Muslim marriages in south Thailand are, by and large, disallowed in Malaysia. But I can name high ranking politicians from almost all political parties, in government and opposition, who defy it, and find exquisite ways to justify them. It is now the practice of couples bent on extramarital sex to safeguard themselves with marriage certificates from South Thailand. And get themselves off the hook. It came to a head recently when two prominent singers caught for khalwat produced two separate marriage certificates, no doubt having forgotten in the heat of passion that they had already taken care for an escape route if caught. A team of religious affairs officials plan to go to south Thailand to ascertain the validity of the certificates.

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.

So it does not matter if Mr Howard meant what he said or said what he meant, that Canberra considers it fair game, in present circumstances, to order pre-emptive strikes on other countries harbouring terrorists. The countries he had in mind are not Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or even Pakistan. Nor South America nor Africa. Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines took Mr Howard to task, but spoiled their case in needless rhetoric. In this hysteria, Malaysia and Indonesia are accused of harbouring Islamic terrorists; Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines have Islamic irridentists fighting for their own homeland -- in southern Thailand, Acheh and Mindanao, respectively. Australia's security fear for decades have been the unwashed Asian hordes in countries to its north who, it believes in its simplistic and racist view, to unsettle its middle class values and existence. The fear is raised a notch by now targetting the Muslim terrorist hordes.

For when the aim is to entrench one group or race even when they are not ready, mediocrity must rule. It was also to punish. The political overview after the 13 May riots and Malay dominance was to punish the non-Malay for daring to confront the Malay to defend the rights promised him after independence. As usual, when the Malays reacted, the non-Malay collapsed. And did not challenge this deliberate worldview in which they were officially relegated to irrelevance. This Malay dominance led to the policies that Admiral Ramly now worries about. Let us look at industry. The Proton car, for instance. The Chinese is deliberately excluded from it, except peripherally as an adjunct to the Malay stake holder. The workers are, like the civil service, predominantly Malay. The non-Malay who has a brilliant idea can only make it to the market place if he has a Malay partner, whose share he often has to pay, acceptable to the government. It has become so bad that many just move to, usually, Thailand, and make his fortune there. A key figure in the motor industry in Thailand is a Malaysian Chinese, who went there after he was rebuffed in Malaysia.

Successful Malay men either have more than wife, or seriously consider taking one, to announce their new status on the slippery pole of success. There are laws honoured in its breach that he needs the consent of his first wife to marry a second, third or fourth. He ignores it, crosses the border into southern Thailand and marrying there. The then mentri besar of Selangor and now UMNO vice president, Tan Sri Muhammad Taib, took that route. Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli first acquired the national air carrier, MAS, then acquired as his second wife the wife of one of his pilots. But many who took second wives live in mortal dread their first wives would find out. Many abandon their wives to live with mistresses, confident of being beyond the law. As always, in such matters, what is allowed Zeus is disallowed the cow.

In practice, this does not intrude into the personal lives of citizens. It is their thoughts than their personal habits or practices which conform to the "civilised" norm that force the jackboot and the harsh laws. But when Islamic laws are the issue, as in Malaysia and in several countries in Africa which adopts it as a badge of its arrival in this Muslim world, the local rulers impose it harshly, but only on others, not on themselves. Polygamy is allowed in Islam, but in Malaysia it is possible only with the consent of the first wife. Nor can they marry secondary wives in Thailand. This law is ignored, but who gets caught are the powerless. An UMNO state mentri besar, now a party vice president, married his sultan's daughter in Thailand. A senior PAS politician marries in Thailand, is lightly tapped on his knuckles and told to go and sin no more. If it had been a bus driver or a garderned, whether from UMNO or PAS, he would have been jailed.

In the end, the Malaysian government is caught in an act of its own making. It cannot be seen to be bending to Washington's dictates to return a Muslim. Not when Malaysia is a year away from hosting the next conference of the Organisation of Islamic states. Nor can she ignore the pressure from Washington that he be handed over posthaste. Nor can Malaysia afford to cane the rector of the IIU and then expect to well regarded by the Muslim countries. Nor can she not, if Dato' Abdullah Ahmad Badawi insists Mr Bilal is here illegally, without Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines not reacting to this selective treatment of illegal immigrants.

