Malaysia’s downward spiral: Is history repeating itself?

Racial, religious and political strife - more than a decade later, we must ask if Najib Razak is trying to repeat the feats of his master Dr Mahathir?

COMMENT

By Liew Chin Tong

July 2015 will mark the 60th year of Umno in power since winning the British-administered self-rule election in 1955. It has held the dubious world record of being the elected government with the longest unbroken rule.

Apart from using its incumbency to redraw electoral boundaries, dispensing the public largesse to buy support, and genuinely delivering some economic goods, Umno’s toolkits for survival include manipulating the race card during crisis, dividing its opponents, and arresting people en masse to maximise the fear factor, as seen in 1987 and 2001.

Upheaval of 1987

In April 1987, Dr Mahathir Mohammad faced a crisis of leadership in Umno. However he managed to win the party presidency against challenger Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, although with a wafer thin 43-vote majority. The Team A -Team B split did not end with the Umno election.

The Team B members in the Cabinet, including Abdullah Badawi, were sacked immediately but it did not stop an intense internal campaign to dislodge Dr Mahathir. Observers believed that Dr Mahathir would not survive the subsequent party election scheduled three years later.

By September 1987, a minor concern of Chinese education – the deployment of non-Chinese educated teachers to Chinese schools – escalated into a massive racial confrontation. Umno Youth, under the leadership of Najib Razak, threatened to organise a mass gathering of 500,000 in Kuala Lumpur on November 1.

On October 18, one army private Adam Jaafar ran amok in the city’s Jalan Chow Kit – a key site of May 13 clashes in 1969. Adam fired random shots, and a person was killed when a bullet ricocheted.

A week later, 106 high profile politicians, activists, academics and media practitioners were arrested. On that fateful day, October 27, they were detained without trial under the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA). The list, including the then Parliamentary Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang, were all placed behind bars. At the same time, Dr Mahathir’s critics within Umno were scared stiff.

In February 1988, Umno was declared illegal by the High Court, after a suggestion was made by lawyers representing Umno!

Dr Mahathir formed a new party with the name “Umno Baru” that excluded “undesirable” members of the Team B, forcing the Tengku Razaleigh’s faction of Team B to form Semangat 46.

Dr Mahathir slowly recouped his erstwhile losses and stature. The general election of 1990 was certainly not easy for Dr Mahathir and Barisan Nasional but by then he had far less credible opponents to deal with. BN retained its two-thirds majority.

With a high growth rate, Dr Mahathir emerged as a very popular and confident man by the early 1990s. Dr Mahathir’s extraordinary comeback and dominance lasted until 1997 when the Asian economic crisis hit Malaysia.

Reformasi of 1998

His deputy Anwar Ibrahim worked hard to resolve the crisis but instead was seen as the premier’s challenger. His call for Reformasi didn’t bode well with Mahathir. In September 1998, Anwar was sacked from the government and Umno, and later jailed.

Despite more than half of Malay voters voting against the government in support of the jailed Anwar Ibrahim, it was the BN’s campaign against PAS and its proposal for hudud and for Malaysia to become an Islamic state that managed to win over non-Malay voters during the November 1999 election. Thus, BN once again managed to survive electorally, with its two-thirds majority intact, despite facing a united opposition under the name of Barisan Alternatif.

One would have thought that Dr Mahathir would not survive again especially when his stock dived further south after the defeat of the BN candidate in the Lunas (Kedah) by-election on November 29, 2000. Saifuddin Nasution of Parti Keadilan shocked the nation when he won the BN-held multi-ethnic seat. It sent shockwaves through Umno and BN. Lunas’ ethnic composition reflected the nation’s.

Soon after the by-election, Umno Youth under Hishammuddin Hussein escalated its attack on an election appeal group representing ethnic Chinese associations Suqiu, leading to the latter being forced to sign a “peace deal” on January 5, 2001 with Umno Youth to “withdraw” its ideas.

Racial sentiments were heightened. Malay unity rallies were being held.

However when a rally was planned to be held to commemorate Anwar’s jailing on April 14, 1999, the government arrested 10 high-profile activists, including Raja Petra Raja Kamaruddin, Hishamuddin Rais, Tian Chua, Saari Sungib and Ezam Mohd Nor, a few days before the planned event. Six were held for two years under the ISA.

Interestingly, the then Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Abdullah Badawi initially claimed that he had no knowledge of the police arrests under ISA though he signed the detention orders after the initial sixty-day period.

I tend to believe Abdullah. The likeliest scenario was that the instruction for the initial police arrests came directly from Dr Mahathir, perhaps without even informing the Home Minister!

The government claimed that the Keadilan activists were planning violent protests in order to overthrow the government, and were attempting to procure weapons and explosives. None of this was ever proven.

Crisis of 2001

On May 28, 2001, MCA acquired two major Chinese dailies, Nanyang Siang Pau and China Press, via its investment arms.

From around June, the issue of Islamic State became a heated debate in the media with Umno mouthpiece Utusan Malaysia urging PAS to break with its Barisan Alternatif partners while MCA, Gerakan and the Chinese media press pressured DAP to break with PAS. When PAS insisted on an Islamic state, DAP left the coalition on September 22, 2001.

In July 2001, a militant group al-Maunah which later was charged in court for trying to “wage a war against the Yang di-Pertuan Agong” were arrested. “Islamic terrorism” was coming to harm Malaysia, so they claimed.

On September 29, 2001, Dr Mahathir turned the tables on PAS and announced that Malaysia was already an Islamic State!

PAS went into a two-year internal debate to decide whether an Islamic state should be democratic or medieval. The conservatives led by Haron Din, with the support of Hadi Awang, won the debate with the publication of the rigid “Islamic State Document” in November 2003.

By early 2002, Dr Mahathir recouped his losses and was a confident man again. He announced his resignation on June 22, 2002 although only officially stepping down 16 months later on October 31, 2003. Incidentally, the moderate PAS President Fadzil Noor passed away on June 23, 2002, a day after Dr Mahathir’s dramatic resignation announcement at the Umno General Assembly.

Will it happen again?

More than a decade later today, we can ask the question, is Najib Razak trying to repeat the feats of the master?

The signs are there. The hudud wedge and the potential break-up of Pakatan Rakyat, the once again heightened racial sentiments, the extremist Islamic State (IS) fighters, and so-called new ISA in the name of Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). And all these are happening when Umno is having massive internal fights including Mahathir’s fierce attacks on Najib.

Will we Malaysians allow history, both as a tragedy and a farce, to repeat itself?

(Excerpts of a speech at the Malaysian Progressives in Australia’s talk “Can we depart from race politics?” in Melbourne on April 6, 2015.)

Liew Chin Tong is DAP National Political Education Director and MP for Kluang