Tunku Abdul Aziz

MALAYSIA is replete with laws. You name them, and we have them. What we do not have, we produce them instantly, well, almost, in our Barisan Nasional dominated parliament where MPs are not encouraged to study and discuss bills being tabled too carefully.

We also, it is claimed, have the best legal framework, rules, regulations and procedures. And we also have the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, Abdullah Badawi’s after thought farewell gift to a nation that has had to put up with decades of unbridled government corruption. In the nature of things, it is not polite to look a gift horse in the mouth. Unlike Midas who turned everything he touched into gold, Pak Lah turned most things he touched into base metal. The MACC is a prime example of the Badawi touch.

Even with the MACC and its new-found “independence”, we remain a thoroughly corrupt country where corruption is unofficially tolerated, and no one particularly wants to know how instant wealth is acquired. In a society such as ours where money, however obtained, is worshipped and a person with money is revered, it is not surprising that unethical public behaviour has become the norm in the corridors of power.
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The only reasonable conclusion I can draw as a reasonable man from the PDRM raid on the DAP headquarters last Saturday evening is that the police leadership need their heads examined for signs of mental degeneration.

It was Euripides (480–406 BC) the Greek playwright who said, “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.” Police behaviour in recent times has convinced me more than ever that there is something rotten in the state of our country, with apologies to William Shakespeare.

The beleaguered police, as far as we are concerned, are in moral retreat. It beggars the imagination that with all the relentless assault on their reputation, they do not seem to care one iota about public opinion.

This is frightening self-indulgence. To be deaf to public strictures is really a symptom of a deep malaise associated with a diseased culture of impunity that has brutalised the police psyche.

For the guardians of the law to show nothing but utter contempt, disregard and disdain for the legitimate concerns about their actions, often bordering on the criminal, is indeed a serious breach of stewardship and public trust, the antithesis of ethical policing in a democratic society.

I plead guilty to being one of the harshest critics of the police. I am hard on them because I so desperately want them to succeed. At the same time, I can claim to be their admirer when they not only operate within the law, but, more to the point, when they are seen to be both law-abiding and respectful of the rights of every individual under the law.

I want a police service that is among the best that I can be proud of, and not “the best police force in the world that money can buy.”
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I HAVE NEVER really thought as much as I have these last few weeks about the future of this country. No, it is not the Perak political tragedy that has occupied my waking hours, important though it might be.

The assault on the established democratic parliamentary principles and practices bears the hallmark of unabashed, unapologetic and blatant cynicism, a feature that looks set, I fear, to wreak havoc, despair and despondency in our national life. I naturally have no wish to underestimate the damage already done in the short term: the potential for lingering longer term ill effects has manifested itself in the loss of public confidence in the government of the day worries me more.

I believe the future of this country lies in our ability to unite: national unity without a common identity is an exercise in futility. In the context of our plural society with a history of decades of uneasy coexistence, with fears and suspicions as constant companions, and each community left largely to its own devices, the idea of national unity through a common identity is difficult enough to imagine, let alone embracing it wholeheartedly. Present day policies of the Barisan Nasional government, slanted and distorted as they are to benefit the Malays, and more particularly UMNOputras, tend to divide rather than unite us.
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WE WERE staying in a holiday cottage in Lynton, the quintessentially small English village in Devon, the setting of the great classic, Lorna Doone, by R.D. Blackmore, first published in 1869. We had run out of milk for breakfast, and so my wife, little daughter and I got into our rented Morris Traveller for the short drive to our favourite local grocery. My wife went into the store while we waited in the car. No sooner had she entered the shop than out she came, in shock, to tell me that race riots had broken out in Kuala Lumpur.

