Malaysian General Election 2004 Special

by Martin Jalleh

Abdullah heads a system that cannot be changed from within

Pak Lah was right when he said recently: "This election does not involve a personality. Voters are choosing a government � (The Star, 7 Mar, 2004). He hit the nail on the head also when he proclaimed earlier that his party is with him.

Indeed, Pak Lah is not alone. Behind him is the BN-UMNO hegemony, which has in the past 22 years manifested itself in unbridled arrogance of power, executive supremacy, political dominance and repression. "Change" has been the mantra Pak Lah has spun day and night. He may be sincere about implementing the changes he has promised. But the system that his predecessor has cultured and bred - and ironically to a great extent on which his (Pak Lah's) political survival depends very much - will prove much more than he can handle.

The truth, if Pak Lah is still open to it, is that he heads and represents a system, a culture and an ideology which had spawned so much abuse of power, injustice, corruption and inequality, and that it is so deeply-entrenched that it cannot change from within and by its own accord.

"A coalition in office for nearly 50 years has to make sure the Opposition should not be given a chance, that impediments of all kinds be laid before it. That is the mindset. The new regime of Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi does not change it. It cannot. There is too much at stake for a new leader to make drastic changes that could redound on him.

"The BN should have insisted upon a new slate to reflect the changes Pak Lah has in mind, but he has done little of that. The same tired old faces are in attendance. Men and women who should have retired years ago remain candidates. Dropping a candidate is seen as a great sacrifice. In other words, little changes," wrote veteran journalist MGG Pillai recently.

Perhaps Pak Lah shares the same stature as the late Hussein Onn, who was described by Singapore's first statesman Lee Kuan Yew in his memoir, as a 'clean' Malaysian PM. He probably will also share the same and even worse predicament than Hussein Onn.

According to Kuan Yew:

"Sitting at the top of an UMNO machine that was based on money politics, Hussein was completely honest. He tried to clean up corruption�authorised the prosecution in November 1975 against the menteri besar of Selangor, Datuk Harun Idris � But Hussein could not widen his purge in the face of resistance from other UMNO state leaders."

Pak Lah is being confronted with a paradigm so riveted to the core that even his predecessor Tun Mahathir Mohamed could not undo. By his very own admission, Mahathir had said during an UMNO general assembly that even his tears could not change the culture of corruption that had seeped so deeply into UMNO.

The truth, if Pak Lah is still open to it, is that he heads and represents a system, a culture and an ideology which had spawned so much abuse of power, injustice, corruption and inequality, and that it is so deeply-entrenched that it cannot change from within and by its own accord.

The BN-UMNO hegemony is an animal or a (rapacious) monster that has been so engineered that it has become irreversible and cannot be re-invented through time. It is so powerful that when unleashed it may even result in a consequence beyond its own control. There can be no clearer example of this than the near-lethal assault by former Inspector of Police Tan Sri Rahim Noor on the handcuffed and blind-folded former Deputy Prime Minster Anwar Ibrahim.

The Anwar Ibrahim affair exposed the ruthless of the UMNO-BN hegemony more than any other recent event in this country. Dr. John Hilley, author of "Malaysia: Mahathirism, Hegemony and the New Opposition" puts it thus:

"The wicked persecution, trial and associated witch-hunts surrounding the Anwar affair gave the Malaysian populace some rare glimpse into the repressive capacities of the BN state.

"The ruthless handling of Anwar, complemented by police intimidation, elite corruption and judicial bias, will remain a stain on the political elite's character for a long time to come."

The BN-UMNO hegemony is not only about a system that encourages corruption. It is also a culture of political hegemony which is highly detrimental to the healthy growth of democracy. It subverts the independence and integrity and public confidence of important democratic institutions such as Parliament, the judiciary, the office of Attorney-General, the police, the Election Commission, etc.

A vote for growing executive dominance?

A vote for Pak Lah is a vote for a hegemony of growing executive dominance, which has reduced the political representation of the people, as embodied in Parliament, to nothing more than a rubber stamp, a symbol shorn of substance, stripped of essence, sidelined and side-stepped by the executive. To stand on the same platform with Pak Lah is to further promote an ideology that ultimately benefits "dominant interests"-the ruling elites and the unscrupulous cronies of the powers-that-be, and which leaves no place for the small man or woman who has no cash, clout or connection.

To give a vote to the BN is to support a powerful hegemony that ignores minority groups such as the Orang Asli and other indigenous peoples, the Indian rubber estate workers, who have been displaced, deprived, disempowered and dislodged from their social environment and natural resource support system, and who have become disillusioned and dysfunctional.

To give Pak Lah a chance is to reinforce a hegemony that employs a gamut of increasingly harsh executive powers to contain, cripple and crush legitimate dissent by the citizens of this country and which resorts to selective prosecution of political opponents for its self-preservation.

To give Pak Lah an overwhelming mandate is to support a hegemony that thrives on the cult of secrecy and which hides the misdeeds of its leaders, and penalizes whistleblowers. Giving the BN a stronger mandate does not make things better, in fact things got worse when Malaysians gave the BN an overwhelming four-fifths majority.

To rally behind Pak Lah is to condone a hegemony that has used its brute majority to push through many constitutional amendments (40 since Merdeka-most amendments made during the last 22 years), at its whim and fancy-not to strengthen rule of law and basic rights-but to erode and erase constitutional checks and balances in order to consolidate and perpetuate the hegemony.

The BN-UMNO hegemony is an ideology which promotes what former MP and writer Sim Kwang Yang calls "the politics of depolitisation"-the closing of the Malaysian political mind which began with the assumption that too much politics was bad for "development." It is an ideology which suggests that Malaysians cannot handle political liberties without killing each other.

Depolitisation means "shifting the burden of ultimate political decisions away from the people, and concentrating such burden in the hands of the ruling elite. It means giving sole monopoly on political decision making to the ruling parties and their fantastic national network of political connections, as far as possible."

"The evolution of our legal and political superstructure in the past three decades, has been geared towards the curbing of civil liberties, especially the right to free speech, assembly and association, in the name of protecting national security and social stability."

It would be apt to recapitulate by using Sim's wisdom on Pak Lah's promise of change:

"�no one person can clean up a system that has reached the stage of near metastasis in terms of moral and political corruption. In its historical development, the idea of democracy has evolved out of a deep-seated and historically tested suspicion against the Rule of Man. The idea is not to give the Great Leader more power, but to curb all exercise of power, through a slow transition to the Rule of Law.

"It would mean a reform from outside the ruling circle, because we cannot expect those powerful people to give up their power willingly. It would entail a radical re-examination of all the institutions of state, to rewrite the rules of the political game, beginning with reform to the election laws and an overhaul of the Election Commission, the guarantee of the independence of the press, the return of non-partisan independence of the police and the army, and the restoration of the independence of the judiciary."

Nothing substantial and real has changed since Pak Lah took over. The pathetic, powerless, prejudiced and pliant performance of the Elections Commission and the blatant manner in which the BN has been abusing the use of government machinery during this campaigning period gives further credence to this.

Rais Yatim once wrote in his thesis "Freedom under Executive Power in Malaysia: A Study of Executive Supremacy" on how the "formidable powers" of the executive have "thrown off-balance the mechanisms of checks and balances that are so vital in a system that claims to be democratic and guided by the rule of law".

Let us help Pak Lah. Let us halt the BN-UMNO hegemony. Let us ensure the necessary checks and balances are brought back into our democratic system. Let us vote the opposition, in spite of its imperfections.

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