Those around Pak Lah makes the wrong moves. The official media, all staffed by Khairy's acolytes, have blamed the Selangor mentri besar, Dato' Seri Khir Toyo, for the recent Shah Alam flood, little realising that federal polices accelerated it. The spin now is that the pig droppings have entered the water supply. to enhance its Islamic commitment. But in the recent floods in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, human waster has got into the water supply. So the water supply is cut, in stages. It was done to suit official convenience, not the public's. There should have warned people when it was decided, not in the media the next day. But the attack on Dato' Seri Khir is to stop him contesting the UMNO Youth leadership, so that Mr Khairy can become leader without a contest. But the challenger is a different man, probably from Dato' Seri Najib's camp.

Mr Khairy's blames Dato' Seri Khir Toyo for the floods in Shah Alam, and is to prevent him being challenged for the UMNO Youth presidency next year. But within UMNO he is seem as blaming an UMNO leader for mistakes the federal government has made. Why did not the federal government, run by his father-in-law, object to the exclusive housing project near Bukit Cheraka when it was being constructed? It cannot, because it has allowed the ridge above Taman Tun Abdul Razak, which Tun Mahathir when prime minister ordered stopped. The people look upon this attack of Datp' Seri Khir as infighting within UMNO. But the man who could challenge Mr Khairy in the UMNO elections is not Dato' Seri Khir but a deputy minister in the government linked to the deputy prime minister. What Mr Khairy has done is to ensure that the next prime minister is Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, with his deputy prime minister Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, who is UMNO Youth leader. UMNO headquarters believe it, and so do many Malaysians up and down the country.

The menu at the Buttery coffee shop of the Lake Club in Kuala Lumpur is now designed that any dish that is not Malay or Western is slowly dropped. The non-Malay must adapt. He has no choice. He must accept the Malay view of what he should eat. The dress code is the Malay dress code. A mosque and temple or church may have existed side by side for decades, but now the pressure is on for the temple or church to move. Shah Alam in Selangor, built as a Malay dominated city, had earmarked for a church, but decades of patient negotiations later, there is still none.

What happens at these gatherings? On Sunday (20 September 2004), it was the turn of the Selangor mentri besar, Dato' Seri Khir Toyo. The roads to his house were chocker block with hundreds of the latest models of Mercedes Benzes, BMWs, Lexuses, and just about every luxury car you could find parked along the road to the residence at Shah Alam. It would be an understatement to say that the luxury cars alone would have been worth at least RM1 billion. But then UMNO meetings are for aspiring politicians to show off their wealth, their cars and their trophy wives. Twenty years ago, a Malay lawyer and I were on the same flight to Penang. He offered me a lift to my hotel. His old Holden car awaited him. He shouted at the driver that he wanted the Mercedes Benz because he was there to attend an UMNO branch meeting. He ordered him to go back to the mainland and return with the other car. I remonstrated with him to take the car into town, and then let the driver return with the other car. He would not hear of it. And we were stuck at the airport for more than three hours until the Mercedes arrived. For him it worked. He is now a cabinet minister and a candidate for the UMNO supreme council.

But the Tahir case reveals that while all are equal before the ISA, some are more equal than than others. He is (or was) a business partner of Mr Kamaludin Abdullah, Pak Lah's only son. When Mr Tahir wanted to ship centrifuge parts to Libya for its nuclear programme, he approached Mr Kamaludin, a substantial shareholder of the stock exchange listed SCOMI, to have them manufactured. SCOMI set up a special factory for it in Shah Alam. But the case is treated with kid gloves. The police made every effort, when the scandal broke early this year, to distance the Prime Minister's son from it, indeed emphatically cleared him. Pak Lah could not be in a scandal as the general election approached, and the police helped beyond its duty. Mr Tahir himself conceded, according to a Malaysian police report, that he sent the centrifuge parts manufactured by the SCOMI subsidiary to Libya. It does not matter if Mr Kamaludin is an innocent party. The ISA makes him culpabable. Indeed, if SCOMI was not controlled by the Prime Minister's son, I dare say that whoever owned it, and Mr Tahir, would not have been so gingerly treated.

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.

But the Malay ground is also divided over the Islamic state: the BN and PAS has its own view of it, although it turns out it is not in the essentials but in how fast it would be implemented that divides the two. This divide is fierce enough. To this must be added the political divide this general election caused. There is an unmentioned presumption: for BN and Pak Lah to survive in the larger world outside, as a footsoldier in the war on terror, they must firmly and irrevocably consign PAS and its presumed Taliban objectives firmly into the political void. That he has. With a little help from Uncle Sam. Pakistan is firmly in the US orbit as a quid pro quo to Pervez Musharraf being off the hook for not prosecuting, and persecuting, its national hero, Dr A.Q. Khan, for his role in exporting nuclear technology to Muslim countries. Is there a similar plan in place for Malaysia and Pak Lah over one digit in that larger Khan plan, his son's SCOMI plant in Shah Alam which built centrifuge parts to Dr Khan's design?

President George W. Bush and the CIA director, Mr George Tenet, said so in public: the SCOMI Precision Engineering (SCOPE) factory in Shah Alam is a link in the shadowy international trade in nuclear weaponry. Malaysia denied it. SCOPE invited foreign and local correspondents to visit its factory to see for themselves. A senior US official, Mr John Bolton, in Singapore, said Malaysia is not involved in this shadowy Pakistani-led network. That is enough for another round of self-congratulation in Malaysia. The curious thing is that no one accused Malaysia of it, only that SCOPE was. Malaysia looked for any straw that could clip the connexion between SCOPE and the Pakistani chain. For SCOPE is the subsidiary of a listed company, SCOMI, which is controlled by the only son of the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. If SCOPE had not been cleared of any wrongdoing, Pak Lah's political career could well be in the dumps. For it becomes clearer by the day that both the Pakistani and Malaysian governments were aware of the network and their respective roles, and is why no one is detained or punished.

