Asia's melting pot marks 50 years
By Jonathan Kent
BBC News, Kuala Lumpur
There were surely moments in the last half century when Malaysians would
not have dared dream that their country would be doing so well at 50.
After all, independence in 1957 was won amidst an occasionally vicious
civil
war with local communists.
The 60s brought turmoil; a military stand off with Indonesia, the split in
1965 with Singapore, the race riots of 1969.
There was paranoia in the 70s, recession and political repression in the
80s, a crash and unrest in the 90s, yet here Malaysia is today and it is
doing all right.
Now it is a nation of skyscrapers and microchip plants, fast highways and
sprawling cities where the government talks of Malaysia's role in biotech,
or conference hosting or Islamic finance.
It is almost unrecognisable from the independent Federation of Malaya of
31
August 1957 when its first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al Haj
stood tall in a specially built stadium in Kuala Lumpur and raised his
right
arm as the crowd echoed his three cries of "Merdeka!" - freedom.
His was a land of impenetrable jungles, small villages of wooden houses,
rubber plantations and tin mines, genteel colonial cities with grand
administrative buildings and rows of traditional shop-houses.
"At that time 60% of Malaysians were living in poverty, below the national
poverty line," said Dr Richard Leete, head of the UN Development Programme
for Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei and author of "Malaysia; from Kampung
to Twin Towers".
"Over time that proportion has declined remarkably and currently there are
less than 5% of people in poverty," he said.
Dr Leete knows the country well, having been seconded from the British
government in 1980 to help Malaysia with its economic planning.
"[In 1957] the majority of the population were illiterate, now just a tiny
fraction of Malaysia's population are unable to write," he said.
Ethnic debate
Yet despite the complete transformation of Malaysia on a physical level
there is frustration that attitudes have changed less.
Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has said time and again that while Malaysia
has the "hardware", it lacks the "software" to be truly modern; in other
words Malaysia builds fast highways and millions of cars but people still
drive as though they are on village roads.
When Malaysians come together and act as one people success is theirs for
the taking, when they are divided failure beckons
Abdullah Ahmad, formerly an MP, Malaysia's special representative at the
UN and Editor in Chief of the New Straits Times Group, agrees.
"The remarkable thing is that during the 50 years of Merdeka... the Malay
mindset has not changed very much," he said.
The majority Malay community has long relied on patronage; in times past
from their sultans and since 1970 on government programmes aimed to help
the Malays specifically.
It has bred a culture of entitlement.
The Malay majority benefit from preferential schemes
"Everything is for them, yet they are way behind the other communities
because they are not seizing the opportunities," he said. Yet the
affirmative action policies persist and rankle with many.
And there are other eerily familiar themes as Malaysia turns 50.
In the years before independence, there was a fierce debate about whether
non Malay immigrants should be give Malayan citizenship.
In the end they were, in return for constitutional guarantees to ensure
the Malays were never marginalised in "their own country".
Now the debate has shifted and many non Malays have taken the anniversary
as an opportunity to ask what place patriotism has in a country that
classifies its people by race, treats them differently according to their
ethnicity and then when the flags come out expects them to all cheer with
equal vigour.
It seems that some are in danger of forgetting the whole lesson of
Merdeka.
Unity and equality
They could be forgiven for having done so, because from the way the story
of Malaysia's independence is told by some within the dominant United
Malays National Organisation (UMNO), you might think the Malay community
secured independence on its own; driving the perfidious British into the
sea.
It is not true.
Chin Peng, leader of the Communist Party of Malaya, did as much as anyone
to bring about Malaya's independence. Indeed the one surviving key player
from the independence struggle is not Malay at all. He is Malaysian
Chinese,
and he is not welcome in the land of his birth.
With 5-10,000 armed guerrillas he tied down tens of thousands of
Commonwealth troops in a ruinously expensive war.
"If there hadn't been a boom in rubber and tin prices in the 1950s, the
British wouldn't have been able to afford to fight him," said Khoo Kay
Kim, emeritus Professor of History at University Malaya.
What the communists did was to focus British minds on a political
settlement.
Up stepped the leaders of the Alliance, which consisted of three parties -
UMNO, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malayan Indian
Congress (MIC) - between them representing the Malay peninsula's three
main races.
Early on, the British saw a unifying force with which they could do
business.
The Alliance's broad appeal meant it all but swept the board in
pre-independence elections in 1955. The appeal of the Communists rapidly
evaporated thereafter.
"One of the things that we were concerned about was to continue in the
same spirit and to perpetuate this multi-communal understanding and
harmony that had come out in 1955," remembered Uma Sambanthan, widow of
the then MIC leader VT Sambanthan.
Professor Khoo agreed. "Before he died, Sambanthan told me that all three
parties were absolutely determined to show the British that they could
work together in order to ensure they granted independence."
And the Alliance in one form or another has governed Malaysia ever since.
Then, as now, the Merdeka lesson is the same.
When Malaysians come together and act as one people success is theirs for
the taking. When they are divided failure beckons.
If modern Malaysia's leaders remind themselves that unity does not come
through threat, discrimination and coercion but through equality and
mutual respect they may yet lay the foundations for a glorious 100th
birthday.
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