'Chinese chauvinism', 'Islamic extremism', and other fallacies

by Dr Khoo Boo Teik

Forget the self-serving commercial and political drivel that surrounded last year�s worldwide, e-driven, greed-struck and bug-scared Y2K welcoming of the false dawn.

The real �new millennium�, by the western calendar, has just begun, and quietly, too.

We can be relieved at that because we don�t need to be exhorted to �Confront the 21st Century�, �Grapple with Globalisation�, �Face the FUTURE�, or do whatever it is the gurus of fads and habits demand of us.

What we need is sober reflection on how to leave behind narrow visions of what political change is probable in this country.

That�s why, thirteen months after the November 1999 general election, I marvel at recent political events, four of which I shall briefly recall.

Anti-ISA at Kamunting

On 29 October, a couple of thousand people from Barisan Alternatif parties and non-governmental organisations, and concerned individuals, gathered outside the Kamunting detention camp to protest �40 years of the Internal Security Act�.

Of course, many Malays have been ISA detainees before, but past anti-ISA protests hadn�t seen Malay protestors outnumbering non-Malay protestors by such a wide, wide margin.

Malays who don't like Malaysia

Shortly after the Kamunting protest, UMNO politicians, taking Dr Mahathir Mohamad�s lead, told �certain Malays� � reportedly BA and the �Free Anwar Campaign� types � that �if they didn�t like Malaysia, they should leave�!

Naturally, we�ve heard before that the Chinese could �return to China� and the Indians could �return to India� � but the Malays had nowhere else to go. How perversely refreshing it was to hear Malay politicians saying �good riddance� to Malay recalcitrants.

Kesas Rally

Next, keADILan called for �100,000 persons� to rally in Shah Alam, on 5 November, for civil liberties and the right to peaceful assembly.

The police predictably wouldn�t issue a permit. On the eve of the rally, they arrested several of its suspected organisers. Everyone knew the police would meet the rally with force.

Still thousands upon thousands of people � �too many to count�, some Chinese dailies diplomatically reported � showed up. The once again predominantly Malay marchers were diverted by the police to the Kesas Highway where they were met by water cannon, tear gas, mace sprays, arrests, and beatings.

The Lunas Eclipse

Then, on 29 November, came the by-election in Lunas, a forty-year Barisan Nasional stronghold in Kedah, Dr Mahathir�s home state, where BN held exactly a two-thirds majority in the legislative assembly.

Grave intra-coalition disputes attended BA�s choice of a keADILan (instead of a widely expected DAP) candidate � and Saifuddin Nasution, the wrecker of the 1996 Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor (APCET II), at that.

The battle for Lunas featured such rancorous ethnic issues as Malay special rights and Chinese education that would have cleanly pitted pro-government �Malay votes� against pro-opposition �Chinese votes� were this an election of the 1980s, say.

Amazingly an ethnically mixed electoral revolt against BN handed Lunas to BA exactly one year after the 1999 general election.

In Flux and Fix

By now it�d be trite to say that these happenings resulted from Reformasi.

Even UMNO�s brooding malcontents, who aren�t ready to be open dissidents, accept that these events indicate the depth of disaffection with � �Call me Pharaoh if you�d like� � and portend disaster for UMNO if the party can�t reinvent itself.

Well, don�t call me a heretic, but I consider these events to form a flux in Malaysian politics which requires all parties to reinvent themselves.

Above all, it�s a flux that has Dr Mahathir in a fix: perhaps for the first time in twenty years, he doesn�t have a satisfactory response to political change and many-sided opposition.

Fishing in Troubled Waters

In pre-�Anwar affair� and pre-Reformasi days, the standard Mahathirist response to oppositionist challenges was to cast out two lines of fishy arguments.

The first type of argument � call it �red baiting� � pinpointed Chinese �communism�, �chauvinism�, �disloyalty�, or whatever was usefully provocative, to keep the Malays in a �Malay unity� fold to preserve �Malay supremacy�.

The second kind of argument � can we name it �green herring�? � was to scare all pork-consuming, alcohol-loving and congenitally-gaming non-Muslims with PAS and �Islamic extremism�.

If neither method worked, everyone could be warned not to �politicise race or religion� while the government prescribed a healthy dose of repression: remember 27 October 1987?

No Grounds for Red Baiting

These days these three methods have become somewhat stale.

The red baiting doesn�t quite work, not because desperate politicians and their servants aren�t trying. They try every time they need to divert attention from their failings, distort public criticism, or provoke quarrels which they then offer to settle �behind closed doors�.

Their difficulty is, times, social conditions and political attitudes have changed considerably. Just look at the difference between interethnic sentiments after the 1986 and 1999 elections respectively.

