Remarks in Ramadhan on a Matter of Regime Change

Turmoil is now the key word in Malaysia. It is ideological, economic, social, cultural and religious conflicts from the turnings of the marionettes plaguing the nation into becoming yet another country in the world that’s stricken.

When cleavages occur in those five areas of society it is in the order of history to demand of such a society for liberty, equality, fraternity or let the nation die - ou la morte!

Old institutions have been replaced in the transition from the agricultural society to the industrial. New institutions have been mauled by power and corruption.

Islam Unbecoming

Islam had been stifling for ages in the Malay world. It kills ideas and initiatives. Books deemed disagreeable by the mullahs were and are still banned.

We were born a democracy with rights. But in the 54 years that have passed we have instead been laden by dozens of draconian laws in addition to the Islamic baggage, making the country more of a dictatorship by the ruling elite.

In the long playing contest for resources deduced by a couple of thinkers into a Clash of Civilizations, Malaysia has finally come to read positive after the Muslim authorities insist on passing more humiliating laws and regulations in recent years.

These demanded Muslims must attend one-day courses before they can marry, the course worth currently RM80 each. Those who have divorced must undergo a course for three-months and pass an examination on how to conduct a lasting matrimony before they would be allowed to marry again. But you are free to marry four wives at any one time. Try thinking.

Trouble is about shift-workers and the likes of lorry drivers who must lose job or income to attend the courses. When asked, religious administrators simply say as they do about the punitive laws of Islam, i.e. you don't have to worry if you don't break the law. So, don't divorce, ever! Try thinking!

The Malays who had built great empires in the Hindu-Buddhist period and reputed to have produced more than 70 percent of the world GDP in those times had been reduced to patented subjugates under an Islam that enriched the Arab and Gujerati traders.

Industrially, since the arrival of Islam, the Islamised Malays in the whole of the peninsular produced not much more than the rehal (Quran stand) and the tombstones. Do you need Islamic law and judiciary to protect and enhance that?

Why did the Malays faithfully subscribe to such an innane religious regime will remain a question few can claim to have half of an answer. Said Professor of Education, Isahak Haron, more than 90 pefcent of the Malays do not understand what they recite in their daily prayers which they do in Arabic.

But that does not answer the tolerance to abuse of such order.

People who stood up have been made to face wild allegations, like former Mufti of Perlis, Dr. Mohamed Asri, who was reported to the National Security Council as someone with links to terrorists. Is that enough to put the Malays down to the ground in an infirm obeisance forever?

In the meantime Malay society has transited into a gender roles reverse. Women account for about 70 percent of enrolments in colleges and universities suggesting Malay men should be getting ready to become house-husbands, something unthinkable to conservative Muslims

Christians are denied the right to distribute Malay translations of the Bible or the Gospels, the whole of which is available in the Internet in Indonesian, making it a lot of ado over actually nothing.

Christians are also legally forbidden from using an assortment of words including the Name of God, “Allah”, and the word “Qur’an”.

The Christian-Muslim clash has now become critical, coming in the guise of an interaction of forces gilded from the plebeian and leading to the making of religious corruption, conceit and deceit to sustain a rotting regime of crony capitalism and shared power.

It is a parody of the truth and of justice. This is an indictment, recalling Mukhtar Lubis in his Senja Di Kota Jakarta (Twilight Over Jakarta).

The result is distrust, distaste and disillusionment, a riot of strong colors that brings in alienation and a certain social breakdown.

In the ensuing anomie is a curious phenomenon. Youths, especially Malay youths, splash acid on people, blinding some and disfiguring the faces of many. It is a clear sign of social disintegration.

Some Malays had been in the habit of poisoning friends and strangers during the colonial era, like there was little other means to secure their self-esteem that has been dying under the colonial yoke. It was called santau and which began reappearing about a decade ago.

Then, year after year when the success had changed the skyline of
Kuala Lumpur and Umno delegates would be housed in the four and five-star hotels to attend the party general-assembly, these leading lights of the Malays would vandalize the rooms leaving behind carnage. It was obviously to inform how they feel about the opulence.

From 2004 Umno delegates in the party supreme council elections openly sold their votes.

The corruption in the party had gotten to its core.

The mischief had been afoot once again. These are behaviors of social disintegration we are talking about.

The Malays became divided and in a forum on 23 August 2011, the well-known Mufti of Perak, Tan Sri Harussani, straightforwardly said there were three reasons the Malays were divided, (i) Prime Minister Najib’s government is weak, (ii) the government is without integrity and (iii) the government is corrupt.

Financial Turmoil

In the face of the financial and economic turmoil that is expected to reach deeper than ever in 2012, nothing is there to guarantee Malaysia a safe passage through the turbulence.

The wakes of the American currency and financial crises and the European sovereign funds crises have started to impact. The morrow is in a very dark cloud.

A divided house as dreadful as this cannot, by any fluke, hold the house of cards before a gale. But what’s coming is a super typhoon.

Prime Minister Najib’s mega projects are now surrounded by high food prices, a property bubble that cannot last a year before it bursts and it litters the streets with instant bankrupts and the critical loss of confidence in the custodians of the law and of order.

In a Malaysian society that is divided into two sets of laws and judiciaries – the secular and the Islamic - it will, as a necessity of history, cause widespread confusion and needlessly enlarging the middle ground with the bewildered.

Alienation is not a new tune to hum. It was sang aloud in the social dances of numbers written down as The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fannon in about the middle of the 20th century and by Victor Hugo, as Les Miserable, a century earlier.

These books were necessary readings in the book-lists that issued from the desk of Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak Bin Hussain, who was architect of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the early 1970s.

The NEP aimed to eradicate poverty and to restructure society to make it possible for the diversity in Malaysia to finally blend into a single identity, a single people, sharing a common heritage and aiming for a common destiny.

But if in Hugo’s Les Miserable the financial crisis Louis XVI caused had turned French society into a simple parasitical state in which the Church, the Nobility and the Workmen made the rest of the people pay for their sustenance and expenses, the same parasitic syndrome of a house divided by an artificially constructed social stratification recurs right here in Malaysia in the 21st century.

The difference is in the fact that in the present phenomenon some make it outright brigandage and these blatantly loot.

It is not about the predatory of colonial regimes. It is a looting by the dint of a capricious alchemy of power and quick riches obtainable by the application of corruption, conceit and wanton abuses by the natives upon their own kinds.

More and more people do not and cannot see eye to eye with the Muslim authorities. In numbers we are easily more than 70 percent of the population. This will surely lead to a final breakdown of Malay and Malaysian societies.

In the constitutional, institutional, cultural, structural and religious conflicts values have and continue to grow upside down, beginning at the top and rotting at the core.

Politicians took over water catchments in the hills to build palatial holiday villas. Others of lesser quantities showed their privileges by having the authorities convert parts of playing fields or recreational reserves into plots for residential bungalows.

In banks the small persons will have to wait six months for a loan of RM 2,000 to be processed and approved knowing a single loan of RM400 million had been approved in a day and by a phone call from the politically weighty.

Unpaid, the RM400 million is mysteriously written off, the latest such maneuver amounting to RM 13 billion, a tidy sum, of course.

In the society it’s not what you know but who you know that counts. Meritocracy becomes blankly a wasting humor. The people feel themselves betrayed.

In that setting sun 85 percent of projects meant for the poorer among the Malays and the Bumiputeras (natives) leaked into the hands of non-Malay tycoons and entrepreneurs. Most Malay contractors and licencies simply sold off contracts and licences given to them.

In the meantime predominantly Malay bureaucracy had long been purchased and the policies of Tun Razak bent beyond breaking point, bastardized, as it were, into a mad mongrel.

Money did not flow downwards. Most of it kept going up, up and away, like the takeoff of Captain Marvel and then some of it may come back to go sideways.

In the industrial and cosmopolitan transition some young workers working away from home and living 20 to a small house became pregnant and threw newly born babies alive into rubbish bins or left them to die under bushes.

The Muslim community bore no compassion for the unmarried mothers. It was adultery conclusively proven by the delivery of the little lives and the mothers must be punished.

The fathers got away, adultery being a crime that must be seen by four immaculate male witnesses or no crime had taken place in Islamic law.

Monseigneur, thiz iz impozzibly wicked!

Senor, vive le difference! It is the way of Almighty God.

