bn Flip-Flop: Bullies at home, cry-babies abroad
That’s the Barisan Nasional (BN) government for you. All bully and bluster on the domestic scene, beating the people into submission with every weapon at its disposal – biased electoral system, bent judiciary, crooked police force, compliant media and all – and then, playing the victim on those rare occasions when the outside world can be bothered to comment on its activities.
That was Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s ploy throughout his 22-year premiership. He ruled the roost through the power of political patronage and corruption plus ham-fisted crackdowns like Ops Lalang, the sacking of top judges in 1988 and the show-trial of Anwar Ibrahim.
At the same time, he claimed that international critics of his methods were just jealous because Malaysia was, as he never tired of claiming, “the envy of the world”.
Now he’s up to his old trick again, claiming that unfavourable international comment on the elevation of Najib Abdul Razak to prime minister is some kind of conspiracy against poor little Malaysia by the big, bad world media. And BN’s latest propaganda chief, Rais Yatim, is happily playing along with this pathetic proposition.
Rais was recently quoted by BN mouthpiece Bernama as making the somewhat weird statement that the foreign media “would use various terminologies relating to the prime minister’s character to give the impression that he was unacceptable to lead the country”.
Having euphemised the situation with the peculiar phrase “various terminologies”, he then went on to make the utterly false claim that “certain issues” which could tarnish Najib’s good name were “mere allegations made up by the media in Europe and the United States”.
Rais knows as well as you and I do that these “mere allegations” he’s so at pains to dismiss were not made up by the media anywhere, let alone Europe or the US. These allegations were first made – as distinct from made up – in Malaysia – by independent journalists, bloggers and others with the courage to speak out, and continue speaking out, despite strenuous attempts by the BN government to silence them.
Principal among Najib’s accusers is, as everybody knows, MalaysiaToday founder Raja Petra Kamarudin, who as a result has been hounded by the government with charges including sedition and criminal defamation, and two months in detention under the Internal Security Act.
Raja Petra was released from detention on a writ of habeas corpus filed by a legal team led by activist and lawyer Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, who last week was awarded the Bindmans Law and Campaigning Award by London-based magazine Index on Censorship for outstanding service against injustice.
Dismal situation
Malik Imtiaz strikes me as the kind of man every Malaysian should be proud of rather than part of what the paranoid government would like to portray as an international plot against the nation.
To me he’s the very personification of that much-misused and abused virtue, patriotism.
Malik Imtiaz appears to love his country as much as he loathes its oppressors. And to judge from an article he wrote last week titled ‘The truth about Malaysia’, he doesn’t pull his punches.
”Architects of autocracies would benefit tremendously from studying the Malaysian model,” he began.
“It stands as a shining example of how, given the right combination of greed, ambition, maladministration and contempt for the rule of law, any democracy can be recast into an autocracy while preserving the veneer of democratic process.”
Following a discussion of Malaysia’s dismal situation under BN rule and the Raja Petra case in particular, he concluded: “The situation is precarious. Malaysians want change and the elites that form the government are in no position to deliver it. Continued suppression and repression is the only way in which power can be preserved. That does not bode well for the nation.”
Admittedly he was writing for the UK Guardian, not gruesome BN government organs like Star or New Straits Times, but it’s ridiculous to imagine that the Guardian or Malik Imtiaz are part of a foreign media conspiracy against Najib in particular or Malaysia in general.
In fact as former BBC correspondent in Malaysia, Jonathan Kent, wrote in a letter to Malaysiakini the other day, “…almost nobody in the international media gives a fig for Malaysia”.
“Having reported for more than five years on the country, I know from bitter experience that it was a constant battle to interest any editor in the place.
“If Najib is attracting unwanted international media attention it is probably because it is really rather unusual for a head of government to find himself linked to the brutal murder of an attractive young woman or to huge and questionable commission payments for the purchase of armaments.”
With all due respect to Kent, suspicions of criminality surrounding heads of government around the world aren’t quite as unusual as some of us would like.
The newly-elected leader of South Africa’s ANC, Jacob Zuma, springs to mind, as do the Burmese generals, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir, North Korea’s Kim Jong-il and dozens of their ilk on almost every continent.
But what they all have in common besides their ugly reputations, and thus their utter unfitness to govern, is their paranoid hypersensitivity to criticism.
So naturally whenever the world’s free media expose them for what they are, they see it as a monstrous conspiracy. But let’s not feel any more sympathy for these people than they do for their unfortunate citizens.
As long as BN and all the other bullies of the world seek refuge at home in secrecy and lies, let’s confront them with the truth internationally all the louder and more often, and ignore their cowardly, hypocritical cries.
Dean Johns, Mkini