The lady who owned the shop had, in the week or so we were there, got to know us a little and knew we were from Malaysia. Her first words on seeing my wife were, “Your country is burning!” My wife replied, “You must be thinking of Vietnam, surely.” In 1969, the war in Vietnam was still on. She then pointed to the stacks of The London Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Manchester Guardian and the rest of the British dailies, all with their screaming headlines. That settled any lingering doubts we might have had, and I bought every newspaper I could lay my hands on.
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The last three months have seen a flurry of activity on the Perak political front. All of this was without any doubt occasioned by Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s blatantly cynical, barefaced manipulation of human greed. Najib is no novice when it comes to money matters. He succeeded spectacularly in seducing the three most unremarkable and positively unpleasant Pakatan Rakyat characters to declare themselves independent supporters of the Barisan Nasional.

They have, as to be expected, denied most vehemently that they had succumbed to any such unworthy and degrading temptation as money. Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, says that Malaysian politicians will only transfer their party allegiance for cash, and not principle. I leave you to draw your own conclusion in this particular case.

Najib’s single act of subterfuge has been remarkable for the damage, and repercussions, to the Malaysian body politic, quite apart from damaging further his own already seriously bruised reputation. If he thought what he had done was an example of cutting edge political sophistication, I suggest he should think again. He has by his reckless adventure only succeeded in portraying himself as nothing more than a common garden variety, and not the statesman that we thought he would become given his father’s honoured place in our history and his family credentials.
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WE ARE ALL familiar with a certain joke, much in vogue, about a dead certainty of a pebble thrown randomly high above a Malaysian gathering landing squarely on a Datuk.

Political jokes or cartoons, whether hilarious or not, apparently carry a message of sorts, and this particular one is stingingly pointed in its contemptuous condemnation of a widespread practice that has become a national embarrassment. State, federal governments and royal palaces, some more brazen, and others less so, have been responsible for debasing our honours system instituted, and rightly so, to honour citizens for bravery, for distinguished service to science, soccer, cricket, industry, community and whatever else considered worthy of public recognition.

Cash for honours in modern times was David Lloyd George’s answer to the eternal difficulty of raising money for party funds. Lloyd George, as some will recall, was the Liberal Party Prime Minister of Britain who in 1916 replaced Herbert Asquith. History tells us that while this practice was nothing new, it was the sheer scale of Lloyd George’s marketing of honours operations that alarmed the nation.
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I never for a moment thought I should live to see the day when a traditional hereditary ruler of a Malay State has taken such a rapid slide in his people’s estimation, approbation and adulation as has the Sultan Azlan Shah of Perak. It took one unfortunate, ill-conceived and ill-considered decision over a petition by the Pakatan Rakyat Mentri Besar Datuk Nizar Jamaluddin, to dissolve the Perak State Assembly that has turned Perak into a politically difficult and dangerous situation.

His Highness Sultan Azlan Shah is no ordinary ruler. As a former Lord President and head of the Malaysian judiciary, he ascended the throne of Perak as someone well-qualified by education and training for what, for all practical purposes, is a largely ceremonial sinecure. Be that as it may, the position carries a heavy constitutional responsibility.

It has become quite apparent that while his legal knowledge may be assumed to be extensive, his training more than adequate, his wisdom in dealing with a delicate and important political matter of public concern, on reflection, has in my humble opinion, turned out to be questionable. A great deficiency in a ruler who showed so much early promise of being a wise, liberal minded and benevolent leader.
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THE PRIME MINISTER’S 1 Malaysia has very quickly caught the imagination of the Malaysian public. It has, as to be expected, produced some mixed reactions ranging from sheer ecstasy, utter disbelief with a heavy overlay of cynicism and the standard non-committal shrug of the shoulders. The message is clear. We will believe Najib when we see the colour of his money.

It is not an unreasonable attitude to adopt given the well-known intractable position of UMNO on such a fundamental issue as equality of opportunity for all. There is no hope in hell or heaven, take your pick, that Najib will be able to persuade UMNO members to jettison their only political capital, howsoever acquired, that has enabled them all these decades to remain on top of the heap, irrespective of the highly questionable moral and ethical “legitimacy” of racial discrimination as their comprehensive, over-arching national policy.
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