It iz clever of you not to menzion the name of Allah, Monseigneur.

I know my world Senor. Here in Malaysia I, as a servant of the Church, a servant of the people and of God, am forbidden by law to use the Name “Allah” and a host of other Islamic terms including “Qur’an”, “Jannat”, Hadith etc. etc..

Monseigneur, you are lucky. Elzewhere in the world you can get yourzelf a death penalty for menzioning the same words. They will charge and sentence you to death for blasphemy!

Senor, you have endangered yourself for to tell me that, and I am a Christian, you may be hanged for the same offence you warn me of.

It is Catch 22 and yet, in the frothing of the lark a Malay doctor having marital problems sent his children for safe-keeping to the Christians several days ago. He will not trust the Muslim half-way houses, if there are any, that is.

He can be put in jail for three years or fined RM5000 or be punished by both for doing what he did.

Christians

A Christian woman had been sentence to death in Pakistan for blasphemy. The Governor of Punjab, a Muslim who stood up for her, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards.

A Christian member of President Asif’s cabinet (Christians form the largest minority in Pakistan. They are 1.6% of the population or 2.8 million souls in 2008) had also been killed.

It has been a stretch of worldwide high and deadly emotions.

An attack on the Coptic Church in Alexandria killed 21 on the eve of the New Year (2011).

Four months before a church in Baghdad was the target. It is happening where Jews, Christians and Muslims share the same shrines of the Abrahamic religions and could be seen praying side-by-side and together even.

In Syria the writer had found himself praying side-by-side with a Nestorian (Suriani) woman at the sepulcher of Prophet Zakaria in Allepo (Halab). It’s the same Zakaria who was guardian and master of the occultation of Mary, Mother of Isa (Jesus).

At the mosque of Yunus (Jonah) in Nineveh (Mosul, Iraq) there would be Jews, Christians and Muslims praying under the same roof.


The Marionettes

But now the marionettes are dancing to a different tune in the game of numbers (see Deuteronomy). The reaches of the game had lanced Indonesia in Maluku, in Jakarta and in Poso (Sulawesi).

In Mindanao the fighting had started more than 300 years before, during the colonization by the Spaniards. It continued sporadically from that time and will not end given the scanty peace efforts and the new religious zeal.

The present stretch of religious violence worldwide had been triggered from the event of September 11 in New York.

Then, as it seemed possible that the torments and the lamentations of September 11 will soon disappear, the world was bloodied beyond the recognition of the mind by a Norwegian.

He said he belonged to the Knights Templars.

Salahuddin the Great routed them a little distance from Nazareth during the Crusades. One escaped.

Religions should have been, at least from the beginning of the 21st century, better equipped with the open-mind. But that has been rendered futile apparently. Only do not give up! We still have President Obama in the US as a moderator.

Les Morte

A nation and society cannot survive serious cleavages occurring in the fields of politics, economics, culture, demography and religion all at once.

If it is agreed Malaysia has gotten there, while the powerful would wish to suspend Parliament and use the Emergency Ordinances to rule by decree, the route out of it is to resume the revolutionary cry for Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, ou le morte (or death)!

Change will have to be prescribed urgently. The ruling Barisan Nasional will possibly lose all states in the peninsular other than Pahang, Johor and Melaka.

The rest depends on the peoples of Sabah (32 ethnic groups) and Sarawak (30 ethnicities), who have become more important than ever before.

Prepare to incubate the new Malaysia with every tribe and every occupational group represented as a beginning of proportional representation, a means to secure freedom and fairplay. This is a democracy with a Bill of Rights. Adios Amigo! --- a. ghani ismail, 23 August, 2011

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WHAT IS RAJA PETRA UP TO?

LIVING IN DREAMS OF A BUGIS NAMED

I LA GALIGO

Even as astounding events unfurl simultaneously over Malaysia that are sizzling the Prime Minister in an aggressive swear of no-confidence and the street-demonstrative Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) has turned upon itself in a fury of alleged higher-up misdealing, it is still Raja Petra’s rush upon a flavor of fantasy to knuckle “the full” band of killers of the Mongolian beauty, Altantuya Shaaribu, that has hogged the attention of the country.

Raja Petra Kamaruddin, blogger of bloggers famed for his No-Holds-Barred in Malaysia-Today, believes the number of killers on the fateful night of October 18, 2007, should be six and not the three that are now still facing trial.

He rammed right into the heart of power his Statutory Declaration (SD) of Wednessday, 18 June, that’s behaving like it is meant to scuttle once and for all the ruling Umno’s numbers one and two, hence securing for the Opposition the way for regime change kicked started by the SAPP in Sabah a couple of days earlier.

Petra’s SD, popularly described as a “nuclear bomb”, threatened to wrack the Malaysian political terrain and can blow the lid of Pandora’s Box, naming as it did the wife of Deputy Premier, Rosmah Mansor, her aide de camp Norhayati and her husband, Acting Kol. Aziz Buyong he described as a C4 expert, as the second triad that killed Altantuya and blew her body to bits to remove the evidence.

In his SD he wrote his source had informed him of an army intelligence report which said the trio were also at the scene of the crime at the material time and the report was sent to the Prime Minister who had given a copy for safekeeping to his son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin.

Another copy, he said, was sent to one of the Malay rulers, meaning he was sure there’s a cover-up and pointing towards a state extra-judicial killing, suggesting the actors were like the special agents of M15, CIA or MOSAIC, and in Malaysia possibly M.I.C.K.E.Y. M.O.U.S.E., involving as it were the number two’s spouse, Rosmah Mansor, as chief of operations, code-named ‘Madam’.

The blast from Petra’s “nuclear bomb” can toss him back into prison where he had been for a few days after refusing to post bail following a charge of sedition only months before.

After the CID chief had mentioned the jail term for making a false report could be two years, Petra once again looms as an incredible hulk battling alone for years against the state’s terror agencies and remaining fit for yet another shot against the oppressors, this time fighting those he believes are licensed to kill.

In the dock are Najib Tun Razak’s political strategist, Abdul Razak Baginda, and two Special Task Force police officers detailed to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, making the second trio the complement of a ring around Najib that some find it easy to believe since it provides the missing links to the macabre murder that had happened in a spot on a blukar-covered hill some have named “the police killing patch”.

The weakness in the facts and figures in the case is the missing melody about who procured the C4 from the army’s armory. That blank has been causing people to continue thinking and filling the vacuity with songs they would otherwise never sing against Rosmah Mansor.

Those come from the question about who ordered the two police officers to execute the Mongolian woman.

The popular plot needed a big-shot in the Ministry of Defence to give the order and to obtain the C4 and Rosmah, her aide de camp and her husband fall neatly into place.

Petra had boldly said the long trial was a “show trial” and after he implicated the deputy premier’s wife and was charged for sedition, he was reported to have said he could be holding a document which we now know as a report from army intelligence.

In his SD Petra reminded the country to withhold evidence is a crime, meaning the Prime Minister and his son-in-law are together liable if his story is true.

But his evidence could run out of character and it could stretch itself into a fantasia of absurd cross-purpose the likes of which was never seen before or after Cervante’s Don Quixote charged some gruesome enemies that were, in fact, windmills.

What then are probably Petra’s plan and purpose?

The Prime Minister has since denied there has been an army intelligence report of such purport.

Unless Petra has corroborative evidences that will stand in a trial, his only relief appears to be hanging somewhere in a royal privy.

He did not tell us which royalty is the link, causing many to suspect the royal household is in a Disney studio he is using to hold the police at ransom so the department must thoroughly investigate or find itself facing the ire of the sire just in case Petra’s story somehow becomes true. He is closely linked to the Selangor Sultan and was also a close friend of the Sultan of Trengganu, who is now the Yang Dipertuan Agong (King).

There is another face to Petra’s novel action. If he had timed his adventure to mix well with the SAPP’s curtain-raiser revolt against Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, his temper this time is, indeed, a sparkling act of self-sacrifice to divide the house into two halves, one believing there was a cover-up no matter if the police investigation finds not an iota of truth in Petra’s hearsay.

Should the police investigation reveal nothing, Petra need to merely point towards a royal household that will remain silent to set Malaysian politics adrift in a divide of wills, with one side allegedly guilty of extra-judicial murder and removing the bodies with C4.

Petra, if he is jailed for sedition and for making a false report, will become the cause celebre, as Anwar had been before.

