This would mean the foreign company is going to be involved what for centuries were in local hands. Even the British in their colonialism did not touch that. In this new world of globalisation, which the National Front government enthusiastically supported, mainly to beat PAS's policies to make life for the rural folk better. But this has now come to its head. Globalisation it supported would result in foreigners controlling what the government does not. Malaysia will produce goods cheaper than the West can for items made there, it would improve its balance of payments, but it would not be in control of the country. This is done in secret, because the only publicity allowed, in its newspapers, actually its public relations arm, is its version of events and policies. The New Straits Times only carries what the Prime Minister and his people say or do; even the deputy minister, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, is ignored, except when he supports his boss. But this cannot last. It will be a matter of time before the truth emerges.

The National Front believes that its prime minister can say what he likes, and they follow. At least that is the fiction. But at a seminar in Petaling Jaya yesterday (12 March 2006) one speaker said the Malaysian Chinese Associatiion (MCA) and Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) leaders had approached his organisation over UMNO's policies which they do not agree. But they should have expected that because they were more interested in being in the cabinet than for why they had been sent there by their communities. This is not surprising because UMNO members are also angry with their president, and his belief he is invincible and can do as he likes. He appoints the editor of the New Straits Times, and the Star support him because it is owned by the MCA, and pushes the Chinese point of view as vigorously as the NST pushes the UMNO president's point of view. But even UMNO and MCA members do not believe in their leaders' way of making themselves important. The alternate papers and the Internet is the source of news these days. So what is published in the mainstream media is by and large ignored. They are sold not for the news they contain, but for the advertisement in them.

THE PRIME MINISTER HAS excused New Straits Times but not the Sarawak Tribune and the Guong Ming Daily News. NST's front page apology on the front page showed the paper was contrite, said the Prime Minister. No body is penalised, as has happened in the two newpapers although they did apologize. All the television stations have carried cartoons deemed offending the Prophet, but how can they be punished? The information minister, Mr Zainuddin Maidin, who is himself a former newspaper editor, who has been running a feud with the former editor-in-chief of the NST group, Mr Khalimullah Hassan, is caught with a dilemma over the television stations under his control. TV3 is run by acolytes of Pak Lah's son-in-law. NTV7 is not in the charmed circle, so will escape if the other television stations are not punished. But they carried the cartoons too. On that will depend on the National Front government's credibility.

UMNO, in the National Front, rules the roost. The New Straits Times is owned by a party conglomerate, its editor is appointed by the Prime Minister. Its editor knows which side his bread is buttered, and acts accordingly. It reports fearlessly on countries and individuals who cannot fight back. It acts as a public relations arm of the government. It used to be the best-selling newspaper in the country but is now third, behind the free newspaper, The Sun. It used to sell more than 300,000 but can only manage about 120,00 now. The decline in leadership can be blamed on its political orientation slavishly with reporters not reporting what should be, and its recent editors, who are mediocrities selected so that the ruling party can be comfortable. It does not report opposition activities, except occasionly to show its "independence". Like all newspapers, its journalists do not usually write their reports until they have seen the sanitized Bernama version of the event. It does not often, like most newspapers, quote Bernama as the source, and the report would appear in other newspapers.

DAT0' SIR ONN JAFFAR, Menteri Besar of Johore, UMNO's founding president, father of the prime minister, Tun Hussein Onn, grandfather of Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, is also known for having got the Malay women of Malaysia to protest against the British plan to neutralise the Malay rulers. The British did not know what hit them. The National Archives is full of reports, written usually in amazement by British officials on the scene, of how the normally placid women protested against plans to remove the powers of the Sultans. The British officers did not know what to do, dare not allow a 'lathi charge' as they would have against the men. The normally apolitcal women were organised by Ibu Zain, who was given a Tan Sri in the 1980s because her daughter, who worked as a journalist for a while on the New Straits Times after she left the education service on a point of principle, would not accept any medal or title if none was given to her mother.

What annoys the National Front in Sabah is that several of its leaders want to join the Parti Keadilan Sabah, whose president is Dato' Seri Anwar's wife, Datin Seri Wan Aziz binti Dato' Wan Ismail. The Sabah unit operate on its own, and is seen as a Sabah party not a West Malaysian clone. It is credible in the state. Dato' Seri Anwar's presence in Sabah has given the party a fillip, and this worries the National Front. As it worried the Malaysian Chinese Association that more than 1,000 of its members had joined PKR in Penang last week. Its leaders issued a statement that they were of no consequence, they were not members, they were bankrupts. But MCA leaders were in Penang up to the night before to persuade them not to leave! It was also the largest gathering of Chinese that PKR had attracted, short of its dinners. To often the blow, the New Straits Times reported that the DAP, almost all Chinese members, would not join an opposition coalition!!