In August 1986 UMNO thrashed PAS, while DAP canned MCA and Gerakan. At the September UMNO general assembly, Dr Mahathir praised the �rural Malay voters� for their �loyalty� and attacked the �urban Chinese voters� for being �chauvinistic� and �unreliable�.

After November 1999 UMNO�s problem is the �disloyalty� of rural and urban Malay voters.

As for the Chinese voters, whose �pragmatism� Dr Mahathir praised, Zunar brilliantly captured the prevailing Malay joke in a cartoon a year ago: the difference between a Malay and a Chinese was, the Chinese supported UMNO.

Storm over Suqiu

Malaysian political life is seldom so simple and even cartoonists sometimes get it wrong.

After Lunas, the strategic danger for Dr Mahathir and UMNO is a combined Malay-Chinese �disloyalty�, just �colour blind� enough to threaten the BN�s hold over the so-called �mixed constituencies�.

Hence, the Chinese Election Appeal Committee (Suqiu) controversy has persisted, despite calls issued by various quarters, including Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and even Pemuda UMNO, for the controversy to be ended. Suqiu is relatively unknown and sounds alien (by the way it�s pronounced �soo chiu�) and is therefore useful as a �Chinese chauvinistic� bogey for a well-worn attempt to convert �Malay disloyalty� into �Malay unity�.

After Lunas, the tactical dilemma for UMNO and BN is how to avoid doing political battle on more than one front at a time.

Hence, the once autonomous but now UMNO-directed Gabungan Pelajar-pelajar Melayu Semenanjung (Federation of Peninsular Malay Students) has converted Suqiu�s �17-Point Appeal� into �83 Chinese demands� against which GPMS threatens to counterpose �100 Malay demands�.

Obviously someone wants to dampen Chinese recalcitrance by threatening �Malay extremism� while UMNO tackles PAS and keADILan over the problem of �Malay disunity�.

Are we 'One Family'?

Yet, which Malay can long believe that Suqiu is a latter-day Chinese-dominated Communist Party of Malaya, or a Chinese version of �Al Maunah�, no matter that Dr Mahathir floated those comparisons on 31 August, of all days? The �PAS, keADILan and PRM Malays� have refused to rise to the red-baiting.

For that matter, which Chinese, especially a �pragmatic� one, believes that the �special position� of the Malays is an issue that can be resolved by non-Malay demands? Even the DAP has dropped its old �Malaysian Malaysia� in favour of Dr Maha-thir�s new Bangsa Malaysia.

Malay Language and Chinese Education

For three decades after 1957, the social contradictions of colonial capitalism, experience of decolonization, and hangovers from separate Malay, Chinese and Indian nationalisms easily inflamed interethnic passions. Most of us, however, sense that those passions have largely burned themselves out.

Consider the history of Malay-Chinese disputes over the New Economic Policy, language, education and culture. Almost intractable once, those disputes have been generally resolved by the post-1969 education policy, NEP�s redistribution, Dr Mahathir�s privatization, and the high economic growth and liberalization of education in the 1990s.

In the process, more than one generation of non-Malays has grown up fluently using the Malay language as Bahasa Malaysia. How many of them today know or care about the bitter fights over the National Language Act in the 1960s?

On the other hand, an estimated 65,000 non-Chinese, mostly Malay, students attend Chinese schools without controversy. How many of these students know or share the emotions that ran high from the 1950s to the 1980s in defence of the �character of Chinese schools�?

There�s no call to be complacent. Malaysians aren�t more virtuous than ordinary folk who live in multiethnic societies. Most Malaysians harbour some pet ethnic grouses and prejudices which they express in the exclusive company of �their own people�.

Despite Anwar Ibrahim�s slogan, wo men dou shi yi jia ren, so beloved of some BN politicians before Anwar�s fall, we aren�t quite one family.

Issues arise intermittently which lend themselves to ethnic interpretation and misunderstanding: the Vision Schools, lack of Malay students in private colleges, patriotism and the use of English, and so on.

But few Malaysians today have the stomach for stoking interethnic fury, especially of the Malay-Chinese variety.

Conditions are such that only the most narrow-minded �Malay nationalist� or �Chinese educationist� would not consider the present state of interethnic relations to resemble a �win-win� situation, to use a clich� which I actually detest.

The Rise and Rise of PAS

Neither is the green herring � or alarm over an imminent PAS-led �Islamic state� � a terribly marketable fish these days. This is not for want of trying by those who tried to scare us about an Islamic threat to secular government before and after the 1999 election.

PAS�s net gain of 20 parliamentary seats and control of the Trengganu state government was achieved at UMNO�s expense. PAS now has 27 seats in parliament compared to the seven seats it held after the 1995 election.

These results thrill PAS members and supporters and unsettle anti-PAS forces. Ironically both sides often find it useful to talk of PAS�s fourfold increase in representation, and, who knows, extrapolate from it to imagine PAS�s taking over the country, perhaps by the next election.