Several hundred thousand illegals flowed into Sarawak and Sabah from across the Kalimantan border. Add to this workers from Thailand, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere, and the foreign workers, legal and illegal, are about 15 per cent of the country's 21 million people. Malaysia to get the growth she proclaims need as many to justify it. When it should have regularised the foreign workers before acting in haste, it wanted to show it had the power to cane and jail those who came in with the active help of many an UMNO leader and the agencies of the goverment. When countries send in their warships to take back their citizens caught in this political trap, the focus then is not on uniting Malaysians against a foreign threat, but a common foreign reaction against Malaysians in their own countries. That Dato' Seri Syed Hamid Albar had to warn Malaysians of the threat is proof yet of a policy gone horribly awry.

He leaves for Thailand tomorrow for an official visit. He should have sent Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi instead. But he is too much in love with power to want to give it up. He showed that in full measure when he went on his holiday, and returned, in the government executive jet, since extensively modified for what it cost -- RM200 million -- so it could fly non-stop to London and with a highly sophisticated camera to enable him to view the ground as he flies. But it is a perk of his office he would not give up. For four years, since the Anwar Ibrahim affair, he governed on autopilot, rushing to the four corners of the world for no rhyme or reason, not sitting still long enough to guide. And plunged the country into unrepayable debt, all hidden from both Parliament and the people.

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, returns from a holiday he had to take after a threat to resign, so recalcitrant UMNO delegates would ask him to stay on, backfired. He cried, resigned, and finding the delegates unenthusiastic about it, was persuaded to return. He left stealthily on holiday immediately after, like a thief in the night, and returns this morning (03 July 2002) to an engineered reception of 10,000 UMNO members to welcome him home. He travels out of the country at least twice a month (he leaves within a day for an official visit to Thailand), and such welcome homes are rare.

[NEW] Umno Kelantan is up in arms at the PAS speaker of the Kelantan state assembly for crossing the border into Thailand to take himself another wife. PAS is embarrassed but he is too important a state apparatchik to be cast aside.

UMNO must deny what Haji Taib revealed. If it does not, it would go down, at least in the Malay mind, of a party of adulterers, paedophiles, corrupt ministers, and anti-nationals. When it laid this elaborate trap, it did not for a moment think it came to entrap it. Here is a summary of Haji Taib's revelations: a chief editor of a mainstream newspaper who had an affair with a young girl while his wife lay paralysed in bed; the head of the government's National Fatwar Council had an "illicit" affair; sundry chief ministers and federal cabinet ministers who eloped to Thailand to secretly marry a second wife, had affairs with married women, was corrupt, had a brother arrested for drug trafficking, had affairs or kept as mistresses under-aged girls, had affairs with sister-in-law and diverse singers and artistes. His list is incomplete. He has more to say and so little time and space.

The tiger prawn project looked good on paper, to be a major supplier of tiger prawns to Thailand, Hong Kong and Japan. It is the Malaysian government's belief that any export project must be of large scale, when projects like these are best handled by smallholders with a company providing technical help and buy the prawns from them at a reasonable price. Which is why every government attempt at large projects invariable fail. Tiger prawns are exported in large quantities, often without government help, to countries further afield, and they face no problems. One of the most successful is run by a renegade Islamic preacher who turned to it after his organisation, Darul Arqam, was banned. He is in restricted residence, recently transferred from Rawang to Labuan, but his tiger prawn export firm makes him as successful as Darul Arqam ventures in Central Asia and China.