He hopes to be prime minister after Pak Lah, but without getting to know the rank and file of UMNO. He is from Oxford, and that he insists gives him a cache that those wanting a political career in UMNO, including the deputy prime minister, do not have. He only talks to newsmen favourable to him, and he believes he should be prime minister over all other claimanents, including Dato' Seri Najib. He threatens to sue any body he does not like, or puts a break on his political rise. If he is supported by his father-in-law the prime minister, he thinks he will make it. He hopes to in Malaysia as Tony Blair, also an Oxford graduate, did in the United Kingdom. He now has money to throw, although using money from a public listed company is criminal breach of trust. He gets UMNO men and women taking him into their bosoms. He thinks he is popular. But where does he stand on issues affecting Malaysia? He does not want to say. He threatens libel suits instead. The New Straits Times, which was once edited by his side-kick and made a mess of it, usually carries laudatory articles about him, more in answer to criticism of him on the Internet. He had not been elected to any post. He has so far arranged it so that he is returned unopposed. Pak Lah thinks this is as it should be, that a young man with no experience in government or in employment is a better bet than a man who had been a cabinet minister more than twenty years ago.

The New Straits Times seems to have realised this, and take to criticising the deputy prime minister obliquely. The other papers, owned mostly by other parties in the National Front, are not so subtle. And they would not be. The Star was suspended in 1987 for a breach of the rules, and two senior editors of the Chinese Press had been suspended yesterday for their resourcefulness which conflicted the official position. But no one talks now of a minister going to China to apologise for nude squat by a Chinese national, when the spin now is that it is a Malay girl after all. Even the DAP MP, Ms Teresa Kok, who brought the video tape of the nude squat to Parliament, now says it was a Malay girl after all.

But it is not convenient. It might be easier to read, but its bulk makes this difficult to do outside the house. In the house, the broadsheet is better. The New Straits Times (NST), which I had read from the 1950s until early this year, lost my custom when I was given a choice of either a broadsheet, really a small version of it, or a tabloid.

But first things first. ECM Libra is encouraged by Pak Lah's government and the Chinese running the firm knows that. Of the the three Malays on its board, two are close to Pak Lah – his son-in-law and the former group editor in chief of the New Straits Times, Dato' Khalimullah Hassan. It came into prominence after Pak Lah was sure of becoming prime minister. With so many impediments for non-Malays in this country, they take steps so that their firms can flourish. Otherwise it would be just a ho-hum firm. Look around you, and the firms that succeed are those with connections. The Malays on its board is well connected, the close they are to the centre of power, the better placed the firm is.

POLICE STRIPPING CHINESE TOURISTS is the issue. The visas were valid. Not even the authorities dispute that. Because of what happened to those with valid visa, the Chinese tourists are not coming here. The New Straits Times said on 21 November 2005 said 50,000 tourists come here and disappear. That they disappear is not the issue. Neither is it that those with valid visas break the law. Instead of hunting them, legal tourists are stripped. The news has gone back. Sixty five per cent less tourists from China come here. The government of Malaysia is in a dilemma. It does not seem to know why. The tourism minister is go to China to find out. But the runaway police gives the country a bad name. But the authorities seem to be protecting the policemen in the official statements they have issued. They will probe what happened. They would not have, it seems, had not the newspapers highlighted it. It also is true that the police would not have stripped them had the tourists been Caucasian. They thought there would be no reaction. So far Pak Lah has kept quiet. The Cabinet has not said a word though it would be quick to say something if something goes wrong in a municipal council. The Chinese tourists are going elsewhere. It is costing us money as a result. But this stripping of women is not an isolated incident. A statement that this is prohibited under the law is not the response China is expecting from Malaysia.