But simple arithmetic shows that PAS�s 27 seats constitute only 14 per cent of parliament. The party isn�t any nearer to governing the country than DAP was when the latter won 24 seats in the 1986 election.

And a dash of political history reveals that PAS won control of Trengganu and Kelantan in the very first post-Merdeka general election of 1959.

Three years later, defections from PAS handed Trengganu to UMNO. Sixteen years after that PAS lost Kelantan following a split in the party and its departure from BN. Only after another twelve years, in 1990, was PAS (in alliance with the now defunct S46) able to recapture Kelantan. And only last year did PAS regain Trengganu.

Consequently, PAS�s results mark the party�s unexpected recovery from almost forty-years of steady slump, much of PAS�s performance owing to Malay anger over the Anwar affair. The results don�t mark the beginning of PAS�s inexorable ascent to power on the back of a clamour for a theocratic state.

Islamisation and Constitutional Government

One can expect PAS�s challenge to UMNO to bring a stricter observance of religiosity in the personal lives of Muslims and public life in general. In and of itself, much of what happens along this line will not be scary to Malaysians � not after the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s and Dr Mahathir�s Islamization programme of the 1980s.

However, what disconcerts many �modern�, �liberal minded� or �non-doctrinaire� Muslims�, not to say most non-Muslims, is the moral conservatism of the PAS state governments. They fear that that conservatism diminishes the options of living one�s private life according to one�s convictions and preferences, within reason and a sensible framework of decent social conduct.

For example, even people who don�t frequent karaoke lounges or go to unisex hair salons with extra-hairdressing motives object to such establishments being closed by administrative fiat. They also can�t see why certain PAS quarters should give undue weight to such matters as the mere mingling of the sexes in public places.

One can go further. Some PAS stalwarts may support ulama rule that enforces hudud laws, proscribes apostasy, and restricts rather than extends the social freedom available to women, to mention some oft-debated issues. But for many other people, any thought of such rule quickly raises visions of harsh rule in the name of Islamic government elsewhere.

No one in PAS who associates its struggles with BA�s defence of democracy, civil liberties, human rights and constitutional procedures can lightly dismiss these concerns as the unexamined fears of non-Muslims who don�t understand Islam or Muslims who don�t fully practise the religion.

A Lost Opportunity

Judging by present conditions, however, whether something like a theocratic state comes to pass may depend less upon PAS�s ideological intent than on BN�s continuing conduct. The events of 1998-99 have made clear that prominent among those who cry �Islamic wolf� loudest and longest are those who have least respect for civil liberties and human rights.

For the foreseeable future, it has not secular government that is being threatened. It's constitutional government that has been undermined by its supposed defenders.

No one is obliged to support PAS�s programme. By democratic principles and practice, however, one is obliged to uphold the rights of the voters of Kelantan and Trengganu who freely chose PAS to govern their states.

These voters have suffered for preferring political opposition to BN�s rule. For over a decade, Kelantan has been deprived of development allocations (like Sabah under PBS before it was toppled in 1994). Now Trengganu�s petroleum-based revenues have been unilaterally turned into a matter of �federal government goodwill�.

More than that, Malaysian society � if not the world � has been robbed of an opportunity to evaluate what �Islamic government, development and governance� could mean in practice, for a multiethnic society, and within a national economy linked to global capitalism.

Under the circumstances, should one hold the government of Kelantan responsible if it doesn�t do more than carry out remedial projects to help the poor, disadvantaged and handicapped?

Should one blame the government of Trengganu for not developing �pragmatic�, �investment-friendly�, or �growth-facilitating� policies in areas important to everyone�s daily life?

Farewell to the Old Millennium

Knowing the severity of BN-imposed restrictions, would one expect either of the PAS state governments to demonstrate their commitment to �Islamic government� other than by stressing religious piety, moral fervour, and exemplary conduct?

Dr Mahathir, UMNO and BN would. That�s because they�ve always considered themselves to hold all the solutions to the problems of Malaysian society.

The Kamunting, Kesas and Lunas episodes are the latest reminders that enough Malay-sians now think otherwise.

Those who grew up or grew old(er) in the twenty years of Dr Mahathir�s administration have seen how things have been continually turned over, upside down and upon their heads. Their experience should make them suspicious of anyone who claims to have a monopoly of solutions, formulas and blueprints for Malaysian society.

Malaysian society doesn�t need a blueprint for the new millennium. What it needs, in principle, is a commitment to live in peace, under democracy and with social justice, and, in practice, to find ways of doing so as conditions change.

However imperfectly Malay-sian society carries out that task, it can�t do better than to discard an outmoded politics of �race, religion and repression�.