THE MALAYSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER, Dato' Seri Syed Hamid Albar, did not mince his words: the CIA director, Mr George Tenet, lied. Malaysia is not part of Pakistan's Dr A.Q. Khan's Islamic nuclear transfer of technology. The company he accused, Scomi Precision Engineering Sdn Bhd (SCOPE), did not know the parts it made for a Dubai-based Sri Lankan businessman, Mr B.S.A. Tahir, could be used for nuclear weapons. SCOPE opened its doors to journalists to prove Mr Tenet lied. It is all above board, you understand. Mr Tahir, signed a long term contract for centrifuge parts. To fulfill it, SCOPE built a factory in Shah Alam in 2001; it is a simple business transaction. It claims it did not inquire what it is used for. Is it as simple as that? SCOMI is in oil and gas exploration. It knows - at least it should - the centrigue is used in oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, nuclear technology. Yet it claims it did not want to know what it would be used for. To prove it, it brought local and foreign reporters to inspect it. The New York Times reporter was so convinced of it that it cleared SCOPE and blamed Mr Tenet. After all, the officials were so helpful. How could such nice people do something as nasty as to be part of a black market in nuclear technology?

But 11 September 2001 frightens many a Muslim world nation faced with an international confrontation with its Islamicists to follow the syariah and Washington's unilateral assertion that if it did, it is an enemy in the global war against terror. Washington effectively sidelined Tun Mahathir in his last year in office. Pak Lah needed Washington's support and backing to keep his Islamicists, led by the Opposition PAS, at bay. So, when this centrifuge crisis blew into the open, he and his government panicked. There is a reason for this. He is not yet annointed the Prime Minister. He must show he is in control. He is angry that this crisis makes him defend what should not be. He sees shadows where there are none. When this hit him as he marked his first 100 days in office, it damaged him more than he bargained. Not for what he did, but for his nervousnessness when the crisis hit his family. Foreign reporters are flown in, given interviews, taken on a tour of the centrifuge factory in Shah Alam, and their reports published in local newspapers as proof they are right. How? The underlying questions remain unanswered.

The Dr Khan visits to Malaysia appear to have come before a Dubai firm, Gulf Technical Industries LLC (GTI), run by a Sri Lankan, Mr B.S.A. Tahir, contracted to buy components for centrifugal plants from a firm in Shah Alam in Selangor state. When a GTI shipment was intercepted by European surveillance teams late last year, Malaysia got dragged into the rogue nuclear weapons chain. A senior Pentagon official shortly after called on the defence minister, now deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, and read him the Riot Act last year. He promptly disowned any connexion to this. It appears now that the aim was to link this to Dr Mahathir. But it is an embarrassment in Washington and Kuala Lumpur that it is to his successor, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. It is no surprise that Malaysian mainstream newspapers were careful to omit Pak Lah's links to the scandal.

So when Pak Lah retorts to "ask the Christians, Buddhist and Hindus who have their churches and temples here ... we are going to celebrate Christmas and Chinese New Year, including organising open hourses for different celebrations in Malaysia", he triviliases it as Washington. It is not the superficial amity of all relgions that Washington is interested in. It is in the small things that can be added to a list to damn a country. And that he cannot defend. When Shah Alam was planned, there was provision for a Catholic church. Over the years, the Selangor state government would not allow it to be build it on politically spurious grounds, that it would sully a Malay town, that there are not enough Roman Catholics to sustain it. The site was not alloted until it was forced to, and given a marshy piece of land. Work started, the foundations laid, but before it could begin, they were told to move.

The MIC organises a convention of MIC branch chairman in Shah Alam yesterday (09 November 2003) ostensibly to prepare the MIC for the general election. Twelve thousand attended, which if its president is believed, is the largest gathering of Indians in one place. It should earn a place in the Malaysian Indian book of records. But in his speech, he could not contain himself about threats to his position. He singled out the Indian Progressive Party (IPF) president, Dato' M.G. Pandithan, for nominating an editor of a Tamil newspaper opposed to Dato' Seri Samy Vellu for an award from the King. And committed a faux pas. He should not have brought His Majesty's name into a political dispute, which is what it is. The award is given only after careful vetting in the Prime Minister's Department and the Palace. Dato' Seri Samy Vellu would have been shown the list before the Prime Minister forwarded the recommendations. Why did he not object then? Or is he telling us even Dr Mahathir did not, in the end, extend him the courtesy he did have in the past?

That is how UMNO establishes its dominance on its rivals. It failed with Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. It failed with Mr Ezam. In other words, both were convicted for refusing to buckle under. When all else fails, jail him for any offence, is how political interrogations are viewed. UMNO needs Mr Ezam more than he needs UMNO: in 1999, he reduced a 14,000-majority in the Shah Alam parliamentary constituency to 1,500. If he or KeADILan were to stand again there, UMNO could well lose. This is so in several key Malay-majority parliamentary constituencies throughout the country. It needs Dato' Seri Anwar more. But how - and who - would dare approach him? Does UMNO seriously think he would, indeed could, rejoin UMNO? That UMNO can make and destroy people at will?

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