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A tryst with destiny

WHEN THE HISTORY OF Malaysia comes to be written in other than the tempestuous present, one man will loom large in her first 50 years. More than the political leaders, he will emerge as the glue that held together a nation prescribed and formulated by politics and its leaders.

He had an important role in the formation of Malaya and Malaysia, was the public face of Malaysian diplomacy even after he retired to enter active politics. His legacy is mixed. That is not unexpected since his flaws are as dominant - on occassion - as his strengths.

He is all but forgotten now, a victim of his brilliance, faults, political miscalculations, his over-reaching ambition, remarkable penchant for attracting immense loyalty and hatred in equal measure, and a prime minister in the final years of his public career who viewed any who second-guessed him as a traitor.

In a nation which hurries to forget the past, the 21 years out of office marks him out as a non-person. Many indeed think Ghazali Shafie is dead. He is not.

He lives quietly, except for visits from old friends and the odd foreign visitor. His health could be better, occasionally is forgetful, but his razor-sharp mind flares into brilliance when the conversation starts flowing. He has mellowed with age, his comments draw on his five decades of public life and two in retirement, and his advice still sought by diplomats, researchers, the prime minister and others.

His arrogant intellect resented his forced withdrawal from public service, as he drifted into a private sector where he was all at sea, only to find that while his intellect was in demand, those who sought it also in time took away his self-respect, landing him in outrageous financial scandals at home and abroad and at much personal cost.

In retrospect he now accepts he should have retired into a sinecure with his talents put to better use. But as Ghazali Shafie, diplomat, bureaucrat, cabinet minister, thinker, a towering if abrasive personality, now says ruefully, one cries only after spilling the milk.

Authority on Asean

On March 22, his 83rd birthday, his friends threw a birthday party for him. He did not know of it until they turned up at his house in Subang Jaya that afternoon. He is not used these days to have more than a few call on him at a time, and dazed when a dozen did.

He was in his favourite armchair, nursing a cup of coffee, when we arrived. Several came with books, others with flowers, a few sent birthday cards, a neighbour baked a cake, and to throw him off the scent, the house was not decorated as on previous birthdays. In minutes, he perked up, and from then on, was the life of the party.

We moved to the dining table, he was in an unusually gregarious mood for talk, and in between nibbling the food and the cakes, conversation flowed. His incisive comments on Malaysia's conundrum in her foreign affairs, notably her deteriorating relations with her Asean neighbours, could offend - not for what he said but for his tart comment that Asean is not what it once was because its leaders do not even pretend to consult each other even on bilateral issues.

He talked of the old days when he was at the centre of Asean and how the leaders, at all levels, were in touch, and discussed issues well before they came public. And so it went on for a few hours. When we left three to four laters, he was enjoying it so much that he persuaded several of us to stay back, which we did, until it was time for him to go to bed.

I have had a love-hate relationship with him for four decades. Our first meeting did not herald a good start. As a young Reuters reporter in Singapore, I had barged into the VIP room at Kallang airport in Singapore where he and then Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew were huddled in discussions over Malaysia.

He glared at me, and chewed me up in no uncertain terms for being there. But I also walked away with enough information about why he was there.

My next encounter with him was in 1965 when I was on a week's holiday in Bangkok from my assignment in Vietnam, and bumped into him, Benny Moerdani (the later Indonesian armed forces chief but then Garuda airways manager in Thailand) and Thai foreign minister Thanat Khoman.

I had walked inadvertently into their room at a seafood restaurant instead of one further down where my friends were. He glared at me, took me aside, and threatened to have me jailed if I were to even breath about it to anyone. But he also told me what the meeting was about: the early talks that ended the confrontation between Malaysia and Indonesia.

I mentioned the gist of it to the Reuters manager in Bangkok, Maitri Sirichotiratna, and he called his sources and by the morning, he had written about the talks that had started. It was a decade later that he allowed me to write about it in detail.

But I was still an outsider, as I was to find out in the aftermath of the May 13 racial riots in 1969, in Malaysia. The Hindustan Times editor Ajit Bhattacharjea, for whom I wrote freelance articles, was in Kuala Lumpur and was to meet Ghazali.

I went with him but I was told to stay out. I was then the Malaysian correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, and he was annoyed with my commentaries on Malaysian politics, and took particular pleasure at scolding me for my sins of omission and commission. I have lost count of the times he threatened to throw me into detention under the Internal Security Act.

I think he tolerated me because I would stand up to him and was not cowed by his arrogant demeanour or his temper. By the time he thought, wrongly as it turned out, that he, and not Dr Mahathir Mohamad, would be deputy prime minister under Hussein Onn, I could talk to him in confidence, and he would tell me what he would not to others of the background to events of the day.

Flawed policy

He was an outsider in Umno politics. Hussein, who succeeded Abdul Razak Hussein as prime minister in January 1976, relied on Ghazali heavily and wanted him as his deputy prime minister. But he was not an Umno vice-president.

When this was known, the three vice-presidents, Ghafar Baba, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Mahathir, in a demarche to Hussein threatened to not serve under him if one of them was not made deputy prime minister. That ended Ghazali's chances. And so it turned out.

But he is not one to take defeats or slights to heart, and buried himself into his work. Now that he had ruled himself out of the top job, his effectiveness as a cabinet minister almost equalled his bureaucratic abilities as a civil servant.

He prospered under Hussein, but not when Mahathir became prime minister. The two men had got off to a bad start, but a modus vivendi was reached, and Ghazali in foreign office provided a perfect foil for Mahathir as prime minister.

It was not to last, as Mahathir took Malaysia on a course different from what had been laid down. Ghazali fought against it, but it was a losing battle. Mahathir was intent on taking Malaysia to new directions via a sociological worldview of forcing the Malay, screaming and kicking, into the modern age peremptorily. But he did not have the political backing to force it through.

The traditional Malay resented this drastic changes to his lift at the expense of his culture, and rebelled. But Mahathir's policies attracted much support since it meant that the supporters would be wealthy indeed. The policy was flawed from the start, as Ghazali had said, in public and private, but Mahathir was not about to have naysayers in his midst. It was Ghazali who had to go.

Today, he is all but forgotten, except by those in politics who owed him, in one way or another, their success. He has numerous friends around the world and those he befriended in his tryst with destiny.

When I asked if he would act differently if he were to have his life all over again, he said: “No. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have made mistakes. Who hasn’t?"

Does he have any regrets?

"Yes. I was present at the creation of Malaya and Malaysia, of bringing Sabah and Sarawak into the federation, and of not being enthusiastic of Brunei in it. Yet I am today remembered for the plane crash 25 years ago in which I reportedly died!"

That is the way of the world, I said, and repeated Mahathir's reaction when he was found alive. He was with V David, the opposition politician and trade unionist, when news came of his rescue.

"Why can't he be like others and die in plane crashes?" Mahathir said when he told David the news. He was not the first to wish that.

Ghazali has outlived most of his detractors, but will not write his memoirs.

"I have nothing to hide, or explain. My life is an open book. All I have is the judgment of history. Whether it is for the good or the bad is not for me to speculate.”

[This is my Chiaroscuro column in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) today, 28 March 2005.]

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