lunch one day at the Colliseum Bar and Restaurant, at the table to the immediate right as one entered, reached agreement but did not have any paper to write it on. So they drafted the agreement on the pristine white table cloth. One of them took it home (both thought it was he), had it transcribed, and wanted to hand the tablecloth to the Tengku. But the servant, seeing the "dirty" table cloth, promptly washed it clean! And as each would say in later years, "we lost a piece of history!"]

On 21 July 2002, the UMNO Overseas Clubs Alumni Organisation (Pertubuhan Alumni Kelab-Kelab UMNO Luar Negeri) had its third annual general meeting at the UMNO-owned Putra World Trade Centre's Dewan Merdeka. The night before, the UMNO president and Malaysian Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, graced its annual dinner. What is this body? The name tells it all. Alumni refers to the former students of an alma mater. That it gets into the name of this UMNO lobby group is yet another creative licence from the spin doctors of Bolehland. Or are UMNO clubs overseas educational institutions? But when you strip it off to its basics, it is nothing more than an UMNO-sponsored pressure and lobby group formed for no reason than to support UMNO to offset the continuing desertion of Malays and its members for PAS and other non-UMNO parties outside the National Front (BN).

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, returned on Saturday, 20 July 2002, to the venue of his unscripted resignation for the third annual dinner of the UMNO Overseas Clubs Alumni Organisation (Pertubuhan Alumni Kelab-Kelab UMNO Luar Negara) at the Putra World Trade Centre's (PWTC) Dewan Merdeka. He had harsh words for Kedah UMNO, without naming it, for not pulling its weight during the Pendang and Anak Bukit bye-elections. PAS retained its votes in 1999, its loss and win proof UMNO has yet to regain the Malay vote. This was not what they had come to hear, and so heard it in deafening silence. The BN tactic is to swamp a byelection with more outside help than voters once worked. Not any more. The highhandedness, the promises unkept, work started to impress ending the day after polling no matter who won, the arrogance after impede in getting the vote. The BN works a workable theory to death, and cannot understand why.

The Betrayal of the Merdeka Generation

Since MCA has been in the governing coalition since 1952, an important partner in the National Front coalition since the demand for Merdeka University was made circa 1969, why did it take MCA this long to get a licence to run a university? UMNO was against it. Interestingly, no senior Malaysian minister has endorsed it. The education minister, whose ministry issued the licence is strangely silent. If anything, it shows how isolated MCA is in the National Front.

But Ling helps MCA stumble. Chinese educationists, led by the redoubtable (and now octogenarian) Sim Mow Yee, wanted a Chinese-run Merdeka University, and an important demand in the 1969 general elections. The then prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, deflected it by allowing MCA to run TAR College, and it survives with little mentioned government grants and ringgit-for-ringgit contributions.

A few days before Merdeka (independence) Day, 31 August 1998, the Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, irritated at reporters' questions of a rift between him and his deputy prime minister, snapped: "Do I have to kiss him in public to show all is fine between us?" A week later, on 2nd September, Anwar Ibrahim was sacked, detained under the ISA, manhandled and jailed. Two days before the Yang Dipertuan Agung's official birthday celebrations. he denied his finance minister, Daim Zainuddin, had resigned. The next day, it became a fact.

So, when it warned people to stay away and equated it with the tens of thousands who gathered in Dataran Merdeka just before the former deputy prime minister was arrested under the Internal Security Act in 1998, the organisers won. Especially when crowds of 50,000 would not appear from no where for causes not serious enough, certainly not for a Saturday afternoon lark. But those who did was enough to prove a point. Perception, not numbers, mattered. It got that.

The police acts not against the organisers, but threatens any who attend with a year's jail; an incredible police cordon envelopes the site in Shah Alam, the Selangor state capital, Dataran Merdeka (Independence Square) and the National Mosque; ten, including the owner of the rally site, arrested; teargas and water cannons used to prevent people going to the area. Motor vehicles towards Klang from all directions were subject to heavy police checks from last night, all roads to Klang under heavy police control. It was known three weeks ago about this rally, but the police reacted only in the past week. Despite the police cordon, several thousand arrived in Klang by this morning. Teargas and water cannons were used today to stop them from proceeding to the site. Meanwhile, a convoy of about 300 motor vehicles, with Barisan Alternatif leaders in tow, were to head for the site. The official overreaction skewers the government's equanimity even more.

