By Ioannis Gatsiounis
KUALA LUMPUR - In preparation for Malaysia's golden anniversary next
month, banners have been hung on the streets around the Petronas
Towers in downtown Kuala Lumpur showing Malay, Indian and Chinese
children blissfully bicycling and running through a village at dusk.
The sign reads: "One legacy. One destiny."
But behind the message of unity, the United Malays National
Organization (UMNO), the conservative race-based party that has run
Malaysia since independence, is ushering in the country's 50-year
anniversary by ratcheting up its trademark fear-based communal rule.
Last week Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak controversially referred
to Malaysia, which includes 40% non-Muslims, as an Islamic state.
"Islam is the official religion and we are an Islamic state," Najib
said.
It's unclear whether the incendiary statement was an election ploy,
but his comments have engendered a political firestorm here. (On
Wednesday, Najib ordered component parties of the National Front
(Barisan Nasional, or BN) that UMNO heads to prepare for an election
by early next year.) More likely, the comments were the result of a
desperate politician and embattled political party resorting to
desperate political measures. Najib's aspirations to become prime
minister are well known and have been cast into doubt by an ongoing
murder trial in which the main suspects - including prominent
political analyst Razak Baginda and two elite police officers - have
been closely linked to Najib.
Opposition leaders and the murder victim's cousin say there is a
photo linking Najib with the Mongolian model found blown up with C4
explosives in a patch of jungle outside Kuala Lumpur. Najib has
refused to answer questions about the woman and he may be spared
having to testify. Nonetheless, the ongoing case has hurt UMNO's
political standing, and the party appears to be appealing to its well-
worn tactic of playing the race and religion card to divert attentions.
In the larger scheme of things, Najib's comments might have been
meaningless. UMNO has long relied on communal rhetoric to sustain its
five-decade grip on power. But the comments also come at a time when
the nominally secular country is undergoing what some view as a
pronounced Islamization; when several court decisions have denied
individuals the right to be recognized by the religion of their
choosing; when race relations are on the skids; and when official
provocation is on the rise - all as the country finds itself in the
throes of a mid-life crisis.
In response to Najib's remark, the Malaysian Chinese Association
(MCA), a component party of the BN coalition, issued statements
assuring its constituency that Malaysia is a secular state. UMNO
Youth chief and Education Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, famous for
speeches in which he brandishes Malay daggers and warns Malaysia's
minority Chinese and Indian communities not to question Malay
"supremacy", hit back by telling the MCA (sans dagger this time) not
to issue "any more statements that Malaysia is a secular state".
Internet opposition
A few years ago, when the state-run print and broadcast media
monopolized public opinion, Najib's and Hishammuddin's comments would
have been spared public probity. But with the recent proliferation of
weblogs and independent news websites, the ruling elite are
increasingly being exposed to outside criticism.
Take, for instance, Minister in the Prime Minister'S Office Nazri
Abdul Aziz, who during a recent parliamentary session repeatedly
shouted "bodoh" (stupid) across the floor at a fellow
parliamentarian. The nine-minute clip was posted on YouTube, and
Malaysian bloggers had a field day asking in effect, "Who is running
our country?"
On Monday, UMNO information chief Muhammad Muhammad Taib filed a
police report against Raja Petra Kamarudin, the editor of popular Web
portal Malaysia-today.net, for allegedly degrading Islam and stirring
communal tensions. The website has built a name for itself by
aggressively reporting on alleged abuses of power at the highest
levels, including within Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi's inner circle.
UMNO probably didn't foresee what happened next. By Monday afternoon,
with news of the police report out, the site's pages loaded slowly as
its server hit 97% capacity, according to Raja Petra. By Tuesday,
Raja Petra had posted a warning to UMNO as clear as that which the
party was trying to send to him and bloggers. In an article titled
"See you in hell, Muhamad son of Muhamad", Raja Petra reminded
readers of the former state-level chief executive's attempt to bring
2.4 million ringgit (US$693,000) into Australia in 1997.
Raja Petra's style of recalcitrance is one of UMNO's biggest fears:
dissenters who refuse to go quietly, dissenters who could inspire
others to speak out just as fearlessly over the Internet. His is
arguably not a common response in feudal Malaysia. And UMNO, through
remarks like Najib's and the crackdown on bloggers, are putting
Malaysians' tolerance to an important new test.
On Tuesday the government said it would formulate new laws that would
potentially allow for detention without trial to punish "offending"
bloggers. On July 13, Nathaniel Tan, a webmaster for the opposition
People's Justice Party (PKR), was detained for five days by police
after he was said to have "classified" documents alleging that Deputy
Internal Security Minister Johari Baharom had taken bribes to free
known gangsters from prison.
Not only did the circumstances surrounding Tan's detention draw
attention to Johari, it also put the spotlight back on Najib. Some
bloggers speculated that Tan's arrest was meant to distract the
independent online media from the Mongolian-murder trial.
A few months ago, around the time that Malaysia's arch-conservative
Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin announced that the government
had to control bloggers and classify them as "professionals" or "non-
professionals", several prominent websites, including Malaysia Today,
added blog roundups to their homepages (with one of the blogs therein
proposing to extend the "professional or non-professional" label to
politicians).
But bloggers are not the only Malaysians concerned about UMNO's
mounting crackdown on dissent. Former UMNO chief and longtime prime
minister Mahathir Mohamad and his onetime deputy and current
opposition figurehead Anwar Ibrahim have both in recent weeks
concluded that UMNO has "rotted". Meanwhile, a band of academics has
begun campaigning against Akujanji, a pledge of loyalty to the
government that every college student must sign and over the years
has been used to suppress free expression.
Last week, meanwhile, the Internal Security Ministry ordered all the
major media not to publish on the question of whether Malaysia is an
Islamic state. Only the prime minister and deputy prime minister are
authorized to comment on it, said the ministry. But on Wednesday a
diverse group of Malaysians held a forum to discuss the matter, in
short emphasizing that while the constitution declares Islam as
Malaysian's official religion, the secular-based constitution, not
sharia law, was intended as the country's legal framework.
Despite this dissent, many political analysts predict an UMNO-BN
landslide at the next general elections, which will occur when the
prime minister decides to call them. That, they say, is because most
Malaysians have been indoctrinated by the government to fear
political change and still vote on ethnic lines. In an ironic twist,
Mahathir, who ruled with an iron fist for 22 years, recently
suggested that Malaysians tend to vote blindly and said, "The country
deserves the government it gets."
The real victim in all this is the Malay community, whom UMNO claims
it is serving and protecting. By politicizing religion, UMNO has
tarnished Malaysia's international and domestic reputation as a
bastion of moderate Islam. Meanwhile, UMNO's unwavering support for
an affirmative-action program favoring ethnic Malays over minority
Chinese and Indians has bred animosity among non-Muslims and become
an excuse for them to scapegoat Malays for all the country's
shortcomings and ignore their significant contributions to nation-
building.
That racial divide has and continues to play into UMNO's hands. The
government elite and a growing band of concerned Malaysians have set
the stage for country's 50th anniversary. Malaysians of all
ethnicities must now decide where they will stand, if it's best to
leave nation-building primarily in government hands, or if now is the
time to become more active stakeholders in the country's future.
Ioannis Gatsiounis, a New York native, is a Kuala Lumpur-based writer.
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