Dato' Aziz's conviction represents what is wrong with people of other races becoming Malay and what their place is in the scheme of things in Malaysia. He is neither fish nor fowl, when pushed to a corner. He thought he was buying protection by doing wrong at the politician's bidding but found out too late that his minister was more important to be in jail than he. In Malaysia, the Muslim takes preference. In the past, it would be the Malay, Chinese and then Indian. Now it lis the Malay Muslim, other Muslims, Chinese and Indian. The recent decision of the authorities to seek an English or Australian to hed MAS was taken to prevent a Chinese or Indian Malaysian to take up the job. It was no so in the past. The change came after the racial riots in 1969. From that time, as part of Malayisation, the Chinese and Indian were weeded out of top posts in civil, government service, or government-linked companies. In the New Straits Times, the editor-in- chief is criticised for bringing in Indians into top positions. The Malays have proved they can't handle the job, and the new man, politically and racially acceptable but an Indian all the same, is blamed for not giving Malays jobs. His family was probably a Muslim years before his attackers among the Malays became Muslims. But that does not matter. It is important Malays must hold all senior positions, it does not matter if they are inefficient. If a non-Malay became a Muslim to rise in his job, he will fall by the wayside as Dato' Aziz has done. The Islamic faith will not protect as it has not Dato' Aziz although he was already a Muslim.

The New Straits Times today takes the people to task for suggesting that the former deputy prime minister, Tun Ghaffar Baba, 80, had died. He has been in ICU at Pantai Hospital, and critically ill. The Prime Minister and others had paid their respects to him. He is not allowed visitors. But the preparations to have him transferred to a hospital in England caused that rumours. I had not met him since my strokes, and he looked unwell then. He had grown too fat, and he appeared to lose his memory now and then. He was defeated as deputy president of UMNO, and therefore deputy prime minister, by Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, later sacked by the prime minister of the day, Tun Mahathir, and retired when he lost. He has been out of the public eye since. He has been ignored by officialdom, especially since he was critical of some of the government policies, and not afraid to say so. The people I saw at his house in Bangsar were ordinary people. It is not giving the latest on a bigwig in retirement that is the problem. The people do not have ill intent. They spread rumours because official information is sparse. He has been in hospital for more than a month, but has any information been released? He may be a nobody today, but he was a somebody less than ten years ago. The rumours would not have spread if officials had given adequate information. The suggestion that the people deliberately gave out false information is not true. When they have to depend on rumours that later turn out to be true, they listen, and spread, rumours. They have no compunction in spreading it because the official media, and those close to the National Front, did not, or spread lies. Many of the news reports are in fact self-serving to the government, and often detrimental to the people.

PARLIAMENT HAS BECOME A charade. The MPs from the ruling National Front are not given a free vote in the Rafidah Aziz affair. The two NF MPs who voted with the Opposition in referring Datin Seri Rafidah Aziz to the Committee of Privileges comes up for mention in newspaper reports and in Paliament as if they had done something terrible. It now seems the National Front never had any intention to put Rafidah Aziz through the hoop. She knows it, and almost every NF MP knows it. The result was predictable, although Parliament was allegedly given a free hand by the NF. The NF's majority in Parliament would see, as it turned out, that Datin Seri Rafidah would get into no trouble. And indeed she did not. She is in the New Straits Times today (6 October 2005) talking about her role in nation building, and that she viewed her international role more important than turning up in Parliament. Parliament is not important, she avers in the interview with New Straits Times. The leader of the Opposition, Mr Lim Kit Siang, is irrelevant, so his questions are less important than the Cabinet's. But in the Parliamentary system of government in force, it is more important than the cabinet. Tun Mahathir used to have cabinet meetings in Parliament. He at least paid lip service to the primacy of Parliament. The Natioanl Front does not. There is pressure on the National Front to penalise the two MPs who voted with the Opposition. And there is a collective sigh of relief that she is scot free. That was only possible by the massive majority the NF has in Parliament.

THE ROYAL MALAYSIA POLICE is up in arms about a crime committed. To make sure that it means business, it informs the press. There is only one problem with it: the story is false. But falsity about anything matters little with the press, particularly the New Straits Times. There is before the RMP a slew of police reports – about cabinet ministers and their corruption, with assorted proof – that the former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim had filed for which the judge who sentenced him in the sham trial and for which he has since been acquitted by the federal court has now been appointed to that bench – which the RMP takes no notice of. But it jumps at this report that Tun Ghazali Shafie, former foreign and interior minister, has been cheated by his former personal assisant. I did ask the Tun when he was in hospital recently about the state of his dispute with him former secretary, who has not returned him documents in her care, which he said he valued more than the "baubles" in her care, which his former driver told the police about, and which the New Straits Times reported in wrongful detail a few days later. The point is he Tun Ghazali did not make any police report, he had long ruled it out in this dispute with his former secretary, who is closer to his wife, from whom he is estranged.