Raja Petra Kamaruddin, once before the chairman of East Asiatic Company and proven a mean mind in corporate strategy is showing his natural bend for political strategy as well. He could be trying to turn the tables, playing the counter-conspiracy game in a style not altogether unlikely.

Should all go according to plan and he finds himself back in a jail cell, all he would need to pull off another spate of spitfire web- and street-aggressions against the government of flip-flop Pak Lah would be a death-fast he had longed to do.

The glorious intermix of political revolt with the stress of hyper-inflation ought to pack enough force to unseat the premier.

Pak Lah could be forced to call for a snap-election and that would leave Umno and the Barisan Nasional in ruins no matter the troubles brewing in the PKR against its Selangor Mentri Besar.

Raja Petra is a genius gone stark crazy, a Bugis as impulsive as they come and choosing to dance on the flavors of fantasies in creating history, like it was with I La Galigo.

I La Galigo was the Bugis legendary hero who took for himself and his nation a niche in China simply because he found a Chinese princess attractive and must have her, plus the kingdom her husband ruled, or he would rather be dead.

He planned all sorts of plans and finally decided to simply walk straight into her room, let her take him captive and seduce him instead, stayed for days with her and finally replaced her husband as ruler of the land as well. Some guts! ----- a. ghani ismail, 25 June, 2008

IS PAK LAH A DICTATOR?

HUSH! PAK LAH IS NEAR. SHUT YOUR MOUTH; SPEAK THROUGH YOUR NOSE

It is Pak Lah’s failure to understand the new realities issuing from the transition from bureaucratic government to the informational society his predecessor had initiated that could have resulted in what the former premier, Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, described as the lack of openness, a terminal understatement of the new regime’s control of the Press uploaded since the “Nice Guy” took over the helm at the end of 2003.

Mahathir, in his blog, chedet.com, said many journalists who were sacked or who accepted voluntary severance, and other senior journalists who were believed to have been “linked” to the former premier were refused even the slightest space in the mainstream media since Pak Lah took over as Prime Minister.

Mahathir’s statement is true. He said Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and he himself were not allowed to speak to Umno members to campaign for the Umno Supreme Council election scheduled for December.

Pak Lah held tight control over the mainstream media in Malaysia.

He placed people from the PM’s office and a select crop of his friends to the top of the heap. They removed all and sundry deemed or suspected of having been “linked” to the former PM or who showed little enthusiasm for Pak Lah as the big boss.

The actions are those of people who believe in the power of the bureaucratic hierarchy and the resulting information became the spin of tamed editors and the media shamans.

Pak Lah was swiftly spun into a Nice Guy and a Mr. Clean. He had then, in fact, recommended his brother-in-law for the Iraq Oil For Food Program and later rewarded members of his family and cronies to the tune of the fabulous.

Fist-tight control of the Press and hiding a nepotist tilt as bold as Mount Rushmore could not possibly escape popular ire in an informational society.

It proved to be the greatest of Pak Lah’s follies, the sacked journalists with fellow bloggers from all walks of life detailing the New Media of the informational society with strategies, talents, humor and courage the likes of which were never known before in Malaysia, resulting in a stripping of the sunshine spun by the artful shamans of the controlled media and leaving Pak Lah and his son-in-law, Khairy, in the blind side of reality.

Pak Lah was aiming to place all of the conventional media under one roof, Media Prima, striking a shadow of a doubt of the Singapore Press Holding that is said to control information in Singapore so precisely people can hear a pin drop when the powers decide to let them hear. Otherwise even a wise-crack as good as that will be retired into Pandora’s Box.

Pak Lah probably never understood what Mahathir had known well – that the informational society would work at its best in a mutual leadership within a free and sharing open community, making the control of information and opinion by a bureaucratic hierarchy in Malaysian plural society the worst of errors.

Mahathir was the architect of the Malaysian informational community, himself trained as a medical doctor with a distinction in Physics in his pocket and hence, well-endowed to convene the world’s best and foremost in the field of ICT in Putrajaya.

Mahathir was also a self-taught writer. He was later to become himself a phenomenal Blogger, discovering rather late in life that he should have been a Blogger decades before. He is a born Blogger.

Pak Lah, alas, was heavily into Civilizational Islam (Islam Hadhari) he seemed to have understood as that part of Islamic culture that was an extension of the Greco-Roman philosophical and scientific pursuits which could be deemed to have begun in the late 9^th century AD and limped after the fall of Baghdad in 1258.

It then revived and died sometime in the 16^th century after the apex of Mughal art and architecture was reached in India, hence leaving the premier’s perception of control and governance stalked by the medieval feudal-religious regime and of bureaucratic government that filtered later into the Islamic landscape through Western colonialism.

He was centuries behind Mahathir, sliding under the sheath of the Singapore-anchored Level Four boys for appearances of efficiency and effectiveness but failing to impress because of the open nepotism, flip-flop policies, and finally, an undeniable cerebral incapacity to do better than his predecessor who he wanted so much to outdo.

He should have been replaced with Najib, but for the fact Najib is power-shy, perhaps remembering his father had taken all authority following the 1969 Emergency and then quickly returning to the people parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

Maybe Najib was too young then to have understood what, in fact, his great father had done. Tun Razak was a member of the British Labor Party, himself an evolutionary socialist who genuinely placed the nation and people first and foremost.

Pak Lah was believed to be ideologically Islamic, but that can hardly be upheld. He has given himself so enthusiastically to the power-patent of the feudal regiment, favoring his own family and his cronies, rewarding sycophants and punishing people he suspects of alien alliance.

He applied such a tight-control over information and opinion he had become to the New Media, undeniably an ogre.

Much has been said about the New Media being a significant reason for the failure of the Barisan Nasional in the 8 March elections.

It would be easier to comprehend the efficiency of the blogosphere should we limit the damage done mainly to the person of the Prime Minister, his son-in-law, the Level Four boys and the medley of maimed Barisan Nasional leaders who either damaged themselves by hubris or were injured by enemy fire for being too arrogant, corrupt and complacent.

The blogosphere is a people’s sphere of information that’s an extension of our nervous system. It is where we express our shared feelings and sensitivities. Pak Lah possibly failed to grasp the change that has found root in Malaysia. Locked in the assumption that the feudal patron-client culture remained efficient, he aggressively purposed and pursued it, leading himself into the underside of doom. Hush! ---a. ghani ismail, 16 June, 2008.

WHAT'S THE REAL PRICE OF FUEL IN MALAYSIA?

SAVE ON SUBSIDY LOSE ON TAXES, FLIP-FLOP POLICY END OF SHOW




In the kind of classic flip-flop the world has seen little of since the Abbassid dynasty collapsed before Hulagu in 1258, Pak Lah, Malaysia’s out-going Prime Minister, raised fuel prices by a fiery snort and then gave rebates to about 6.1 million non-commercial car-owners. Now conscientiously working to “automatically” reduce road-tax and even income tax, it is clear he had raised fuel prices in a flip to cut the fuel subsidies and then he flopped to cut government revenue to raise the people’s humor, or something like that.

In Baghdad the flip-flop was, of course, even more critical. Hulagu forced the sultan to decide between keeping his treasures or his concubines - numbering more than 800 he described as ‘women that had neither been touched by the light of the sun nor that of the moon.’

Hulagu let the captured sultan believe he could leave with the women and about 200 miles from the capital, he intercepted the sultan’s caravan and had him and his men cut to pieces.

Both the episodes have one thing in common, and that’s about the Beast. The Beauty Hulagu distributed between his captains. It must have raised their humor somewhat, for a while.

The humor could not last. From out of the general despondence caused by rising prices, several thousands took to the streets in Kuala Lumpur yesterday (Friday, 13 June) to protest the flip-flop policy.

The government should have known better. Fuel prices to most Malaysians are far above what are paid at the kiosks. These kiosks are not available to most people.

Even in the outskirts of the Klang Valley fuel is often sold in bottles and in plastic cans. When petrol used to cost RM1.92 at the kiosks, a liter in a bottle would cost RM6 or more. As an example, RM6 per liter was charged at two small sundry shops in Batu 14, Ulu Langat, Selangor.

In Sarawak it was reported petrol was sold along the Rejang at RM5.05 per liter and some in the government may have us believe it is the story of a remote upstream station.

