AG closes file on remark that Malays are ‘pendatang too’

Muslim NGOs might be incensed but police and AG appear to want to distance themselves from cases of this nature.

COMMENT

Pembela, a group of Islamist NGOs, has expressed outrage that Attorney-General Abdul Gani Patail will not be dragging Gerakan member Tan Lai Soon to court for pointing out that Malays are “pendatang (outsiders) too”. Abdul Gani is being asked to explain his decision.

At least 20 police reports, at last count, have been lodged against Tan for his remark. If news reports are accurate, his party has suspended him pending disciplinary action.

Deputy Inspector-General of Police Noor Rashid Ibrahim thinks that the AG may have his reasons for closing the file on the Tan case, if there was any.

Noor Rashid noted on Friday in the media that there were always other ways to carry on with the case. “If there are people who are not satisfied, they can bring it to court through other means.” He did not venture further but appeared to rule out the police and the AG getting involved in such cases.

Tan’s recall of history, obviously, is too much to handle for many people who have grown up with the idea that “the peninsula was Tanah Melayu because the Malays were there first”, even if they came from elsewhere.

Of course, there’s the little matter of the Orang Asli who had beaten them to it by some 40,000 years.

But this had been explained away by claiming that the Orang Asli were Malays too and when that didn’t work, to imply, as former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has done more than once, that the aborigines were in the same league as their cousins in Australia where “the whites could not be expected to give back the country to the original owners”.

Pembela has raised an interesting question in law by expressing outrage over the “pendatang” remark.

There’s a locus standi issue here since the group is all about defending Islam and not taking on the “pendatang” on behalf of others who claim, to put it simply, that they could not be “pendatang” too “in the only country they had in the world, unlike the Indians who could point to Mother India, and the Chinese who could return to China”.

Locus standi would also be the issue if those who lodged the 20 police reports against Tan were to decide “that they are not satisfied and want to bring it to court through other means”.

If locus standi can be established, which is not the case, the court can rule that it has no jurisdiction to hear the case. This was seen in the Herald case in the Federal Court last June when it ruled that “the court cannot get into theology”. So, Allah is not for the court to decide.

The idea of Malay land

It would be interesting if those who lodged the 20 police reports “can bring the case to court through other means”.

They shouldn’t think of dragging the AG to court on the matter. Under the Federal Constitution, the AG is the sole prosecuting authority and has absolute powers to decide whether to launch a case, vary the charges, withdraw or even drop them. He doesn’t have to give reasons and that’s probably because he doesn’t have any – considering that people call each other names every day for some reason or other – or because the public interest would not be served.

However, one issue that can be explored is the idea of tanah Melayu (Malay land) often cited by Malays as Tanah Melayu (Malay Land, i.e. in the same vein as England).

Tanah Melayu is in fact reservation land that the British created for squatter colonies in the peninsula to get them out of the way so that they could plant rubber and mine tin. Such land, created in Orang Asli country by gazette – and hence untitled – i.e. tanah Melayu the land (reservation) extrapolated into Tanah Melayu the country.

The British fought two wars with Bangkok to hack away the southern part of the Kra Peninsula from Siam. The rest is even more history.

They also codified the term Malay to refer to the Muslim squatters – Bugis, Javanese, Minang, Acehnese and others – who used the Malay language, the lingua franca of the archipelago, to communicate with each other.

If the Malays in the peninsula say that they are not “pendatang”, they would have claimed that they are Orang Asal, native or indigenous just like the Orang Asli and the Orang Asal in Sabah and Sarawak.

They couldn’t. So, Tunku Abdul Rahman created the political term Bumiputera (sons of the soil) to group the Malays with the Orang Asli and Orang Asal.