The twin pressures of Pak Sheikh and corruption is too potent a molotov cocktail for UMNO to fend off. This shows itself in other ways too. The New Straits Times confidently insisted the 15.8 per cent stake held by the estate of Tan Sri Yahya Ahmad in the automotive group, DRB-Hicom, would go to a consortium headed by Tan Sri SM Nazimuddin SM Amin; it went instead to one headed by Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Albukhary. The NST group is controlled by a Pak Lah crony, so its views are believed to be his voice.

The Star approach is typical of this re-creation of Pak Lah as 'one of us' by the mainstream press to divert attention into irrelevance when larger issues of state demand his, and our, attention. We know why. Pak Lah sits on an uneasy throne which his spinmeisters believe can best be secured by banal platitudes and irrelevant sideshows. Malaysia is not alone in this. The Singapore Straits Times recently carried a news story about President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono urging Indonesians to prefer the nation's interest not their own. Look at the New Straits Times front page headlines about Malaysian affairs: it is one banal platitude or irrelevant sideshow after another. The issues that should be discussed are not. The ghastly reality television shows, now the staple on Malaysian television networks, have come into the mainstream of life, and newspapers begin a print edition of it.

THE INDIAN AND BRITISH HIGH Commissioners – let us put aside for a moment the propriety of foreign ambassadors getting involved in company marketing campaigns in the country of their accreditation – love the tabloid New Straits Times for its size and convenience; so does the golfing sensation, Vijay Singh; and so every man, according to the New Straits Times, it asked. This is taken as informed consent. If these great people desired the tabloid version the moment they held it in their hands, it is proof enough all of Malaysia do. When this experiment started in September, readers were solemnly promised a choice, only to learn that it was Hobson's: you could have the NST in any size so long as it was a tabloid. My news agent of 30 years got only the tabloid editions, though he had several, including me, who wanted the tabloid. It took him a fortnight to get the right papers. If choice was what the NST wanted, its advertisements should have reflected it. But it was tabloid it wanted all along. Now, based on what we are told is its huge success in the Klang Valley, it is going nationwide.

The government struggles to regain its composure as the Anwar magic which sustained the reformasi movement is not, as it had hoped, blighted. It is there, bright and lively, and with the spark of his release, shows its power. In one sense, it is fortuitous for the government that he left for his surgery almost immediately. The longer he remained, the worse it would have been for the National Front (BN) government, and especially for the UMNO whose deputy president he was only six years ago. That he left as soon had nothing to do with saving the government; his excruciating back pain had to be attended to first. The Saudi jet which was to have carried him and his family to Munich was caught in a Saudi bureacratic maze and could not arrive when it was to; so he left by a MAS flight to Frankfurt for which, as the New Straits Times reported, he paid for the tickets. Was that ever an issue in this dispute: It was clear from the start the government would not. But the paper could not get over its confusion when the man was released, and its reports reflect it.

Pak Lah (1364)   United States (636)   Straits Times (412)   Samy Vellu (224)   Putra Jaya (200)   Chief Justice (200)   Saddam Hussein (188)   Vincent Tan (164)   Civil Service (154)   Parti KeADILan (148)   Islamic State (118)   Johore Bahru (100)   Sungei Buloh (94)   Bukit Tinggi (88)   Abdul Razak (80)   Pengkalen Pasir (68)   Ting Pek (64)   Armed Forces (59)   Soviet Union (58)

Malay Dominance (58)   Yong Teck (56)   Hong Kong (56)   Human Rights (56)   Syed Hamid (54)   Puteri UMNO (52)   Islam Hadhari (52)   Royal Commission (51)   Hussein Onn (51)   Rafidah Aziz (48)   Indian Congress (48)   Open House (44)   Vision Schools (44)   Shah Alam (44)   Malay Unity (42)   Chua Jui (42)   Abdul Taib (42)   Ampang Jaya (36)   Ras Adiba (36)

Osama Bin Laden (36)   Nik Aziz Nik (20)   Ling Liong Sik (18)   Lee Kuan Yew (18)

High Court Judge (14)   Wan Azizah Wan (9)   Lim Kit Siang (9)   Megat Junid Megat (8)

Mahathir (2960)

Anwar (2399)