But between Slim River and Bidor in West Malaysia is a Felda scheme plopped 45 kilometers from the trunk road and settlers will have to drive or ride about 60 kilometers to fill their tanks at the kiosk in Slim River. That means 120 kilometers to and fro. Is that also a remote place?

Should you drive from Kuala Pilah to Sri Menanti in Negeri Sembilan, the last petrol kiosk you’ll find would be about 12 kilometers from the royal village. Then, from Sri Menanti to Gunung Pasir and Inas, you will see no kiosk until you get to Johol. Through all of the 60 kilometers fuel was sold in bottles until one enterprising fellow set up a skid-tank pump that’s now out of service.

Is Batu 14 Ulu Langat remote? Is Sri Menanti also remote?

Still wonder how come prices of goods go up by leaps and bounds in some places following the fuel price hike? Development in Malaysia is like a checker-board, but with less than equal black squares and white.

Someone should put on the web a map showing the distribution of the fuel kiosks and superimpose that on a demographic map and there before our very eyes would be a lesson we ought to have learned a long time before.

It will tell us the kiosks are commercial and not featuring a public utility provided by the government. Hence, their absence means a higher fuel price than the ones the government decided without bothering to consult the people via the parliament or via any forum.

You still think it had been a great idea to rush the price of petrol to RM2.70 from RM1.92 and diesel up RM1 to RM2.54 per liter while issuing rebates for 800 liters?

You still think it was smart to do that and then, seeing the general price increase can overwhelm the society, you reduce road tax, income tax and sales taxes, resulting in an elaborate exercise to save on the fuel subsidies and then lose a lot of revenue. What kind of a subsidy-taxes swop is that?

A sales girl told this writer she has started to eat broth for lunch and to skip dinner. Many will have to do that, earning only RM800 per month or RM30 per day part-time, in Kuala Lumpur.

These are the people that are punished most severely, people who do not at all use petrol or diesel, and along with them all those we may categorize broadly as less endowed.

The injury is done. What we need now is intervention between policy decisions and implementation simply because there was no consultation before the hopeless decision was made.

But how can that happen if the deputy premier, Najib Tun Razak, is not willing to place the nation and the people before self and decided he will not contest for party president in the forthcoming Umno Supreme Council election?

Rumors suggest Pak Lah will retire anytime between March and June next year. But in that time the injury would have become gangrenous and what Najib shall be taking over would be a country in critical need of surgery.

Najib must become more policy-active now, not later. The protest march from Kampung Baru to Sogo yesterday the Pas Youth organized was merely a foretaste of what’s to come. Planned on 5 July is the “million march”. Will it happen?

Judging from the enthusiasm shown yesterday, with a lot of people waiting at and around the KLCC to welcome the walkers, the answer is yea, it will.

The fuel-price decision was crazy. It made no sense at all to save on the fuel subsidy and cause a general price rise, and then cut revenue by reducing tax after tax in addition to the RM625 rebate. It makes the policy a veritable gas-bag but certainly filled with other than laughing-gas.

People are bound to ask who made the money from the fuel price hike?

Caramba! We need a problem solver, not a bleeding-heart or peace-maker for a leader. Maybe we need one such as Hulagu, the Mongolian. ----a. ghani ismail, 14 June, 2008

IS PAK LAH POLITICALLY DEAD?

IS THIS FINALLY THE END OF PAK LAH?

REACHING INTO THE APPEARANCE OF DORIAN GRAY




Unless the god you worship is dumb, and stupid, you will never get away with the things you have been doing in Malaysia, such as the police refusing to take a report made against a crown prince who battered a young woman he kept as a lover, and the Prime Minister elaborately lying through his teeth on TV about his son’s business dealings.

But the second matter is old, resurrected currently after it was known who has been selling buses to Rapid KL and the monorail to Penang.

On 7 August 2006, in an arranged interview on TV3 with BERNAMA chairman, Datuk Annuar Zaini, the premier said this:

Q: You are known as Mr Clean and Mr Nice Guy. Sometimes that intention is
disrupted because of business interests. Besides KJ [Khairy Jamaluddin, his son-in-law], your son, Kamaluddin, is also in business and has he misused or taken advantage of his
relationship with you to excel in his business?

A: Kamal has never used his relationship with me to advance in business. His
business is in a field which only has two companies in the world. Of the two
integrated oil companies, one is in the US and the other is his.

He is not involved in many other companies and he operates overseas. Sometimes people ask, why is he overseas?

He tells them that since his father has become the Prime Minister, it is difficult for him to make a living here. That is why he opted to do it overseas. Eighty percent of his contracts are from overseas and that is where he gets his rezeki (sustenance).

Petronas usually participates in international open tenders. Any tender he gets is too small compared to what he gets overseas and he also has to compete for the tenders with other companies.

He usually gets tenders from companies like Shell and Esso because it is related
with oil and gas. He has never asked for help from the Government. There is also
no bail out. None.

Q: In your capacity as the Finance Minister, has his company obtained
government tenders?

A: No, not at all. To my knowledge, he has not received any. He does not manage
the business and is only the major shareholder and had made a move to buy a
Singapore company with 188 ships to transport coal.

Q: Some say that the Penang monorail is reserved for Kamal. Is that true?

A: Siapa cakap? (Who said so?) I tell you, it is hard to be nice.

That was on Monday, 7 August, 2006. Nine days later (15 August 2006) in Malaysiakini, Sulaiman Rejab wrote to say he did not wish to refer to the Prime Minister anymore as “Pak Lah”, saying the man had lost all his endearing qualities since becoming Prime Minister.

Then he recounted the following:

‘In March, The Malay Mail reported that KTM had in 2005 awarded a five-year RM50
million contract to Scomi Group [Kamaluddin’s company] ‘to overhaul and maintain’ as many as 1,000 wagons.

‘Also in March, Business Times reported that Scomi Group was going to submit a
bid for a RM120 million contract ‘to make body parts for about 400 buses for
state-owned Syarikat Prasarana Negara Bhd’.

‘Then in April, The Edge reported that Scomi Engineering Bhd is acquiring a 51%
stake in MTrans Transportation Systems Sdn Bhd for RM30 million to provide it a
platform to be a key player in urban transportation.

‘Scomi Engineering had on April 28 signed an agreement with Kiara Kilau Sdn Bhd,
which owns 100% stake in MTrans, to acquire the 51% stake. MTrans owns bus
manufacturer MTRans Bus Sdn Bhd and MTRans Technology Bhd, which specializes in
monorail systems and technology. This is, of course, for the Penang monorail
project.

‘So the five-time hike in petroleum prices over the last year on the pretext of
improving public transportation is certainly benefiting some parties - your
son's Scomi Engineering, to be specific.

‘What have you done to improve the public transportation in Kuala Lumpur since
then? The LRT is still madly congested and the city buses are still breaking
down in the middle of already congested roads.’ .[Italics mine]

‘The pieces fall into place nicely…’, Sulaiman wrote, possibly fully aware the end of the story was still a long way from where he was looking.

Even after Malaysian society had awaken to the regime-corruption signage and almost voted the Barisan Nasional (BN) out in the recent 8 March elections, the BN, and especially Umno, is still appearing like it is enjoying somnolence of the kind dreams never visit.

It is in deep sleep, and apparently believing God is dumb and is causing the acquired impotence of the party members.

What now?

Superman-under-siege, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, former premier and all that jazzy stuff, in his phenomenal blog, chedet.com, recalled the great open lie on 6 June 2008, and once more set the stage for awakening Umno from the “elegant” somnolence that’s making many think it is, indeed, in a smear of death.

Scomi, the flagship of the premier’s son, after taking over M-Trans Sdn. Bhd., which is the bus and monorail builder, has now been supplying the GLC, Rapid KL, with new buses, some it built itself in the M-trans yard and others it bought from China, which must be pretty convenient, of course.

Hence, Dr. M wants to know:

What prices did Scomi (or the relevant subsidiary) pay for the Chinese buses and what did it charge Rapid KL for the same imported buses? What tariffs and taxes did it pay for bringing in those buses?

He also wants to know if it is possible for Rapid KL and Khazanah to show the people their profit and loss accounts, which could mean he thinks transparency concerning the GLCs has gone under the Official Secrets Act as well under Pak Lah.

What does Rapid KL intend to do with more than a thousand buses it now keeps in a yard at Sungai Chua, Kajang, which it paid for in its takeover of City Liner and Intrakota? Surely these buses could be repaired or refurbished and be taken back on the road or sold?

