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2000
Anwar, Badawi, and feeling detached
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A
few readers have asked me why I haven't said a word about the Anwar case in
Malaysia. It has been 17 months since he was sacked as Deputy Prime Minister and
charged with sodomy.
The simple answer is that I have had very little to say about it, which in itself says a lot. It tells you how distant a Singaporean -- and I do not think I am untypical -- now feels about Malaysia. But a truly dreadful speech by the current Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Badawi, was reported in the Straits Times on February 4, and it has jolted me to write this. Three not-so-related threads come out of the above introduction, and below I will expand on each: (a) the Anwar case (b) the Badawi speech and what it implies (c) the distance between Singapore and Malaysia The Anwar case On 2 September 1998, Prime Minister Mahathir sacked his Deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, on the grounds that he was unfit for high office because he had committed sodomy. Anwar is now on trial for a series of alleged homosexual acts. When the case first hit the headlines, some gay men, understandably perhaps, instantly rose to Anwar's defence, and heaped accusations at Mahathir for gay-baiting. But one should recognise that Anwar's defence was that he didn't do it; he did not engage in homosexual acts. It was all a Mahathir conspiracy to get rid of a political rival. So it's way off the mark to treat him as some kind of gay martyr. He is not. The gay side of me doesn’t care how the case turns out, whether he's found guilty or not, because nothing gay is involved in this particular trial. I simply maintain that whether a person is gay or straight, it should have no bearing on his fitness for high office. His competency for the job should be what counts. However, what this case does show is how a sodomy law, at the end of the day, is a tool to be used by politicians to beat their opponents with. On any given day, hundreds, if not thousands, of men in Malaysia engage in anal sex, in other words, "commit sodomy". Yet, you don't find hundreds of new prosecutions a day, nor even in five years. But when you want to get rid of a political opponent, it is a device of great impact.
The selectivity of such prosecutions brings the whole justice system into
disrepute. Far from strengthening the backbone of society, a sodomy law, through
the temptation it poses to politicians to use it for sordidly partisan purposes,
weakens the moral tone and institutions of a country. It has clearly dragged
much of Malaysian politics into the mud. The Badawi speech The rupture between Mahathir and Anwar came out of the economic stresses Malaysia suffered in the crisis of 1997. For months, the economy was almost in free fall, and many large companies were severely hit. They looked to the government for bail-outs, but the government itself was beset by a rising tide of criticism about "corruption, cronyism and nepotism" ("KKN" in Malay), to quote the catchwords of the period. Similar popular anger had already brought down the Suharto government in Jakarta (May 1998), and potentially could destabilise the Malaysian government. Anwar, even though he was the Deputy Prime Minister, cast himself as a clean outsider to all the wheeling and dealing that people said characterised the Mahathir administration. My reading of the situation was that he hoped to use the popular dissatisfaction to propel himself into the Prime Minister's seat. It was not a great surprise to anyone that Mahathir then sacked him. Through the economic crisis, Mahathir earned worldwide attention (notoriety?) for his attacks on Western capitalism and the "Jewish lobby" for creating or exacerbating the currency maelstrom and the sharp business contraction that followed. His response to accusations of cronyism and corruption – KKN -- draining the life out of the Malaysian economy was simply to deny these ills existed. Having removed Anwar, and having won another general election (Nov 1999), albeit with clouded results, the Mahathir administration does not seem to have taken any corrective measures about KKN. But the ground has changed. The last election revealed a serious drift of young Malay voters -- and Malays form the majority ethnic group in Malaysia -- to the Islamic party, PAS. Essentially, Mahathir's coalition got back into power only because the non-Malay vote was too frightened by the rise in the Islamic party to defect en-masse to other opposition parties. However, there is concern that at the next election, a new cohort of first-time Malay voters may vote so strongly for the Islamic party that UMNO, the core Malay party of present coalition, will lose heavily. Hence, there is a rising tide from UMNO grassroots to reform the party or perish. The party has to be more responsive to a younger generation of voters, the ones disgusted that the party had been paying too much attention to business cronies of the leaders, at the expense of the man-in-the-street. But Mahathir does not seem to be listening. For example, he has appointed Abdullah Badawi as his new Deputy, both in the cabinet and in UMNO. Badawi, unfortunately, does not command much following. With party elections ahead, Mahathir has let it be known that his and Badawi's positions must not be contested. In effect then, Mahathir does not want to face any test, nor does he want his choice of Badawi as his successor, to be subject to any poll. In this context, consider this speech by Badawi, as reported in the Straits Times:
I can hardly imagine a more brazen snub at facts and logic. Take his analysis of the Indonesian situation. It wasn't the West that destroyed the Suharto regime, and made his successor Habibie a no-hoper. The people of Indonesia came out onto the streets by the tens and hundreds of thousands, totally fed-up with the corruption that sucked away three decades of economic effort. They demanded and got Suharto's resignation. Habibie, as Suharto's unelected successor, had no legitimacy of his own; of course he had to call elections to avert more demonstrations. In those elections, which were said to have been the freest and fairest Indonesia had ever seen, the biggest winner was the PDI-Perjuangan party, which had been one of the most anti-Suharto parties previously. The toppling of the old regime and the transition to a more open democracy was very much something that the politically aware citizens of Indonesia wanted; it wasn't foisted on the country by the perfidious West. Likewise the East Timor referendum, and independence for the ex-Portuguese colony. By a huge margin -- 78% of a large turnout -- the people of East Timor voted to be free. They had wanted to be free for 25 years, with many resistance fighters dying for the cause. It was hardly a plot by the West to split Indonesia. Of course, the aftermath in East Timor and the many parts of Indonesia has been messy. More than messy; bloody. But messy implementation of reforms, and having to fight reactionary forces every step of the way, does not negate the fact that people wanted make the transition in the first place. It is disingenuous to suggest that Indonesians never really wanted a democratic revolution and a cleaner government, and to counter suggest that it was merely a Western scheme to shove liberal democracy down their throats.
But the present government in Malaysia fears a similar demand for a
transition, and this explains the rather pathetic attempt at a revisionist view
of recent Indonesian events. But surely, politicians should be wilier than to
say such inane things like "our democracy works, and it works for the
people of Malaysia." Many Malaysians don't think it's working. Distancing In the 1950s and 1960s, many people in Singapore saw themselves as "Malayans", that is, a part of a community – Chinese, Malay, Indian -- spread over the peninsula which today we call West Malaysia, but was then called Malaya. I don’t belong to that generation, and the vast majority of Singaporeans today don’t even have the faintest memory of it. Political separation and determined government efforts to keep Malaysian politics out of Singapore (for example, Malaysian newspapers are banned from circulating here) have turned our attention to other directions. Nor does it help that the current Mahathir government has not been on good terms with the Singapore government. The Kuala Lumpur government [1] is perceived here as unreasonable and bullying, for example over the railway link and the CLOB issue [2]. Even as we gripe about our own government and its heavyhandedness, there is always a rallying to one’s flag every time a foreign country tries to clobber us. Happening as often as it does -- and tricky issues crop up between Singapore and Malaysia every few months -- there is probably more political animosity than amity now between the two sides. But the distancing between the two countries goes a lot deeper than politics. By now, there is a cultural distance too [3]. Cultural differences are a complex of ethnicity, language and religion. In terms of ethnicity, Singapore has remained substantially Chinese, with an increasing overlay of westernisation. But Malaysia is now about 70% ethnically Malay. Ethnic Chinese as a percentage of Malaysia’s population has been gradually falling, from the 34 percent about 20 years ago to 26 percent now. Singaporeans mostly speak English and Chinese. On the other hand, most Malaysians now don't speak English at all, since their public schools don’t teach in that language any more. Malay is the predominant language -- all Malaysians can speak it, but only about 15% of Singaporeans do [see my article Bazaar Malay]. Some Chinese Malaysians still speak Chinese, but they either speak the Cantonese dialect (which is gradually disappearing from Singapore), or a form of Mandarin that is distinctly Malaysian, recogniseably different from Singapore's. Then of course, there is an Islamic tone to Malaysian social and political life.
The trend therefore is for greater
cultural, language and religious distance between Singaporeans and Malaysians. For us, visiting Malaysia, we feel we’re in a foreign land. Many
Singaporeans report that they feel more at home in Bangkok, Sydney or Shanghai
than in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian politics are foreign to us: we cannot fully
understand their issues and frustrations because the conditions – the Islamic
undertone, for one -- are now so different. And coming back to the Anwar case,
well, it's a piece of political theatre, nothing to do with being gay, and
nothing, really, to do with Singapore. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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