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'Reformasi' without reforms?

THE 'REFORMASI' MOVEMENT, founded to protest a grave injustice, has seen better days. It was the catalyst seven years ago in the most seminal mass movement in Malaysian history equal to, if not more important than, the mass rallies in 1946 which led to UMNO's founding. The issue then and seven years ago rose out of an insult to the Malay psyche: in one the British reducing Malay sultans to colonial ciphers, the other, UMNO defiling Malay cultural mores. Malaysian history will not forget either even if UMNO today reflects British colonial arrogance more than post-colonial Malay confidence. It took UMNO five decades to self-destruct; but barely a decade for the reformasi movement, if it does not reform. To put it bluntly, the reformasi movement knows not if it comes or goes. It has forgotten what it wants or what it ought to do. It has fragmented into amorphous groups, with no unifying thread, and often an embarrassment to the opposition.

So I thought at the gathering to honour the victims of police brutality, and jailing, of reformasi activists in the kerfuffle who rose to support the just sacked then deputy prime minister and UMNO deputy president, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who had raised the ante when he challenged his arrest and humiliation. That struck a common chord with the Malays who discovered their cultural and political common weal hijacked and reduced to hewers of wood and carriers of water. The gathering last night (13 March 2005) at the Century Paradise Club in Taman Melawati, which Dato' Seri Anwar attended, descended at times to farce. It harked back to its glory days, as if that guarantees its future. As UMNO would tell you, it does not. It must have a new focus and a new enemy. But for Hishamuddin Rais's brilliant skit on the prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, which had the few thousand in the audience in stitches, and Dato' Seri Anwar's 30-minute speech, it was dated and irrelevant.

Who would lead it? It is sidelined in part by its shortcomings. The former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is still its target; it should be Pak Lah. It lost its raison d'etre when he resigned five months before last year's general elections. Indeed, the opposition parties, at a two-day retreat, six months before the poll, believed it would do far better, perhaps even capture Kedah, with him as prime minister, but to certain defeat and even annihilation if he stepped down unexpectedly. Dato' Seri Anwar, wedded to the opposition, can be a powerful catalyst to the disparate political parties and groups opposed to the National Front (BN). The reformasi movement should sort itself out to be his stormtroopers. It proved yesterday it could organise. If only it could find its way back to what it was.

Make no mistake: Dato' Seri Anwar has brought new life to the Opposition. PAS has cast aside its religious cobwebs, I am told though I do not yet know how, to challenge the BN on its home ground. It admits it does not have electable leaders to attract the non-Muslims when it offered Dato' Seri Anwar the presidency. The two know that each needs the other if the opposition were ever to defeat the UMNO-led BN in the centre. But the other opposition political parties – the DAP and Parti Keadilan Rakyat, for instance – are caught up in self-induced irrelevancies at the ballot box, prepared to lself-destruct if the other parties would not bend to its views. But is anyone listening to this certain recipe for political suicide? Only PAS appears to have taken the lessons to heart. The others are too comfortable as opposition party leaders to risk it for an opposition coalition that could in time be elected to power.

There are issues aplenty to focus. Nasir Jani's horrific video clips of police brutality against reformasi supporters in the run up to Dato' Seri Anwar's arrest and in the kerfuffle during his court scenes led police to decide Yahya Ismail's poliical missive, "Khairy Jamaludin: Bakal Perdana Mentri?" controversial, and seize copies from shops selling it. Its taste of blood then leads it to take the law now into its own hands when it wants and at the behest of UMNO and the BN government, and how dangerous it has become as guardians or law and order. The video is a series of powerful images to show why anti-government protests and demonstrations could get ugly in the future, with the police viewing even innocent gatherings as a direct threat to the security of the nation. Nothing in it was new, but I was disturbed nevertheless at the police belief that he who challenges authority for however noble a cause should expect to be kicked and assaulted by police, and that in six years it has become the government's brutal private security force means more blood must flow if it is not restrained.

For all its defects and shortcomings, the reformasi movement sharpened the divide between the political and cultural Malay. The Malay will stand up, in government and opposition, to be counted; but not the non-Malay, who has become a parasite in politics, in business, in every sphere. The non-Malay BN politicians would utter not a word if they can help it. But permanent serfdom is not their option. So they venture into the public domain periodically to assure their communities they look after their interests. But this often boomerangs. The MCA demands in public more Chinese schools under the Ninth Malaysia Plan, but it opened a can of worms instead. UMNO is equally insistent there should be fewer Chinese schools. The MIC discovered the Indian community is more than its members, and invited non-MIC groups for advice on how the Indians could get more help under the five-year plan. With the same results. The non-Malay opposition parties with a similar focus can but self-destruct or survive as irrelevant adjuncts in a Malay-led coalition.

The BN non-UMNO parties have no hope for a stronger role; but the opposition non-Malay parties can still write their own role. But they must be more active than they are in multiracial politics. The near absence of Indians and Chinese at yesterday's gathering is the norm. If they want to be taken seriously by the Malays, they must not only turn up in numbers, but insist on taking part. They must constantly negotiate for a larger political space in a future coalition. Unfortunately, non-Malay leaders in BN or the opposition would fight for this ideal, one by serfdom, the other on its terms. This is not to say the Malays are united. They are not. But they regroup when their future is in question or mortgaged. This unity is their strength. The divide now is, at its base, if politics or culture should dominate. That it is so divisive comes from the differences bottled up over the decades. What opened it into the public domain is the reformasi movement. There is no movement of like mind in the Chinese, Indian and other non-Malay communities in Malaysia.

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