MGG Pillai Commentary View

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A miss is as good as a mile

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' SERI Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, is at it again, a preacher railing against sin: instant orders to repair long standing neglect. Too many robberies? Cease and desist! Too many rapes? Let rapists spend three liftetimes in jail. Too few low cost houses built? Build them instantly. Money politics? Produce proof. UMNO suspends officials of a division for bribery? Pox on their houses. Landslides on highways? Repair it instantly. The Palestinian succession? Don't fight over it. Divisions in our society? Do as I say or be damned.

He talks his way around Malaysia's problems, since he took office a year ago, with facile, instant answeres which gets him banner headlines but little else and reveals only his impotence. He is Malaysia's oracle of choice. Ministers can complain and cajole for all they want, but having cried wolf once too often, is ignored. Pak Lah takes over and repeats it. Nothing still gets done but that is often an order to ignore it. And he moves on, leaving the entrails of his outpourings all over as a child after he has done with his toys.

Malaysia's sycophantic press are past masters of this culture of official intentions, carrots and sticks. It reports with the same breathlessness as scientific papers revealling a discovery or invention, but to brown nose the UMNO president of the day. The editorials often is an extension of it. Criticism is only when Putra Jaya allows it. The works minister, Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu, can be as his public works chickens come home to roost. His bad odour with Pak Lah is well known, so he is fair game. As cabinet ministers not close to him or are his political rivals.

The New Straits Times is his megaphone as the Star is the MCA president, Dato' Ong Ka Ting's. The Utusan Malaysia group, led by a different UMNO faction, often descends into the sycophancy which costs the mainstream newspapers dear. I have known cabinet ministers to tear their hair in frustration, when UMNO divisions hold their elections and they are ignored. The deputy prime minister and UMNO deputy president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, is an "enemy", so the press ignore him. When it reports on a convicted politician's desire to mend bridges with Pak Lah, the UMNO ground sees it as an unholy alliance to dislodge the deputy prime minister from his perch. It probably is not but Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim has not lost his political skills in prison, and any act which unnerves UMNO and its leaders is fair game.

What is puerile is this widespread belief, not just amongst politicians, what they say must be reported. Aliran, for instance, does not send their press releases to the NST and the Star since, it says, they do not carry them. Companies hold press conferences not to say something but so they would make the papers. They are upset when they are not, berating the editors for ingratitude and threaten to withhold advertisements. Embassies complain to Wisma Putra when a critical piece of news about their countries or about a dispute with a third country, on the not unusual view amongst them that the government ordered it.

An editor-in-chief was shown the door for, we are told, for putting bilateral ties with a Middle Eastern country at risk. That was not why. The regime was changed, he was ancien regime, and any excuse was good as another. He had also to be shown how dangerous he was, as much an indictment of who put him there. When the newspapers are so narrowly focussed, and accepted as the right arm of government, what is reported is what they can say, no more no less. To keep the diplomatic peace, they are often called up to explain whenever there is a diplomatic protest at what they wrote.

They are, by extension, no better or no worse than party organs. The government does not miss a trick to compare them with opposition party organs. The Southern Thai Muslim affair is reported in critical detail in Thai newspapers with the Thai prime minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawantra, told to explain why he mishandled it. Malaysian newspapers, on their part, sent reporters who reported as a crime story on the streets of Johore Bahru. They went in with their eyes closed, knowing not why, the history, the background, but decided on no evidence that it is a Thai buddhist reaction against defenceless Muslims.

Thai newspapers have criticised Malaysian officials, along with the Thai, for the sharp upsurge of violence in the South. I understand this attack on the Thai Muslims is a diversion from the more serious crisis there: besides a proxy battle between criminal groups, this is also a fight for control of the region between the armed forces and the police. Mr Thaksin is, after all, a former police colonel. Into this melee, and adding a dangerous twist, is the Malaysian meddling which led the two groups to unite against the intruder. As in all cases, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

This is not new. The army was in control until, with Mr Thaksin in charge, the police moved in. But issues are decided here not in thought and national interest but in front of a microphone, a lazy response to a reporter's often irrelevant question. Now it gets out of hand. A flurry of activity ensures, in the belief this shows concern, groups rush hither and thither to contain the conflagration. They cannot. Pak Lah burnt his bridges with Mr Thaksin when he allowed Thailand to crack down on 'terrorists' in the south. Dato' Seri Najib is now to meet Mr Thaksin. If it is Thai police in charge of the south, the Malaysian military across the border can expect more headaches.

Malaysia can at best pick up the pieces after the fact. As with Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is no standard policy on anything: it shifts with prime ministers, cabinet ministers, official, local warlordly reaction to official policy: the water issue with Singapore is one example; Malaysia sending in peacekeepers, at Manila's request, to Mindanao, where Kuala Lumpur has sided in the past with Muslim leaders fighting for autonomy from Manila. I met Mr Nur Misuari, the local Muslim leader at odds with Manila, in Tripoli, Libya, in 1976; he was travelling on a Malaysian passport.

This is in one area of foreign relations; if you look further afield, you see more gaping holes and neglect. Often they are looked at only when it hits the newspapers. But why are we surprised when it happens? When the prime minister decides on policy (to be fair, Pak Lah only follows the practice of his predecessor), as a glib answer to a reporter's question, it shows not control but lack of it. It was the arrogant asumption of Malay rule – though that could be justified to right a gross colonial wrong of Malay irrelevance – when this irrelevance, underwritten by UMNO, became official policy.

Somewhere along the line it dealt with the outside world as it did the inside. This has done some damage though not much for no reason than that in the sceme of things, Malaysia is, to put it mildly, off the map in world affairs beyond that of their neighbours. But it back well inside now, in this disastrous global war on terror, for it supports some whom Washington has decided are promoters of it. Most of whose charged for it in the United States and Indonesia has had Malaysian links.

Meddling in foreign affairs, especially when one has strategic interests with it, is the hidden side of diplomacy. It is not discussed in genteel circles, but it is only in degree that one national state differs in its use than another. But we do not have a consistent policy on it, shifting for political reasons and without thought about whom we sacrifice. The political arrogance of untrammelled power and with it this believe in invincibility can hold only so long as there is no power vaccuum. Then it is a matter of time when all hell breaks loose.

We see extreme examples of this in internal policies and projects are affected for no reason than fasion. But it cannot be sustained for the public disbelieves the official spin. Pak Lah must distance himself from the policies of the past for which he had a high role: the ground rebels and disbelieves when told why. When spin is used widely to convince what is unconvincing, it had better be good. But this spin is created on the run, and discarded in short shrift. It is the end result of a political policy that the citizen's role is only to elect it to power. Thirty years in power, a generation, after the 1969 racial riots, with Malay dominance, without defining out what it is, dictating policies in isolation, the Malays are back to where they are in 1969.

The UMNO general assembly two months ago had no doubt about it. It evoked a dangerous Malay agenda, not for what it contains but for what it means. If no progress is made when the 2007 assembly comes around – how could it when it could not in 30 years? – it could as easily descend into a Chinese agenda, to blame the community for Malay problems. What frightens in this is that Pak Lah, for whatever reason, did not argue against. it. He could not. He knows the consequences. If UMNO cannot honour it, it could go the way of Parti Negara.

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