The California Public Employees Retirement System (Calpers) withdraws its investment funds from Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand for reasons as varied as poor human rights record and money. Malaysia decided it damns her, though she would not spell it out, for the travails of that unheard, unseen man forcibly whiling away his time in a lonely cell in Sungei Buloh Prison. Now, Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam, the retired civil servant and corporate worthy, in a letter to the New Straits Times today (04 March 2002), insists US investors should not dabble in politics, and fears other countries could follow the US lead and skew the international financial structure. He does not say how, but says Calpers investment strategy would make nonsense of the long-term interests of the US and of "free and fair international trade and finance".

Is it the right time to visit Argentina? Yes. The Argentinian crisis, with rioters demanding their money from the banks, is a mirror image of what could happen in Malaysia. It requires but an unintended miscalculation or faux pas to turn the country belly up. The two countries have about the same amount of private and sovereign debt -- about US$100 billion -- though two ambassadors -- one Latin American, one Southeast Asia -- assures me that unlike Argentina, Malaysia has the capacity to repay. Perhaps. But as the Asian financial crisis in 1997 showed, it takes little to turn a setback into a rout when the barbarians are at the gate. Ask Thailand. Malaysia is worse off than Argentina, what with off-the-cuff prescriptions for national disasters. Every policy is made on the run, without discussion or thought, delivered in the most inappropriate of places, and on the whim and fancy of the prime minister.

There is money, lots of it, to be made in this modern slave trade. The son of a former cabinet minister is a multimillionaire in his twenties by controlling the import of workers through the employment agencies his father threw his way. He drives around in cars that each cost more than a Malaysian earned in a life of back-breaking toil. The workers came from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. The list changed with the official mood, and the scams involved were many. One ambassador tried with any seriousness to curtail this trade in his countrymen, but he left before he could: the powers ranged against him, in Malaysia and in Bangladesh, were too strong for him to overcome. The rules are changed so often that corruption is endemic. Only the government insists it is corruption-free, but it is the name of the game in every sphere in which the government is involved. But with each change in the regulations opens yet another avenue for corruption.

The defence minister, and the man the Prime Minister would rather have as his successor, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, made a curious announcement shortly after the Lima defence show was over this month: Malaysia would buy main military tanks. It was not explained what this meant, nor why, nor what it cost, nor even if they were suitable for the tropical forests in which they would operate. But the main battle tanks he talks about are heavy-duty and heavy tanks for offence for use in a terrain Malaysia does not have. The United States have the A-1 M-1 Abrams tanks and the Russians the T-72. Neither can stand up to the rigours of the tropical jungles in Malaysia. So, why is Malaysia interested in main battle tanks that is of no use? Tanks are offensive weapons, for attack than defence. Who is then the enemy? Is it Singapore or Thailand? And how was the decision arrived at?

That, in Mr Selvam's considered view, is not enough. "Perhaps, the police and prisons department should take measures adopted by a neighbouring country. Every prisoner has to be cuffed with leg irons and chains before being escorted to the courts. (The neighbouring country, in Malaysia's silly national euphemism, refers to Singapore, though here it is Thailand he talks of; he is not an official, so he is pardoned for not knowing it!) It is important to Mr Selvam, in what he wrote, that a prisoner, guilty or not, be deprived of his humanity and rights once the police decides he is a dangerous criminal. He is not yet tried in court, and we do not know if he is whom the police say he is and get the conviction it seeks.

The Thai Prime Minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, who is as rich as he is as a successful entrepreneur, transferred most of his wealth to his son, who is now Thailand's richest man. But the declared wealth of the cabinet of RM24 billion (about RM2 billion) is a fraction of one Malaysian cabinet minister's reputed wealth, another's estimated wealth, and of several ministerial pairs.

The Miri Port Authority threatens to sue Mr Lim for libel. He had called it a white elephant. Even if the port is now unusable, it is not a white elephant. Mr Lim should know that white elephants exist only in Thailand. So, Mr Lim has libelled it, presumed the MPA. Its chairman, Mr Edwin Dundang says that Mr Lim, by describing it a white elephant, "has caused irreparable damage to the port's reputation and caused us to suffer huge losses in business." Interesting. I would have thought it suffers huge losses precisely because it is unusable. If it is unusable it is a white elephant.

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