Why on earth were they replaced by new buses from China in the first place, when public transport in the Klang Valley and surrounding areas are appalling and can do with the extra buses now lying idle?

And, of course, in Penang, isn’t the monorail given to Scomi’s subsidiary to build?

These and many other questions will surely be raised in the forthcoming parliamentary session.

But will it move Umno in any direction that shall serve the society in a way that can inspire maturity and refinement 62 years after the ruling party was born or would that necessarily need a regime change?

To state that differently, how much of corruption, nepotism and poor governance will it take for Umno members to aggress and demand for Pak Lah to retire?

I cannot answer that. The present Umno is not the Umno I knew.

It would be equally audacious for me to try and suggest this may be the final straw that will break Umno’s gentle somnolence and that the party will soon wake up to say “it’s enough!” and bid Pak Lah a tearless goodbye.

Therefore, keeping alive the belief there will be a regime change sooner than later is, indeed, the wiser thing to do.

Pak Lah’s Nice Guy and Mr. Clean images could have all been appearances of the Dorian Gray sort, a magic of art or an artifice of magic, which, in a single word, is a lie. ---a. ghani ismail, 11 June 2008

CAN PAK LAH SURVIVE HIS FUEL PRICE HIKE?

HAIL PAK LAH! WITHER THOU GOEST?
The sage has withered from the lake and no bird sings.



The dust settled quickly after Pak Lah’s kiss of death announcement on 4 June that raised the price of petrol at the stands by more than 40 percent and diesel hiked beyond 63 percent. It was like the sun intended one last rising for the “flip-flop” Prime Minister to sing his swan song. He is still refusing to retire, waiting to be cast out by the count of delegates’ votes in December.

If there’s ever a need for Umno to hold an emergency general meeting to oust the party president, that occasion is certainly here and now. Umno and the BN are defenseless against the people’s woes now that prices will rise once again like the dead, to haunt.

His ingenious “tiered-system” of fuel pricing has only offered a lollipop rebate of RM 652 or about 800 liters of petrol at the rate of the hike - 78 sens per liter. It is for vehicles of 2000 cc and below.

While that rebate works out to merely about 52 Ringgit per month, the rise of gasoline price to 2.70 will issue another general price-rise that will assuredly eat into the household incomes way above the paltry sweetener.

In February 2006 when the price was raised by 30 sens from RM 1.62 to RM1.92, the effect was like the floodgates were opened and in the general price rise that ensued, the consumers were simply helpless watching the prices go up and up like hot-air balloons.

Control isn’t a word of any value in Pak Lah’s regime. Prices o s$ome brands of chilly sauce went up from RM1.25 to RM1.90 within a couple of months, confirming the suspicion some really like it hot.

Why then did Pak Lah decide on RM2.70 and then pay the rebate of RM52 a month (RM 625 a year) when the price could be much lower without the rebate and the floodgates effect could be lessened?

People are unlikely to forget the price of diesel is now RM2.58, up one buck from RM1.58, meaning the prices of everything commercial will rise like Dracula.

If that’s complicated, a simpler way of saying the same thing is why not decide on a lower price of fuel and forget the rebate?

The society is still haunted by the sudden general cost-climb caused by the fuel price-rise of Feb. 2006. It was compounded by the cabinet’s shameless incompetence to manage and control the effects of the price-rise that resulted in what appeared like a scramble for survival among manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and retailers.

Until some brands, especially of the food-link, began to run beyond the reach of consumers, prices kept climbing. Some essential items like floor and cooking oil were soon hoarded to force the government to concede to demands for higher prices.

Petrol will now cost RM 2.70 per liter, from RM1.92 the day before, up 78 sens. Diesel is RM2.58 per liter from 5 June, from RM 1.58 the day before, up RM1 overnight. It used to be only 78 sens until May 2004.

The senseless argument would have to be it’s a malady of the world and Malaysia is not an exception even if we are a net exporter of oil and we are earning more in our exports and we are enjoying a much larger tax take since the tariff reforms.

Malaysians obviously are feeling themselves roped like dopes in a noose that has instantly brought home the point that the government is heartless and is being punitive.

Should Pak Lah call for a snap-election the debris that will be strewn in the aftermath would definitely be the pieces of the trounced BN.

Pak Lah has been observed to have been more and more isolated from the realities of Malaysian society. Now he is altogether lost.

After the February 2006 fuel price decision Pak Lah decided to raise the salaries and living allowances of the government servants as an easy means to keep them happy. That happened against a shower of protests since that would compound the inflationary effects. He did not care and inflation indeed jacked-up more than four percent in the following month.

Now many are saying the Prime Minister is simply being punitive. He is punishing the people for voting the Opposition in five states and in one Federal Territory and denying the BN the two-third majority in parliament for the first time in history.

It is looking like it is either curtain for Pak Lah or it would be unlikely for the BN to stave off regime-change no matter the Malay solidarity movement launched in early May to defy Anwar Ibrahim’s Malay-led supra-ethnic initiative for a multi-racial Malaysia with the Party Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).

The Malay intelligentsia is cold toward Anwar’s PKR. They prefer Anwar to find his way back into Umno rather than force a supra-ethnic leading number to rule the country before the Malays are ready for such a change.

But where Malay interests and destiny are concerned, Pak Lah is seen as having worn a mask now assumed to have hidden an intriguing split-personality. He inclined too much to Singapore and discontinued his predecessor’s policies and vision, causing a decided net loss of Malay faith and confidence in him.

In his Monsoon Cup poly-caper in Trengganu it was discovered several billions of Trengganu oil royalty (Wang Ehsan) somehow went missing and the mystery of the missing money now compounds the already squelchy reserve of Pak Lah’s misadventures that had left a stench.

Pak Lah has too big a credibility deficit. His crony from Penang, Patrick Lim, bill-boarded himself beside the premier in the Trengganu Monsoon Cup, while in Perth, his wife’s multi-million dollar mansion has been Pak Lah’s holiday retreat and lair.

This same Patrick Lim is the brain behind the Penang Global City Centre (PGCC), a multi-billion mega city development project now suggestively about to tilt towards ruination. Penang fell to the Pakatan Rakyat in the 8 March elections.

This same man and his company somehow acquired several hundred acres of choice land at Batu Kawan as soon as Pak Lah had become prime minister according to some reports. The chunk of prime land is right beside where the Penang second bridge would begin on the mainland

Pak Lah is self-entrapped, and speedily sinking deeper and deeper into disgrace he cannot halt and overcome.

His brand new cabinet he constructed without bothering to acknowledge the contribution and significance of Sabah, resulting in a couple of resignations, loud protests, threats to cross the floor and much of the premier’s time wasted in the effort to sooth the wounded pride and feelings of a people who deserves much better.

In his encounter with himself the leader has told his party members he wants more time to rehabilitate Umno and to see through the development corridors he planned, the northern chapter of which has since been blemished and bashed by the acquisitions of Patrick Lim while the eastern corridor is stumped by the missing funds belonging to Trengganu.

How can Pak Lah lead an attempt to rehabilitate the party when as a Malay leader he is already assumed as baroque? He is also observed as nepotistic, placing family before society and nation.

He has serially bungled in the Trengganu Cup poly-caper, in the intrusions into Penang Development Plan, in his continued deference to Singapore for whom he had dumped the Crooked Bridge Mahathir had begun to build. Even about Islam Hadhari he bungled.

He has enriched his family members and made worse corruption in the country.

Has he been true to the aspirations of the Malays and of Umno whose elders had asked him to restore democracy after he suspended it in the 2004 party Supreme Council election that frothed with accusations of “money politics”?

And now we have this so-called “tiered fuel pricing system” that raised prices by 78 sens to RM2.70 for gasoline and by RM 1 to RM2.58 for diesel when the prices could be lower if there’s no lollipop rebate.

What kind of alchemy are we dealing with here?

Pak Lah did not even care to wait for improvements in public transport before leaping. The timing in the Klang Valley is quite clearly horrid. Of course the chorus will say it is about the same in most places in Malaysia.

KTM’s Komuter is now running on a schedule of 20 minutes per trip instead of 10 minutes and many areas are neither served by buses nor by taxies, Bangi old town and the surrounding villages and housing estates being merely one example.

