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When proud men on horseback are reduced to donkeys on apple carts ...

THE MALAYSIAN ARMED FORCES should have been proud of the moment, and savour it: a Sandhurst-trained Yang Dipertuan Agung, the first ever, inspecting the guard of honour at his official birthday on Saturday, 05 June 2004, at the Dataran Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur. It is rare for the King to be conscious of military traditions - only one other had that insight. Instead, the MAF let its supreme commander-in-chief down. To the public at large, and all who care not what the armed forces stand for, all went well and they had a jolly good time. The old Land Rovers are gone. In its place comes the gleaming Lexus open-hooded sports utility vehicles. And with them, a distinct lack of professionalism that was once its metier. The spartan conditions of old was deliberate: one does not go to war in luxury vehicles.

Some brilliant functionary in the defence department and protocol departments must have come up with these luxury vehicles, not the functional military vehicles the Land Rover earned its name. Everything went spic and span. The oohs and the aahs of the crowd at this display of pomp and ceremony should have caused many an unmilitary civil servant glow with pride at a job well done. No doubt, the armed forces chiefs would also have been proud of the moment, and nudging each other as if to show what "our" boys are capable of.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The MAF's preparations for what should have been its highlight for the year were - to mince no words - shoddy, demeaning, utterly irresponsible. It should hang its head in shame, and raises doubts about its readiness for battle, let alone war. The armed forces prepare for war in peace-time, their waking hours spent on training and preparing the troops for war. Which is why officers and men in most countries present a professional front: they train and re-train for battle and war, in readiness and high alert at all times, so that they act instinctively when danger or conflict beckons .

Preparing for the guard of honour would, or should, have begun months earlier. Nothing should have been left to chance. The details should be checked, re-checked, and re-checked again, until there could be no mistake, mishap. They were not. And it was left to the world to find out how unprofessional the MAF has turned out to be. If the MAF could make the unpardonably stupid mistake of placing upside down the King's ensign of the field marshal, how could we in confidence expect that when push comes to shove, the armed forces would not run helter skelter because it forgot, or did not bother about, the details and went to battle without weapons?

The field marshal's ensign is a circle of five stars in a background of colours representing the three services. The British and Commonwealth practice is followed in Malaysia, with the light blue colours of the air force at the top, the red of the army in the centre, and the dark blue of the navy at the bottom. That is how it should be displayed. But on the Lexus, the dark blue is on top. The supreme commander-in-chief took the salute with his ensign upside down. As recent as three decades ago, the colonel in charge would have been resigned to escape a court martial; in earlier centuries, he would have been shot. The chief of the armed forces, General Tan Sri Zaidi Zainuddin, who accompanied the King when taking the salute, should have personally checked this detail well before the parade. He did not.

But he will be declared blameless. That is the Malaysia Boleh way of doing things. The hapless private or sergeant who does not know what the ranks stand for or the traditions behind it except that it is the King's ensign would in the end be punished for it. All others would sleep well. But why is not one surprised this happened in the watch of General Tan Sri Zahidi? He had never commanded a brigade but rose to the highest rank in the armed forces. He is a political general, having risen to the top without combat experience and his promotions helped by political influence. Old timers recall that when he commanded the 9RMR - the Ninth Royal Malay Regiment - and contact was established with the 'enemy', the remnants of Malaysia's communist insurgents, it was he who cracked first, and had to be brought around by his less experienced but more resolute junior officers.

A lieutenant colonel I spoke to thought I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill. I am not. Indian Brigadier Dalve's 'The Himalayan Blunder', his account of the 1961 Sino-Indian war in which he was the highest Indian officer taken prisoner by Chinese troops in that war, recounts that the blunder in the war was that a lieutenant-general from the army service corps was catapaulted into the army chief's job - he was a cousin of the then prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and appointed in the hope that he would be pleased - that led to a litany of bumbling organisation and shortage of key military material and co-ordination. India learnt from that mistake, and the professionalism that it is now famous for comes from that brutal determination not to allow the politicians to decide for it. Besides, it is too professional an army to want to run the country. Its biggest grouse is that it is the most professional of Indian arms and it baulks at being called for be part of the forces putting down civil disorder. There is a similar tradition in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

