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Byzantine manouevres in the BN court

WHEN CABINET MINISTERS DEFEND the indefensible, they first blame others. They are deemed incapable of sin and wrongdoing; and others, including their cabinet colleagues, are culpabale beyond belief. Appointment to the cabinet makes one a demi-god; his words – however asinine, stupid, or wrong – reported with the gravity of voice when reading off a thousand-year text, but which makes an untutored one wonder, listening to the rubbish, if he has lost his marbles. But when ministers are appointed as a life-time appointment, they get ideas beyond their station, and soon begin to believe that they are elavated not into the laps of the gods, but as gods. Blame is transferred to even cabinet colleagues, when it is rightly and properly laid at his foot. Is the newly built hospital unusable? It does not matter who built it, it is the health ministry who must take the blame. A flyover has collapsed? It someone other than who built it. Landslips on the highway? It cannot be the works ministry. The privatisation contracts after all are given out by the Treasury.

This blame-evading is a fine art. The politician and civil servant learns it early in their careers. Scapegoats are all over and easy to target. The higher in rank the scapegoat, the more culpable the minister shifting blame. When he targets his own cabinet colleagues, his culpability is certain. He takes great care not to apportion blame on his party colleague, unless he wants him destroyed, and so when the blame falls, the discussion is not on who to blame but if there is bad blood between the two and why. This is taken by all and sundry as how it should be. When Malaysians know no other than what he sees, he begins to believe it is how it must be; and attacks those who ask too many questions, or blame those responsible. He cannot see what the fuss is about, more so when it does not concern him directly, and sees instead an opportunity – one should not forget that the Chinese ideogram for crisis represents both danger and opportunity – profit from it. The cabinet minister is thus on firm ground, especially when it allows him to browbeat his political party to electing him as leader until death in an unholy alliance that leaves the community he represents shortchanged.

Since tens of thousands or more benefit from this gravy train – that is what it boils down to – this belief in one's own invincibility is a political article of faith. But this is challenged. The National Front coalition is not invincible as it once was. For that to be, the Malay community must accept UMNO as its cultural and political leader. For 31 years, until 1987, it did. But the president of the day, one Tun Mahathir Mohamed, felt the ungrateful UMNO wretches did not accept him as president for life, and when his election as president that year was challenged, decided to let UMNO be declared illegal. The courts did the work for him, but the result was one that gladdened his heart. He could now be president for life, and he could keep out of his reborn UMNO those who could disturb the peace by challenging him. Every change in the party rules was not to benefit the members but how he could be returned unopposed as party president. Two strains developed from this: those who wanted to be in politics where the rules are not bent opted out of it altogether or joined the only other Malay political party extant, PAS.

The National Front party presidents then decided if the UMNO leader could, so could they. As the electoral rules were framed in UMNO to prevent other than the incumbents to be elected, so did the coalition partners rush to follow suit. The UMNO president helped in the other party elections by clearly stating his preference as leader, almost always the incumbent. Not unsurprisingly, this geriatric cabal in time represented no one not even, unsurprisingly, themselves. The coalition became a vehicle to beat its communities with. Until it imploded from within. There was no danger of that then, and dissidents could be brought in line with evidence of their corruption or misdoing, sexual or otherwise. It worked every time until the deputy president of UMNO, who questioned what he should not, in National Front amity, question. When that defiance had more support than assumed, he had to be destroyed. What happened after became, despite the tragic consequences, a comedy of errors. Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim was sacked, detained under the Internal Security Act, beaten to a pulp by the Inspector-General of Police no less, jailed for corruption and sodomy in a trial in the Malayan courts that was closer to Judge Jeffreys' court than Solomon's.

It was also a warning for National Front politicians of their fate if they defied their leaders. But because if fell foul of Malay cultural beliefs – a dissident chief could be killed but never ever humiliated, for one – the accuser became the accused. The accused, jailed in defiance of the judiciary's own sentencing rules, perservered to clear his name, and six years after his downfall and humiliation, he is free. It is UMNO that is now in danger of annihilation. The UMNO president who caused the rot, Dr Mahathir was, and even after retirement is, forced to defend his destruction of UMNO in 1987 and of his deputy president in 1998. His governance went downhill after that. It is ironic that if he did not attempt to destroy Dato' Seri Anwar, UMNO would be today in fine fettle and his reputation in history would have been preserved for posterity. Instead, he was forced out of office – forget the spin he went voluntarily; the Anwar excoriating carpings from his prison cell and the world wide condemnations of what he did, was too much for him to take – to be an irrelevant voice in the wilderness. Paradoxically, a stronger Anwar means inevitably a weaker UMNO and BN.

With UMNO leaders, often clueless, running around in cricles, with a president unable to make his presence felt, it imparts a political culture the coalition partners adopt. Even if they do not see where this would lead them to. Malaysians do, and begin to see its dangers on their future and safety. The split within the communities is as serious as amongst the races; between the peninsular and the Borneo states; between the rural and urban centres; between the religions; all helped by an indifferent cabinet which would not allow fresh blood unless proven as irrelevant, or would in time.

It does not matter if Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu blames the finance ministry for his ministry's deficiences; but that he attacks the finance minister of the time – his former patron, Dr Mahathir – is proof his own political future is cloudy as it should have been a decade ago. The UMNO president of the day prefers another Indian to represent the community. Dato' Seri Samy hopes to prevent that by biting the political hand that fed him. He hopes Pak Lah would see this treachery as proof he can be relied upon. But he, like every BN party president, overstates his political importance. He is but another door mat for the UMNO president to step on. The intrigues within would have made the Byzantine court proud. But the BN emperor is encircled by a hostile enemy, the people, as surely as the Ottomans laid seige of Constantinople city walls with an entrapped Byzantium emperor inside. What frightens the BN emperor even more is that he is cornered in his city walls as securely by his Ottoman emperor, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

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