This kind of policy blunder cannot be treated as a lark. This can amount to gross negligence of the economy, something that will certainly become overwhelmingly clear in a matter of a few weeks when once again prices of essentials would have breached the ozone layer and the society would be hot, restless and feeling more threatened than ever before. It would lead to anomie.

So, which way is Pak Lah going?

It’s best for him to accept the verdict of the people and decide to go. Adios amigo! -----a. ghani ismail, 6 June 2008

Umno Presidential Equation - Pak Lah or Najib or Ku Li?

TRANSIT MALAY NATIONALISTS SURVIVING BY TIME –

[Alternatively, pleeeze pass me my sombrero, amigo, hehe!]


Time in Umno, having entered a state of transit since former party president and premier, Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, bailed out on Wesak Day (May 19), is taking the party on a drift that feels like it is dragging endlessly. Mahathir walked out on a spur after the cabinet decided to have him and party secretary-general, Tengku Adnan, investigated for crimes they may be charged with following the Lingam tape the Royal Commission found believable and hence, incriminating.

In making his final appeal to deputy party president, Najib Tun Razak, to contest for number one, Mahathir is applying for the only certain course to defeat Pak Lah, but tearing to pieces Tengku Razaleigh’s hope to get the qualifying number of nominations (58) to enable him to contest for president.

Tengku Li is now regarded only as a reserve, a consequence of the former strongman’s move that must have appeared in his mind as unavoidable.

The Kelantan prince’s gutsy doggedness, however, is critically keeping the effort for leadership change alive in Umno, Najib being as slow as a snail to warm up to the popular assumption in Umno that he will surely win if he [finally] decides to contest Pak Lah.

Najib’s uneventful calculative nature is forcing everyone to have to wait until nominations begin in July when the party holds the divisional meetings and begins the process of nomination.
Mahathir’s decision to depend solely on Najib taking the plunge has become to many somewhat illusionary and thus stretching time in Umno simply because of the wait to see to believe that Najib will accept the nominations to contest.

Pak Lah, driven deeper and deeper into a horrid mess he caused himself is still unable to resolve Sabah’s poor representation in his new cabinet, that’s making Anwar Ibrahim’s claim to early regime change more and more credible.

The premier is now saddled with yet another eye-popper. Billions in oil royalty that ought to have been paid to Trengganu as Wang Ehsan are missing, apparently vanished from the books either by an act of great magic or by high-tech thievery.

A police report has been made, an amount of RM3 billion mentioned when the missing money could be as much as RM6 billion.

Prices, meanwhile, having climbed more than four percent in April, are still going up like the controls are not anywhere beyond the talking.

With subsidies now surpassing RM50 billion and have exceeded the development expenditure, Pak Lah must either find the means to effectively address the need for inflation moderation and manage the currency and food crises or Malaysia, it is generally felt, will soon be drifting on the current of investors’, consumers’ and labors’ nervousness that will soon qualify the nation as a failed state.

The premier is seen as trying to make much of the investments entering Malaysia Iskandar (Development Region) in Johor. But how relevant are these to the challenges the crises are posing?

Floor staffers of joints like MacDonald, Pizza Hut, Mr. Tappanyika, Sushi and Kenny Roger’s are merely paid an average of RM800 per month, in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, and if lucky, they get an extra RM100 every three months as “incentive”.

Are we to seriously believe these workers can survive on that sum in Kuala Lumpur now? How will they be faring 12 months hence, while these outlets have to be striving against lower volumes because of the price hikes?

The problems we currently face are complex and they will stay for years to come.

The price of oil having reached USD135 per barrel and should surpass USD200 even without Iran being invaded is only one thing.

It is the rising commodity prices and the manipulation of the food supply and distribution that are making the economic woes run into trends worse than those of the Great Depression of the thirties.

It is really useless to be repeating Malaysia is not affected by the sub-prime and the unsecured loans messes that are turning the world’s finances and economy into a wicked and painful game of profiteering. We know the big players are trying to recoup great losses by the manipulation of the commodity, food and currency trades.

But the point is about what we can do and what we will immediately do to avoid and to moderate the impacts of the deliberate disorderliness, and not over and over again repeat the useless mantra that our banks are not hit by the sub-prime scuttle and thus expect people to somehow feel good.

It is alright if the government is not going to be a party to the rising demands to find a peaceful world solution, like going for a new Bretton-Woods. But it is not alright to be singing the same mantra repeatedly since that is like saying clearly you have hit a mental block and should, indeed, quit as a government.

We need to know how you plan to drive for self-sufficiency in the sectors that will be badly bashed, and underlining food which we are importing more than RM15 billion per year currently.

That sum can triple within the space of two years in the given circumstances, meaning Malaysia can become a bankrupt individual if the trends continue unabated.

The purchasing power of the Ringgit is being squeezed in many more ways than the inflation. Consumption is already straining and will shortly worsen the negative effects on production, the upshot of which will translate into recession with inflation and yet continue showing positive growth, a poser nobody has yet dared to name beyond the 1985-87 coinage we know as “stagflation”, which is old hat.

It’s almost a surreal world event, except that the forced-sales of shares and bonds plus the properties the banks are auctioning are indeed real.

In other words, unless we quickly do something intelligent we are surely headed for a crunch.

We would be better off attending to national self-sufficiency and regional and inter-bloc economic co-operations by barter than to be securing marks in showing how good we are in complying with the WTO and the cosmo-global companies so we can get serially patted on the back from the big shots, before international TV.

Seeing we have no answers forthcoming from Pak Lah and his cabinet that can provide us with a reason to hope we’d be getting any better, rather than for Dr. Mahathir and Tengku Razaleigh to be wasting their accumulated experiences in this critical transit of time, surely we can gain much if they were to leave the distasteful aside and help guide the nation to secure the society from the decided drift that’s taking us towards breakdown.

People have come to assume as given that Pak Lah has bogged himself down and is in no shape either to rehabilitate Umno or to plan and manage the country’s needed economic adjustments.

Everywhere people are saying the political puzzlement in Umno and BN is simply arising from the fact he does not want to let go and would rather see the ship sink with him.

Umno, as a mass organization that has become power and money absorbed, cannot be expected to regain the spiritual quest of the early years that would be needed to move the members to act as Dr. Mahathir is asking them to do, which is to bail out and shout from the outside to demand Pak Lah quit before they will return to the party.

He may have done the right thing for himself, and with him his wife and a son, Mokhzani.

As for party members, some say they would be loosing the means they have to aggress against Pak Lah should Najib choose to contest and/or if it has to be Tengku Li they must back to chance for change.

Najib has said he fears the party will be divided should he contest for number one. Party members now say that will not happen unless Pak Lah lets the power go to the opposition and the horror of a president of that sort crashes the meaning and worth of Umno like a mirror being smashed on the floor.

Najib has successfully gained for himself the biggest single disappointment many can trace in the history for Umno. He is seen not at all as a fighter, they say, and not as someone who places the nation and party above self.

He has lost for nothing a lot of goodwill and respect while the party is heavily inclined towards him no matter the Altantuya murder trial casting a wild shadow over him and his wife, Rosmah.

The popular belief is, unless a regime change actually happens, Umno will not fragment beyond what has already occurred.

Any significant bleeding can only be expected to happen if Pak Lah were to stay as president beyond December, which would seem to be reflecting the sense of futility among the immortally impotent majority in Umno’s 3.5 million members.

The nationalist Malays have apparently successfully castrated themselves.

Meanwhile, until the nominations for president and deputy president are made beginning July, time in Umno will still be skirting reality and shunting in transit, bearing little hope to reduce the gigantic frustration and sense of self-defeat that has become almost second nature to the Malays in Umno.

The zeitgeist has long been saddled on the fear of the orang asing (the aliens) and acknowledged little about internal rot and incompetence as causes of terminal political and economic failures.

The present crop of Malay nationalists in Umno, caught in a bind such as now and fearing for Malay survival, can become very vocal in the evenings at coffee-shops but leaves to Dr. Mahathir the ravings and rantings in the attempt “to remove the gangrene”.

In 2004, most of the Umno delegates that chose the current list of Umno Supreme Council members, had accepted bribes we were told. It was the first Umno Supreme Council election held under Pak Lah’s leadership. The delegates were corrupt!

Now we learn anywhere between RM3 billion and RM6 billion of Trengganu’s oil royalty had not been paid to the state government. Where on earth did the money go?