We had had such a tradition until the advent of Tun (then Dato' Seri) Mahathir Mohamed as Prime Minister in 1981. He did not believe in tradition, developed Malaysia as a bull in a china shop, casting aside traditions and long-standing civic and civil practices, consigning meritocracy to the birds, to remake a Malaysia in his own image, with all organs of state, the military included, beholden to him and him only: one who owed no respect to the past, believed history was bunk, traditions are best consigned to history's dustbin, the present is the best indicator of what is to come, not one's past. He was afraid of the armed forces, so he emasculated it, with, let us mince no words about it, the help of his brother-in-law, General Tan Sri 'Freddy' Hashim Ali, who stayed on as armed forces chief for too long after retirement, and destroyed the army cadre. In turn, he got a poodle of an army, waxing fat of the land, with nothing to show for it.

Occasionally, some bones are thrown it - in the form of expensive weaponry, ships, submarines, fighter planes - but with no means to use them effectively. Our air force's greatest claim to fame is the regularity with which it crashes it high-tech fighter planes. Now the emphasis is on overpriced submarines, aircraft and weapons. We have not invested in the men who would man them. So we would have these state-of-the-art weaponry, but withought the wherewithal to use them, and we are happy we have an army that tiny but well-armed Singapore would not shiver at its name. Our armed forces have descended into the realm of the Third World. Its terrible state - beholden to civilian authority, naked without its support, political officers of field rank, unprofessional men in arms who know their future lies in political influence and connexions - is when proud men on horseback are reduced to donkeys in apple carts.

A personal example. I used to lecture once or twice a year for almost a decade until the late 1980s at the Malaysian Staff College and then at Highgate - or as it is spelled here, Haigate - the Malaysian Command Staff College at the Ministry of Defence in Kuala Lumpur. My subject all those years was Singapore threat perceptions. One year, at the MSC, I discussed how Malaysia could pre-empt a war by dropping animals, snakes and other inhabitants of the forest from a low-flying aircraft on the island. It upset the Singapore officers at the course. I was dropped. A Singaporean henceforth took my place. I moved to Highgate to lecture. I ran into the same problem. I left, but not before I was asked to be an examiner for the written paper each participant wrote on one aspect of the defence of Malaysia. None had thought of Sabah and Sarawak in their defence, except in passing, one, a Sarawakian. He got the highest mark I gave, 2 out of 10 (the others, more liberal, gave between 7 and 9); the lowest was zero, for not even mentioning the two states. Now, Sabah and Sarawak is integral to any paper written in subsequent years on Malaysia's defence.

There were red faces all around when I explained why. Why should Sabah and Sarawak be loyal to Malaysia when they are regarded only as convenient appendages to rape and plunder. If the armed forces regarded Sabah and Sarawak as integral to Malaysia, then it should defend it with all they have, as they would the peninsular. Half a dozen generals called me out to dinner one night shortly after to discuss this. They apologised for what happened, but said the Singapore High Commission had protested. I asked why they had to. I was, after all, a civilian albeit one interested in strategic and military affairs but more important a Malaysian talking to Malaysian officers who would soon be of field rank - brigadier-generals and above, and one who could be armed forces commander in a decade - about threat perceptions from Singapore.

Are these officers so mollycoddled that they are frightened of the prospect, or more important did not have the brains to dismiss what I had to say if they thought what I said could not stand muster? Unfortunately, by then the rot had set in. It is now capped with Malaysia's supreme commander-in-chief inspecting his troops with his ensign upside down. Some heads must roll. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, as defence minister, must act quickly, and demand heads. It is so galling and inexcusable a mistake that senior officers must be punished for what happened. A simple question to ask here is this: Would a general takes matters as lightly if his ensign was upside down on the vehicle he travells in? If he is on the watch over the King's ensign, he could not do worse than resign his commission.

[This also appeared in my Chiaroscuro column in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) today, 11 June 2004, under the title: A royal screw-up.]

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

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