MGG Pillai Commentary View

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Losing the plot – and hope

UMNO LEADERS HAVE LOST the plot. A fortnight after Dato' Seri Anwar is released from prison, he is the only issue they have. The only news that matters of Malaysian politics, as the mainstream newspapers see it, is he, not UMNO or its general assembly or indeed its triennial elections next week. If it is not to decry him or his future in Malaysian politics, it is UMNO's fear and loathing of the man. And this of one the UMNO supreme council decreed should never ever soil the party with his membership. Is that the issue here? After all, UMNO gleefully points out to any who would listen that whatever the courts might say, he is a sodomist, that he is barred from party politics for five years, that he would be 61 by then and 'too old' to start the grind to be prime minister.

The incoming UMNO deputy president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, said yesterday: "We don't want to be sidetracked by one issue over one individual." Besides the general assembly is bigger than that. Which is why he wants it to focus on the future of the Malay race, Islam and Malaysia. "It should not be sidetracked by one issue over one individual," he reiterated. His views are a consensus of UMNO leaders about Dato' Seri Anwar and the UMNO general assembly. Which is not surprising when official reactions are formulated on the well-known monkey see-monkey do principle. So the mess UMNO is in, is thoroughly understandable.

There is no reason for UMNO to be so dangerously and possibly lethally disoriented. Its network of division and branch leaders, elected members of parliament and state assembly, the state government it controls should have allowed the ground to be well-informed of issues like that of an Anwar out of jail; its control of the mainstream media gave it a unique control of whatever it wanted Malaysians to know of its actions and policies. But it waxed fat on its laurels, and what mattered is that the top leaders should be known as intelligent, inflexible men and women who had only the best intentions for the men and women who voted them in. The newspapers, radio and television did not know what sycophancy meant but practiced it with a vengeance.

Any who challenged the officially certified view is roughly treated. Any who challenged the status quo, however rationally and with good reason, were pushed poste haste to the scrap heap. No one dared to challenge the status quo. If one did, one quickly sued for peace, and one's political future only what the Great Leader decided. One did. UMNO reacted brutally, sacked him, arrested him, beat him, convicted him, jailed him in what turns out to have been a grand conspiracy involving the best and the brightest in the land. He is now out of jail, cannot be in party politics for another four years, but he raises the ante with every press conference or article, and UMNO steers itself determinedly into a quicksand.

For all the UMNO-led National Front (BN) government's commitment to information technology, its espousal of the Multimedia Super Corridor that is bigger in area than the Republic of Singapore, there is not a single UMNO website that takes on the numerous sites that look at local politics that challenges its world view. It is not that UMNO does not have the means or the tools to do so. But because it believes that power comes from nowhere but the "wahyu" (breath) of the Great Leader, no one dares to take on its challengers. I speak often to several UMNO intellectual heavyweights. I respect what they say. I urge them to come out arguing the attacks against UMNO intellectually, and force a changing of the mind. They would not. There stand to lose too much. When Dato' Seri Anwar was appointed deputy prime minister in 1993, the then prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, assigned senior civil servants and intelligence officials to his personal office. When he was sacked five years later, so were they; for many their businesses, lives and family life were ruined; they remain pariahs to this day as Dato' Seri Anwar is. It is not the life they aspire. In any case, why should they put their families at risk for saying that UMNO must re-orient to survive?

UMNO could still be turned around. But it would be at heavy cost. This, I am afraid, it is not prepared to pay. The newspapers, radio and television it controls should be turned around to spread the UMNO message with intellectuals arguing its shortcomings, with readers and listeners invited to share their views. It must move away from treating the media as the public relations arm of the Great Leader. They should be run professionally, their future determined solely by the intellectual content and how seemlessly it has turned it around into an organ of weight. The present system of editors sacked when a new Great Leader appears, or when he is dissatisfied, is not how to run it. Mr Lee Kuan Yew, in the early days of Singapore, had a cast iron rule: if Singapore television carried items about him for more than 60 seconds, there was hell to pay. He understood how the media worked and turned it to his advantage. In UMNO, it is those who barely read newspapers who are in charge of information and media policy. It is not that the government does not know of this. I have been invited to several private meetings with senior politicians and civil servants to talk of this, but I fear this is only to show they mean business than any desire to do anything about it.

Which is why they now pay for it. The Najib gaffe is only one. Why was Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's son-in-law at Dato' Seri Anwar's house on the night of his release? The official spin is to help him obtain a passport quickly so he could leave for Munich. Does he issue passports? What happened to the Immigration Department? If anyone should have gone to see him that night, it should have been an immigration officer, not even its director-general. Or is this a tacit acceptance that the civil servants do not obey the prime minister? Is this why the only beneficiaries of this year's budget is the civil service and other institutions, like the police and armed forces?

When your spin is amateurish, it does not take long for it to be dismissed out of hand. In this case, the worst UMNO Youth and Mr Khairy could have done is for the youth chief, Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, to say that Mr Khairy, his new deputy youth chief, has explained it and there is nothing untoward or unusual about it. Mr Khairy says in an interview with the Star that he went there to help Dato' Seri Anwar with his passport. Dato' Seri Najib is so frightened that Mr Khairy visited Dato' Seri Anwar at his father-in-law's instructions to seek his help to destroy the new deputy president. Dato' Seri Anwar, when I asked him about it, said it was a private chat and not about his passport. If the UMNO deputy president is nervous about the visit, it reflects the utter fear and loathing in UMNO about this man. And it responds amateurishly. The spin doctors spin uncontrollably for the Great Leader, who himself spins with it, and complains of headaches (as he did to an old friend recently). Dato' Seri Anwar has yet to respond. UMNO does not want to think of what then. Its first priority is to the Malay race, Islam and Malaysia. That is its mantra of hope. Or is it hopelessness?

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