A flurry of contracts have been announced, few of which would ever be completed. There is no money in the kitty. But it does give the impression that Malaysia does well, so well that the others are jealous of its success. The cronies given more than a billion ringgit worth of contracts prove their loyalty by not building them, even with government subventions. One wellknown hanger-on has the contract for both the monorail and the linear city, neither of which ever see fruition under him. This gentleman's privatisation of the sewage industry was so successful that the government had to take it back, or so we are told. Success in such matters, in the government's views, is what you and I would see as failure. It is fiction that dominates. So truth must take a back seat. When euphemism and fiction rules, combined with imagined political correctness, it is form more than substance that takes precedence. Sandiwara is more important than policy. And so it is with multiracialism and racial harmony. When both are used for a political objective, something must give. Especially, when the racial communities today have each gone beyond the Merdeka imperatives to a different level of racial harmony and politics which are not those of the founding fathers. To then insist narrowly -- and possible with constitutional provisions to buttress that -- that compacts taken out of context prevents any rational discussion of racial and communal issues defeats the very concept of a multiracial and multireligious society.

The Prime Minister, in his Merdeka Day speech, castigated those Chinese groups who he insists made unreasonable demands as communists, provided UMNO Youth and extreme Malay groups to rise in anti-Chinese mayhem. But his address climaxed a runup the previous month in which Malay-Chinese divisions became more pronounced, with the UMNO youth Hishamuddin Hussein not only encouraging UMNO Youth protests at the Chinese Assembly Hall in Kuala Lumpur. Gone was the Prime Minister's irrelevant but confident belief that a Chinese could be Prime Minister; he could be, but not hold senior positions in the administration, police force, armed forces or elsewhere except as a token presence. The current crisis, for that is what it is, rose from 17 demands of the Chinese organisations elections group called Suqui, which the National Front and notably the Malaysian Chinese Association accepted before the November 1999 general elections. Now that is decried as communist-inspired. UMNO Youth warns any to view the Prime Minister in any but nationalist terms.

This year's Merdeka celebrations (31 August 00) is no cause for joy or complacency. The usual marchpast and festivities were there, as in every year since 1957, but the unusual security precautions and the partisan speech of the Prime Minister ensured not hope for the future, but fright at the divisiveness of Malaysian society. The Prime Minister himself blamed this on religious and racial extremists, without once mentioning his role in it. Whatever gloss officialdom puts on it, these reasons, if they exist (for they are discussed officially as the work of the dark opposition forces jealous of the governing National Front's achievement), they ascerbated as a contributing factor in the larger problem of cultural credibility after the humiliation of the immediate past deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. The Prime Minister's speech this morning looked not into the future and rejoice our blessings, but to divide the Malaysian nation even further by harping on religious and racial sentiments, for which the National Front component parties themselves must take much blame for. This, in my view, is the most depressing National Day speech, any Prime Minister of this nation has delivered. All this in a climate of tense security. All doctors had their leave cancelled and the Klang General Hospital was on full alert. This is new. So, what was the government worried about? Or is the government, frightened of its own shadows, sees an assassin at any who moves and wears not the National Front badge?

Yet when the Development & Commercial Bank, now the RHB Bank, built its headquarters, now that of Tan Sri Tajuddin Ramli's business empire, just behind the temple, one express condition was that building must blend with the temple in front, which should not be touched. Such concern amongst officials, usually Malay, was what saved numerous nineteenth century buildings from twentieth century disfiguration. The Anglican St Mary's cathedral beside the Royal Selangor Club and Dataran Merdeka wanted to remodel its front, but was not allowed to, in the early 1980s, because the Muzium Negara objected, insisting that the national heritage would be defaced. Today, the civil servant works hand in hand with politicians and developers to destroy such heritages handed down to us. It began in the early 1980s, when rather than retain the beautiful wooden house of such distinction as the Prime Minister's official residence, it was gutted and a new monstrosity built over it, where he does live any more, not after his Istana Rakyat is built in Putra Jaya. No one shed a tear then, except those interested in the heritage of our forefathers. From then, every thing had a price, and had to be destroyed in the name of progress. When the LRT was being built, one official suggestion, quickly disabused, was to disfigure the Sri Mariamman Temple in Jalan Bandar, another religious building more than a century old. But Hindu temples also get disfigured: Look at the Sri Kandaswamy Temple in Brickfields, built in the waning years of the nineteenth century, but recently completely rebuilt.

Merdeka celebrations at the Dataran Merdaka, the LIMA Exhibition in Langkawi, sports matches, weddings, formal opening of touristy hotels, open houses. All engage bomohs -- even if the practice is abhorrent in Islam, and out of character with the allegedly scientific world we are trying to create in Bolehland -- to ensure good weather. Why I wonder are these agents of nature called upon to remove the worst environmental hazard we have had to face in decades? Can they produce rain? I have not seen scientific evidence that they can, but I have seen the after effects of the bomoh's actions. They can, and keep them away as well. How do they do it? I do not know. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and there are bomohs who can. And are used by the very same people who now run helter skelter for a solution to the haze, when it is in their personal interest. Any way, these bomohs have a better record of success than the scientific rain makers in Malaysia.

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