No wonder time in Umno is in transit and waiting for something to happen, and which will, of course, probably from July. Hidup Melayu! Long Live the Malays!

Can you pleeeze hand me my sombrero? Mooooocho gracias amigo! Hehe! ----- a. ghani ismail, 25 May, 2008 (or is it?)

IS UMNO BECOMING A CIRCUS OF DOOM?

UMNO BECOMING A CIRCUS OF DOOM;
OR A LESSON OF WHAT YOU SOW THAT YOU SHALL REAP

http://www.naningku.blogspot.com/



With stakes reaching above the moon, Umno is now looking like a circus gone upside-down with the weakest man on top and the strongest apparently cowed into submission and seen as vulnerable as he’s being forced down the crest of popular accusations linked to an on-going murder trial that’s been dragging for almost a year.

In the run-up to the party Supreme Council election scheduled for December, some party veterans are screaming like banshees over unfair and undemocratic practices of the party president and his clique.

Bent on scuttling challengers, Pak Lah has once again been abusing democratic rights in Umno as he had done in 2004.

Former party president and Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, who is hoping for the number two to go for number one in December, said his “cowardly” protégé and candidate for the top post in Umno had told him he had to have the president’s permission should he wish to meet with the former Prime Minister.

Mahathir, who had dubbed the Deputy Prime Minister a coward in a recent talk to Malaysian students in Manchester, is now making the man look like a schoolboy of 10 that’s afraid to play truant and meet his former boss to discuss why the party had lost as badly as it did in the 8 March general elections.

The ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional, lost five states and for the first time in history, was denied the two-third majority in parliament, making the Prime Minister a lame duck and his authority defied by several Malay rulers who refused to accept his candidates for Mentri Besar (the state’s chief executive).

Pak Lah, is refusing to step down and instead is said to be using his regime-support apparatus to deny his challengers constitutional rights and due democratic process.

It’s a repeat performance many find intolerable, the first being the siege of Tengku Razaleigh he applied in 2004. It left the prince with a single nomination in his attempt to contest for party president.

Party divisions were ordered to deny him the 60 nominations he needed to qualify. He obtained only one nomination, i.e from his own division of Gua Musang.

As Tengku Razaleigh riled about the plot mounted to ruin his bid in his second attempt to contest for president, Mahathir publicly rued about the Umno Deputy President and Deputy Prime Minister’s apparent disability, asking what kind of a political party has Umno become under Pak Lah.

In the given circumstances, the name calling and the diminution of the number two left in its wake a remarkable turn of events that finally thundered with Raja Petra Kamaruddin’s article in his blog, Malaysia Today, implicating the Deputy Prime Minister and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, in the murder of the Mongolian translator.

Raja Petra’s Let’s Send Altantuya’s Murderers To Hell has earned him a charge of sedition. He denied bail and has since been a guest of His Majesty in Sungai Buluh Prison.

Even as Mahathir has been loudly wondering what kind of party Umno has become under his successor, observers were quick to ask why, indeed, did he enhance the set of regime-supportive apparatus that made it possible for the party president to preside as a dictator?

Mahathir may not have set up most of the quasi-political agencies that had made Umno rather of a muscular giant. But he strengthened them, ostensibly in an attempt to “institutionalize Umno”.

The Biro Tatanegara (BTN) in the Prime Minister’s Department is one among several agencies responsible directly to the Prime Minister and empowered to intercept, and has been intercepting, the democratic political processes.

It began employing ex-commandos during Mahathir’s premiership and has been alleged to have been using intimidation and coercion with impunity to keep party members subdued and the opposition endlessly harassed.

With power and big funds, these agencies promptly became abusive.

In the early 90s in preparation for a state by-election in Kuala Nerang, Trengganu, Seranta, another quasi-political agency set up during Mahathir’s regime, sent more than 3,000 members to stay for months within the small constituency to appeal for votes and ensure victory in the Pas’ territory.

Discipline could hardly be sustained among the participants and several of the young women became pregnant while villagers complained of the men troubling village girls. Maybe the idea was to quickly increase the number of voters.

Trouble in these agencies brewed from the early days. In the 80s when Sanusi Junid was Secretary-General of Umno he loudly proclaimed his disgust when he was given a set of blue videos that were made by and featured members of Kemas, yet another quasi-political agency.

The videos were made for sale, leaving Sanusi aghast and spoilt for a decision whether or not to lodge a police report against the instant film-stars and film-producers.

Many who had asked before what kind of a political party was Umno were left unheard.
Belonging to the politically favored agencies, however, must have made these vivaciously talented people highly influential in the party, for very conceivable reasons.

Pak Lah, it is alleged widely, has been excessively using these agencies along with the police. Even many senior journalists were debarred from the main stream media ever since he became PM, a reason why they became effective bloggers.

Abuses like these had obviously been one of the major causes for the massive rejection of the ruling party by members of Umno, a factor that will surely be carried through to the next general elections and will ensure the end of Umno’s unbroken rule since 1955.

These abuses have now been etched in blood when members of the police special squad attached to the Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister were charged for the murder of Altantuya who worked as translator for Najib’s political strategist, Abdul Razak Baginda.

To make matters even worse, Razak’s affidavit stated six persons had been killed and probably also blasted to bits with C4 before Altantuya became victim.

How do we protect ourselves from such powers of the regime’s special apparatus, therefore, becomes the biggest question that’s gaping in the face of the nation, daring each and everyone to ask the questions Raja Petra had voiced on our behalf.

Is it then already time to call an end to Umno and for the members to seek other and more realistic means for regime change rather than continue to wail like beaten banshees over ruined chances to democratically contest in the party?

In the light of all these it is pertinent to ask, is it at all useful for Tengku Razaleigh to keep trying to breach the siege in Umno or would he serve the nation better should he call it a day and join Anwar Ibrahim in Parti Keadilan Rakyat as a faction, or revive his old vehicle, Semangat 46? --- a. ghani ismail, 8 May, 2008

Umno In Ballet

BALLET IN PRECINCT THREE – A CASE OF ZOMBIES FLYING HIGH IN UMNO

Squeezed into a narrow spider hole over two days of deft moves in Umno, deputy premier, Najib Tun Razak, must now make up his mind either to aggress for number one or be sacked along with Pak Lah in or before the party Supreme Council election scheduled for December.

The April 10 meeting of divisional leaders from Kedah and Penang with Najib issued him an ultimatum he cannot evade. They said they will vote for Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and Muhyiddin Yassin for number one and two if he does not stand up and fight. They want Pak Lah out, pronto.

The following day in Johor, Pak Lah, in a meeting with state party leaders, could not offer a succession plan he was asked for.

A date for his exit was then suggested - 2010, when in the state’s Umno liaisons committee meeting on Saturday April 5, Pak Lah’s immediate departure was discussed, a consensus not reached merely because of Sharir Samad’s gratitude for being resurrected from the dead by Pak Lah who appointed him a minister.

Johor Umno was clearly saying on April 11 Pak Lah has no wish to retire, meaning Najib must quickly make his decision known.

There’s a problem in the party about Tengku Razaleigh’s intention to drag Umno into a “supra-ethnic” mode, impressed as he had said he was with the PKR’s success in his April 4 speech at Gua Musang.

Umno in West Malaysia would prefer to remain predominantly a Malay party.

But while Najib is the best man to conserve the image and the policy of the Malay nationalist party, the person himself will have to be bold enough to take the risk of having Pak Lah order a police and ACA probe into the affairs related to the murder of the Mongolian beauty, Altantuya Sharibu, some believe is connected to a grand kickback.

Prometheus, it would seem, is still chained to a rock for teaching humans how to play with fire.

Umno, after being sucked by the patron-client capture for decades and subjected to Mahathir’s sit-and-sunder dictatorial misconduct for many years, is now profoundly short of presidential quality, while the overwhelming materialism that had disused the party’s élan and ethos had made many rich Umno leaders bastardized either into images of calypso sugar-daddies whose minions do the dirty jobs for them or into outright cowards without the daring to even squash a bug with their naked krisses.

The party, still shell-shocked after more than a month since the March 8 routing at the polls, is floundering for a certain direction. Truth is, she has outlived her corporate lifespan without reinvention. Umno is already 38 years old from the time it was reborn after the Emergency of 1969.

