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The fracas at Kamunting reveals the ISA for what it is

THE INTERNAL SECURITY ACT, AN EXTRACONSTITUTIONAL law against enemies of the state, now imprisons political opponents of the government. Where once detainees' only crime was that they differed intellectually and in practice with the government, today such distinctions are blurred so anyone the government considers a threat, real or imagined, to its continuance in office is picked up. It is now also a useful weapon to instil fear amongst the people if they spouted anti-government views. So, the lot of the ISA detainee is worse now than it ever was. The Emergency Regulations, which preceded it, was to contain the Communist threat, and hundreds, mostly Chinese, were hanged or detained in the 12 years between 1948 and 1960, when the ISA succeeded it. This has been amended so often since so enemies of the state include any opposed to the government. Worse, all the safeguards in the Emergency Regulations and the ISA in 1960 have been removed. The onus is on the detainee to prove he is not an enemy of the state, and without knowing why.

The capriciousness with which it is employed frightens. The promised due care and attention before and after arrest is but bureaucratic double-talk. The Home Minister is to decide, after weighing the evidence, if a detainee should be released or detained. Today that is a formality. If the police says he is a danger, who is the Home Minister to decide otherwise? And once in, he remains there until he decides to confess his sins, still often without knowing why he is there, die, or the authorities decide that keeping him is more dangerous than releasing him.

The late James J. Puthucheary, the prominent advocate and solicitor and an active trade unionist and politician earlier, told me once how when he was detained in Changi prison in the 1950s, the British colonial secretary of the day came to see him, knocked on the open cell door and asked if it was convenient to see him. James brusquely said it was not. The man went away and came back a few days later, established a friendship that lasted until the man's death decades on. Ten years' later, in independent Singapore, in a second bout of detention, all these niceties had disappeared. It is worse now. The former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, was bound and trussed after his arrest under the ISA in 1998 when the then Inspector-General of Police, Tan Sri Rahim Noor, beat him to a pulp. The New Straits Times editor-in-chief, Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad, was promised release from ISA in December 1976 if he provided a statement the authorities wanted. He gave it, but he remained in detention for another five years.

The regimen is so tight that even visits from lawyers are bound in bureaucratic harrassment. In Kamunting, where ISA detainees are sent, the once enlightened wardens have made way for bureaucratic yes-men, willing to do what is demanded of them, with little thought to rehabilitation or detainees' needs. More money is spent to make the life of the wardens comfortable than the detainees: A nine-hole golf is built for them in the Kamunting detention camp. The petty harassment of the wardens on family visitors is compounded by pettier restrictions on the detainees. The wardens demand that they be obeyed without question, and a law unto their own hands. If they decide that food brought in on family visits is excessive, the detainees are invited to buy them from the camp canteen the wardens' families have set up outside the camp gates.

So the fracas at the Kamunting camp on Monday last week (05 May 2003) was one waiting to happen. Five detainees - the Reformasi 5 - were due in Kuala Lumpur for one of several cases against them for breaching the peace and worse. One, Dr Badrul Amin Haron had blood pressure so high that even the camp doctor agreed he was medically unfit to travel. But the prison wardens insisted he travel. Hot words were exchanged. Another, Lokman Haron, took matters into his own hands, and badly bruised the lips of a prison warden. The five came to Kuala Lumpur as scheduled, only to find the case postponed yet again. On their return, they found their belongings vandalised, and a garden another detainee, Hishamuddin Rais, kept, levelled. He was so upset he broke a flag pole. Worse, as the KeADILan vice president, Dr Xavier Jayakumar, told a press conference on Sunday 10 May, 30 officers in riot gear and plain clothes charged into the dormitory of the detainees on Saturday.

"When Tian Chua went to see what the commotion was all about, he was slapped a couple of times and pushed to the ground. He was wearing only his sarong and in the ensuing struggle, the sarong was removed and he was pinned to the ground and handcuffed. Some of the officers sat on him and the bruise marks o­n his body are clearly visible to his family members who visited him today. When Hishamuddin Rais (one of the ISA 5) came to help out, he was also handcuffed and put into solitary confinement for o­ne hour," he said. There had been bad blood between the Reformasi 5 and the wardens and this built up. The camp commandant later met the Reformasi 5 on Saturday and, after discussing the incidents, accepted his wardens had over-reacted, and apologised. But he said nothing about a lawyer being denied entry into the camp to visit the detainees after the camp officers' vandalised the dormitory.

But is this the end of the affair? No, not by any means. Their two-year detention ends on 01 June 2003. If the detention is renewed, then they have to stay two more years. The political situation for UMNO is risky enough for the Home Minister to keep them detained. So the current thinking. By all accounts they have not been rehabilitated. But what is rehabilitation? No one knows. No one talks to them to find out what they think and believe in. One former detainee said the only rehabilitation that the government would accept is that the detainee see the light, renounce his links to the Opposition political party, and join a party in the BN, "for that is the only hope for a prosperous and happy Malaysia." What then do you do with a man like Hishamuddin Rais, a man I have known well for years, and to whom joining a political party is anathema? He subscribes to no political party, espouses no political ideology, and describes himself as an NGI - non-governmental individual.

The government should investigate what happened, punish those camp officers who took the law into their own hands, and issue a full statement on the affair. Preventive detention of this sort is depressingly common in many countries. The elightened regimen of old is no more. I read a depressing book of writings by literate people in independent countries in several corners of the world. Many leaders had been detained, and broken, in their struggle for independence, that when they came to power and arrested their opponents under the same laws, suitably defanged, and insisted that his enemies be broken, intellectually if not physically. A Kenyan writer wrote, after his detention, that President Jomo Kenyatta, was broken in this manner, and he gave no quarter to those he ordered detained. While those like Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu are remembered as giants in their midst. Which probably accounts why few pre-independent anti-colonial giants retained their stature after a few years in office. The ISA is here to stay. The BN government is not about to abolish it or tightens its provisions so that the Reformasi 5 and their ilk could not be detained. When death loses its sting, who would fear death?

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my