MGG Pillai Commentary View

<< Previous || Next >>

Maid abuse and trial by hysteria

AN INDONESIAN MAID IS tortured and abused. This is not new. Abusing and torturing of foreign maids is taken for granted. No one cares. No one bothers. Apart from a few non-governmental organisations. The government keeps a stiff upper lip. says nothing. Then, last week it comes to light that a teen-aged Indonesian maid named Nirmala Bonat had been horribly tortured and disfigured. It hits the front pages of Malaysia's newspapers. And a hysteria is let loose. Government ministers and others outdid each other to express shock and concern; the NGOs ever shrill to make a point; the newspaper editorials and reports whip up a frenzy; the Attorney-General promises a swift trial and a prospect of 67 years in jail. This threat is part of the trial by hysteria. Law and order has all but broken down. The police cannot do what they must. It forms a 1,000 man force to protect the high and mighty, after a few embassies and residences were robbed. Hysteria led to its formation. But would this help? Not on your life. The police are nowhere to be seen. A mere police presence is enough to deter the wrong doer. The police have decided that the foreigner is more important than the local, his security more important than yours or mine.

Malaysia has long seized to believe in the sanctity of the law and of justice. The Anwar Ibrahim trials and high profile cases where the chief justice goes on holidays with the lawyer for a prominent business man but would not recuse when requested topped the public's contempt for justice in Malaysian courts. There are hundreds more. It is reflected in peculiar ways. Malaysian corporations, when signing contracts, insist on disputes adjudicated by foreign arbitration. The system has broken down. The blame for that must be laid on the former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, who did not have a sense of history, did not understand or care how the system worked, and cared not if it broke down the system. All that mattered to him was this his dictates were implicity obeyed. He did not understand government, nor its workings, nor its history. It is system that provides continuity. In any endeavour the individual should fit into the system, not the other way around. If the system must be changed, an alternative must be at hand. This is what the People's Action Party did in Singapore. This is what Malaysia did not do. This is what the United States did not in Iraq.

So when problems arise, attention is to resolve them at any cost, rather than address if the policy behind it was flawed. For a good reason. No one knows what the policy is. Ministers and civil servants have given up the ghost. When issues like messy traffic accidents, or abused Indonesian maids, or rapes in national service camps, the reaction is the same: engineered but controlled mass hysteria. It erupts as a teacup in a storm and as quickly disappears, usually with no solution. The case of Nirmala Bonat is no different. But the hysteria is sustained also for a cynical purpose: the coming UMNO elections. It allows the UMNO office seekers in the government to tell their voters that they care and they should not forget it when it is election time. The Prime Minister has shown his concern, so has every member of the cabinet. The rule of law is emphasised. The ministers threaten a review of the laws governing foreign maids. Once it was rape. In the ensuing hysteria, one or two arrested were made an example, sentenced to two or more life terms. No one talks of rape these days, although it continues as before. So in this case, though the promised minimum sentence is three life terms.

The book is thrown at the hapless woman who abused her. I do not for a moment excuse her conduct. What she did was wrong. She should be tried, and if convicted, given an exemplary sentence. But she should not be subjected to the mass hysteria that surrounds her. Justice is best served when it is an every day matter, dispensed calmly and void of histrionics or hysteria. The Attorney-General, Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patel, had no right to comment on the case as he did yesterday (21 May 2004). "I want justice to be done. We will ask for the maximum sentence, and definitely for the sentence to run consecutively," he said. Bail will be opposed. A senior prosecutor is assigned to prosecute. If that is how the Attorney-General's Chambers want to handle it, that is fine. But when he says what he intends to do, he puts pressure on the sessions court judge trying her, a not-too-subtle warning that if he does not convict and impose the maximum sentence, then his future cannot be bright in the legal and judicial service. If justice was his aim, which clearly it is not, he should have done all this without cover of publicity and hysteria.

The system is so badly corrupted that silence, especially amongst the highest holders of any office, is not an option. If the political masters decide on a course of action, everyone in any authority must follow without question. The political decision is taken to destroy the then deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, politically and personally, at any cost. The judiciary agreed. The chief justice of the day decided that he cannot defy the political masters. Especially when he presided over the drumming out of his predecessor, and made justice beholden to the political executive. In the Anwar case, the judiciary had creative reasons why it could not be relied upon to judge the case on its merits. When the chief justice and the second highest political figure in the land could be subject to so much injustice, what hope is there for the common man? With this mass hysteria, the accused woman cannot hope for a fair trial. The retort that she does not deserve it is neither here nor there.

This mass hysteria is deliberately engineered, for political and other reasons, to which parties with a vested interest helped to embellish. In times past, the newspapers would have been hauled over the coals, by the Attorney-General no less, to cease and desist if they commented, as they have done, on this horrific case of abuse. Today, he joins the fray. It is a forgone conclusion that the abuser of Nirmala Bonat would be convicted and severely punished. Would it enhance justice? Hardly. Would it prevent other Nirmala Bonats from such abuse? Hardly. Would Malaysia be reputed for its judicial system? Hardly. When justice becomes a nine-day wonder, it reflects its non-existence, not that it flourishes. The chief justice should have stepped in to prevent this hysteria. He did not. The law minister should have stepped in. He did not. But when the Prime Minister himself gets into the act, what did you expect them to do?

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com