MGG Pillai Commentary View

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Can National Security Survive In A Vaccuum?

The Prime Minister, helpless as Malaysia in this Abu Sayyaf kidnap fiasco, watch in frustration and anger as the Philippines orders its military to root out the rebels at whatever cost. He thunders Malaysia would not accept if the three kidnapped Malaysians with the rebels are harmed. Kuala Lumpur expects this threat would reduce President Joseph Estrada, in the Malaysian view suspect as a personal friend of He Who Must Be Destroyed At All Cost, to slithering jelly. But the ground rules have changed. When there were foreigners in rebel hands, Manila and Kuala Lumpur were careful not to upset the applecart. When Malaysia and the European nations paid ransom to get the hostages released, the groundrules changed. Manila did not want them paid, but the European Community, facing political pressure at home, decided to. The Malaysians sent in the deputy education minister, Dato' Aziz Shamsuddin, and the former Sabah chief minister, Tan Sri Yong Teck Lee, with sundry ministers and deputy ministers to make their own deals, much to Manila's consternation. This bull-in-a-china shop approach to bilateral ties with Manila and the release of the 20 hostages kidnapped from an island claimed by Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta queered the pitch. Manila cocks a snook at Kuala Lumpur -- and justifiably.

Malaysia had strategic and tactical options which it did not know it had; or if it did, studiously ignored. What frightens in this ignoble episode is the failure of intelligence. It should have known, and rounded up, the Abu Sayyaf leaders and others involved in the kidnap, brought to Kuala Lumpur and quietly exchange them for the hostages, raising the ante as the talks wore on. Was this done? No! Why not? One reason why China regarded Malaysia in such high regard was just this professionalism of its strategic and tactical thinkers in letting Beijing know what it could do, and would hesitate if it had to. But since the thinking is done these days only to convince one man, this strategic and tactical perception of national police is now all but non-existent. This opens up other danger points in regional relationships. The increasing importance of Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri in the Jakarta administration returns to prominent the Confrontationalists. The incidents at the Kalimantan border with Sarawak is not an isolated incident but part of a larger policy move. This time around, this absence of intelligence and perception has Malaysia buffeted in a political storm without protection. The refusal -- more likely, inability -- of the Mahathir administration to see it in that light holds unseen dangers to national polity.

Has Malaysia prepared itself strategically and tactically for whatever happens in Indonesia? The fissiparous pressures in Acheh, Mollucas, Ambon, West Papua and elsewhere coupled with Western criticism of human rights abuses, many, especially Westerners, believe, would fragment Indonesia into half-a-dozen or more mutually exclusive states at war with each other. The Singapore Senior Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, during his visit here, could not understand this Malay unconcern at this development and asked an old friend incredulously: "You mean the Malays would accept Indonesian hegemony over them?" But it is more than that. What happens in Indonesia after the fall of President Suharto is the normal power play when a dynasty falls. Those who lived through Confrontation and 1965, when the failed Gestapu coup brought General Suharto to power see President Suharto's predicament no worse than President Sukarno's under him.

The Indonesian perception of its own national interest -- especially with regard to the inherent Islamic pressures, the battle the Indonesia say between the "Merah Putih" (literally, Red-White, the colour of the Indonesian flag, the nationalists) and the "Hijau" ( Green or Islamic fundamentalists) -- differs radically from the democratic prescriptions forced upon it by Western nations. The excising of Timor, in this view, is a problem for Australia not Indonesia. And in this worldview, essentially the statecraft worldview of Hindu Emperor much in evidence in Javanese polity, this current uncertainty, which, unlike others, it expected when the Emperor fell, would herald a new dynasty which could well come into power in a coup d'etat. The name of one lieutenant general frequently surfaces when Indonesia's future is discussed in cultural terms. The perennial search for the Holy Grail of Indonesian statecraft, the Ratu Adil or the prince of justice, starts afresh. And more relevant than democratic franchise.

Can Malaysia fit into this millieu when the frosty relations with Indonesia is compounded by a failure of intelligence and personal ties. That the Prime Minister have difficulties communicating with President Abdurrahman Wahid, as with Presidents Suharto and Habibie (the latter for his Estrada-like sympathies for that man in solitary confinement in Sungei Buloh prison), is well known. The personal relationships that Malaysian officials once had with his neighbours, firmed through their frequent associations in Asean, is today no more. I remember once asking the then foreign minister, Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie, about some Singapore-Indonesian friction that had not yet hit the papers. He called his Singapore and Indonesian counterparts, Mr S. Dhanabalan and Prof. Mochtar Kusumaatmadja, on the phone, and asked them to speak to me about the problem, asked me what they said and gave me his interprepation. That camraderie has all but disappeared when foreign policy became not to further the country's interest, but the leader's. And we pay for that neglect. The failure of intelligence cannot be far behind. The failure for not toeing the official line is severe. Just ask any of those known to be in the other camp in Malaysian politics, be he Tan Sri Musa Hitam, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah or Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. The failure of intelligence is not far behind and inevitable. And fails us when we need it most. As now. The Abu Sayyaf fiasco is but a consequence of that failure.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my