MGG Pillai Commentary View

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What is a tun worth?

THE ROYAL MALAYSIA POLICE is up in arms about a crime committed. To make sure that it means business, it informs the press. There is only one problem with it: the story is false. But falsity about anything matters little with the press, particularly the New Straits Times. There is before the RMP a slew of police reports – about cabinet ministers and their corruption, with assorted proof – that the former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim had filed for which the judge who sentenced him in the sham trial and for which he has since been acquitted by the federal court has now been appointed to that bench – which the RMP takes no notice of. But it jumps at this report that Tun Ghazali Shafie, former foreign and interior minister, has been cheated by his former personal assisant. I did ask the Tun when he was in hospital recently about the state of his dispute with him former secretary, who has not returned him documents in her care, which he said he valued more than the "baubles" in her care, which his former driver told the police about, and which the New Straits Times reported in wrongful detail a few days later. The point is he Tun Ghazali did not make any police report, he had long ruled it out in this dispute with his former secretary, who is closer to his wife, from whom he is estranged.

But the news report suggested he made the police report. He did not. The RMP send a delegation for details about the case, and he gave a statement, which he is in law bound to, but he made it clear then he had no dispute with his former secretary that required a police report. Yet it became an issue which the New Straits Times group of newspapers went to town with. The fact is Tun Ghazali Shafie did not file a police report, and the news item was much ado about nothing. That the reporters who wrote about it knew who Tun Ghazali is or was did not matter: there were from the school of reporting in which facts mean least of all, all that matters is a sensational story in which truth and accuracy mean nothing. Those days when a police report assumed a confidentiality is now more. It is now commonplace for the police to tell reporters of police reports, or as in this case, without the police investigating the truth of a police report. The police assumed the driver was right, that Tun Ghafar was wrong, and action needed to be taken. The reporter, for the New Straits Times, assumed that the police and the report was right, and went ahead to assume that even when the story was right, even when it was wrong.

A scoop was what it thought it had. The newspaper was shortchanged with the announcement of his Tunship. A television station linked to the New Straits Times reported the event as "amongst those awared Tun was the chief justice of Malaysia", thus evading having to mention the other, Tun Ghazali Shafie. The RMP has its own reasons to downgrade Tun Ghazali. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, informed the RMP, at the spur of the moment, that he wanted to visit an address in Wangsa Baiduri. A police detail arrived minuites ahead wanting to find out whose house it was. Pak Lah arrived, kept the police out, and remained with Tun Ghazali, who is ill and in bed, in his bedroom, along for nearly an hour. The police could not understand why this should be so, why Pak Lah did not take the police into his confidence that they were kept aside. So his driver's report of Tun Ghazali's problem with his secretary was used by the RMP to destroy Tun Ghazali's credibility. And destroy it the RMP did. It revealed the police report, which ought to have been confidential, and the New Straits Times wrote of the incident as if it were the gospel. There is only one problem with it: He did not file a police report, all the questions he anwswered were police questions on the report he did not file.

Neither has Pak Lah spoken about the incident, not even to the police detail surrounding him. In this age of there being no secrets, this is terrible. So the man has to be taught a lesson he would not forget. The police, and the press, do not like surprises. So a police report filed by someone else, who is not even in his employ, to damn Tun Ghazali. And the press play along. But it is the RMP that has now to answer. Is a police report secure? Obviously, it longer is. A report appears in the day's press the moment it is filed, and the police, for whatever reason, decide to release it for public consumption. The truth of it does not matter. The fightening reversal of this is that reports are hidden when it suits the RMP, or the authorities. Otherwise, why has not the RMP taken notice of the several reports filed by Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim of flagrations of the law by his former cabinet colleagues? Or more frighteningly, are UMNO bigwigs close to the prime minister of the day given an immunity from police investigations that those not do not have? Should not the editors of the Straits Times group smelt a rate at the report about Tun Ghazali especially at the vaguesness of it all? The report iself showed how vague it was. Or is it a case of not letting facts stand in the way of a good story?

But it is the police which will have to answer for the damage done to a sick old man, who when history comes to be written, would tower over all those who had come before and since. This national owes him a debt that could not be repaid in several generations. He had made his mistakes, the most important being his reluctance to suffer fools, but then which man has'nt? He left the cabinet more than 20 years ago, is in his eighties, is still his own man, though he is ill at ease in crowds and surrounds himself with people he is comfortable with. Many of those around him were once his bitterest critics, I for instance, but we realised soon we fought from opposite sides of the fence. I notice that to this day when we talk of the past, and the differences which separated us then had to do with interpretations, not if Malaysia is viable. There is no doubt, as he is the first to admit, that we look at the same goal from drifferent perspectives. But the RMP has declined into a regional thug squad for the National Front government. And the New Straits Times is handmaiden to this deterioration.

Tun Ghazali keeps telling me the police is doing its duty, that when he was home minister he has prisided over such inquiries, though he insists he would not have allowed the invistegations as has happened to him. But politics has gone a long way from what it was in his day. And the rules have declined likewise. Today the offer of a tun ship is written in bureaucratese so convoluted that he had refused to reply to the request once before and accepted the second time around only because he did not want to upset Pak Lah. The only persons who would go through this ordeal are those who finds a Tun or Tan Sri important in his business, or those who think they deserve it. Others would shy away. He is already a Tan Sri of he first order for more than four decades when he was made a Tun of the second order this month.

[This is my column in Harakah, the PAS organ and published on Tuesday, 21 June 2005.)

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.comx