The members, used to looting from after the success of the industrial and commercial transition can hardly imagine what nationalism and the national struggle is about, the job of winning at the elections mostly done by professional “Gurkhas” employed by the Prime Minster’s Department since Mahathir became premier in 1981, and dictator in 1989.

In the 1999 general elections Mahathir loudly muttered his displeasure at Umno members who will not move even to put up the party’s posters and banners unless their palms were laced with hard currency.

The members have become mercenaries. But as someone remarked, why shouldn’t they? Why should anyone work for free to keep multi-millionaires and billionaires afloat when most members can hardly afford to repair the kitchen of their houses without having to borrow from loan-sharks?

Umno simply does not make much sense any longer, dominated, as it were, by a fabulously wealthy and corrupt elite.

The party Supreme Council Mahathir had made all-powerful. Divisions can be frozen for the slightest dissent, the leaders and their families harassed for years, something people in the upper crust of the party know.

There’s a clear clash of cultures between the heavily gold-laden Umno patrons and the poor nationalist-dreamer having to crawl up the party ladder by dint of hard-work to be overtaken by overnight-enriched contractors of the Ali-Baba ilk, or by son-in-laws of the mighty who push-envelopes for colossal sums of gratuitous graft.

What sense is there left in Umno, especially after she has been reduced to a scum-size by the infant supra-ethnic PKR and her hardy bedfellows, one of an Islamic State origin and the other, a yellow-top taxi spreading Malaysian Malaysia since 1965 that has finally paid-off?

Even as Tengku Razaleigh is observably quiet after his shout for an Extraordinary General Meeting to scuttle Pak Lah he made on April 4, he ought to be remembered for calling on the party to purge herself from the corrupt, the oppressive and the deadwoods.

In short, Umno is in an ideological, leadership and vision-muddle, dwarfed in only four years of Pak Lah’s blunders after Mahathir had successfully spun a vision that somehow came to be respected by the people while it (the vision) was least understood in Umno herself.

The result is ludicrous – the former premier regretting publicly his choice for successor, and since ruing every person he placed in his and Pak Lah’s cabinet, including the current number two.

Mahathir made the rules in Umno that required candidates for president to be nominated by at least 30 percent of the divisions he now wants undone. Pak Lah wants it to stay.

Each nomination also carries 10 “bonus points”, making it possible for a candidate to win by an aggregate of those points, before the party delegates may cast their votes.

In 1993 Anwar Ibrahim challenged Ghafar Baba for position number two and won by the aggregate of “bonus point”, i.e. before the delegates cast their votes. Then Mahathir threw Anwar into jail in 1998 and the party has yet to recover from the aftershocks of that.

Now, with the “nomination quota” and the “bonus points” intact, and with Tengku Razaleigh’s inclination towards a “supra-ethnic Umno” not well-received by a large segment of the members, it is quite believable 34 Umno Members of Parliament from West Malaysia are now ready to cross court and jump in with Anwar in the PKR supra-ethnic push for Civil Society and a people-friendly government and political culture.

With 34 the Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance) would become the ruling coalition enjoying a majority of five in Parliament and governing five states, which effectively turns the table around but which would still need the inclusion of at least Sabah and Sarawak to bring the comforts needed for stable government.

That comfort zone can come later. Fact is, Umno and the BN can be spun around into becoming the underdog at any time and as the underdog, it is becoming harder and harder to believe Umno has the energy and the coherence to fight and to get back to the top.

The blow impacted on March 8 is appearing fatal. What will Najib do?

Several more questions gape for an answer. Can there actually be a reawakening of Malay nationalism in the party? Would not some of the wealthy in Umno employ voodoo artistes from Haiti to do the job for them and the reawakened nationalist become a ballet of zombies in Precinct Three, Putrajaya, where the Palace of Justice is often seen as a Casino de Jure? --- a. ghani ismail, 12 April, 2008

MALAYSIAN POLICE FEARED RATHER THAN FRIENDLY

THE ALCHEMY OF INVESTOR’S JITTERS TURNING INTO POLITICAL FEAR


Clearly showing in Malaysia are investors’ jitters and the blues of the industrial and commercial community. On April 2 when the Asian markets pulled a whopping bonanza with several up above four percent, the KLSE went down. It’s a sure sign Malaysia is already dislodged from the Asian money-movements and trends.

The Malaysian bourse had been drifting for months. In the SME sectors workers have been retrenched while the remaining have to do with lower pay.

Malaysian graduates have had to wait years before getting jobs and some work for less than what typists are paid. In some private colleges filling the dream of the Asian educational hub in the Klang Valley and its surroundings, some young graduates are being paid RM1,100 with annual increments of RM75 to RM100, good for the early 1980s.

The Prime Minister, Pak Lah, has done hardly a thing to arrest the skid. He has lost control and in losing control he shunted the country into a police state, making him appear more and more like a sea captain insisting the ship must sink with him.

The police department is now posing itself as the greatest threat the country is facing. It has been revealed policemen were involved in the macabre murder of the Mongolian beauty, Altantuya Sharibu. Police used live bullets in Trengganu on 8 September 2007 to disperse a peaceful assembly of 500 meaning to appeal for free and fair elections, injuring two, one of whom shot in the chest at point blank.

On 2 April Penang Chief Minister, Lim Guan Eng, was reported to have told presspersons he was ready to be detained or go to prison once again in reaction to intimidating remarks the police made about something he said concerning the New Economic Policy (NEP).

But that’s screaming, something the former bank senior accountant should avoid doing even after we know a demonstration of 3,000 had welcomed him in his first few days in office and a bus company has refused to ply to Komtar where he is nested as chief minister.

The police have since explained they merely wanted to know what he had said about the NEP to journalists from two Chinese vernacular newspapers. That’s within their line of duty, though the police will have to be fair about crowd control if the department is to be useful in stabilizing what is already a veritable circus of errors.

Police, equipped with electronics and satellite connections that can shut down car engines and control vehicle operations have been heard to have threatened members of the opposition, and even bloggers, with “accidents” on the roads, a manner of homicide that would be hard to prove in court.

It should be remembered there are others in the world that are endowed with even more sophisticated electronic arsenals. The Malaysian police could be made to look like clowns if they abuse the facilities they are entrusted with.

Former high officials in the corridors of power have said the police were also equipped with low-frequency radio-wave devices that can wirelessly be used to apply excruciating pain on their victims. A bit about these low-frequency weapons are featured on the web.

A check with neuroscientists in the universities confirmed this can be done, the pain inflicted by such low-frequency sound-waves are indeed quite bad. Hit in the brains the victim can be made to lose the sense of balance and suffer vertigo, or worse. It would be fatal while driving at high speed.

The solution suggested to the writer as a means to protect oneself against such low-frequency weapons was either to use a device to scatter the waves or some method they term as “brain over mind”. A neuroscientist consulted had said, ‘there is such a thing as brain over mind.’

It does not appear possible for “the brain over mind” thing to work against the level of pain that can be inflicted. You’d need to be an accomplished yogi. Perhaps the ‘brain over mind’ method may work if the appliances are used to input thoughts or suggestions, but not when it is simple electronically inflicted pain or vertigo, or in a game of virtual reality.

With or without these sophisticated devices, if police dump professionalism the breakdown of civil authority would quite certainly become a collapse of civil government, which would be a very high price to pay for sustaining an ineffective Prime Minister.

Lalang and Sand

The police, Seputeh MP Teresa Kok has told us, had entered into a rental agreement for 43 helicopters recently, when in the Ninth Malaysia Plan the department asked for less than 10.

The message behind Teresa’s issuance may be a warning against a possible Emergency, akin to the Operation Lalang we had to bear under Mahathir’s wicked rule on 27 October 1987, when 106 or more persons were detained and 16 lingered for many years in the Kamunting detention camp.

Some people close to the powers in Putrajaya had been talking about that possibility from months before the 8 March election. Some say Pak Lah’s family may have accumulated more than RM6 billion in the four years he has been in power and he has no other means to avoid the payback. The country is under duress.

A dark cloud was spreading over Malaysia when on 8 March the elections wrought the kind of damage on Pak Lah and the BN making it more secure for all of us in Malaysia. The BN has been denied the two-third majority and we may safely believe we have a King who will not accept Pak Lah’s prayer to apply an Emergency as a means out of woes he made himself.

A crackdown under the ISA or under the Police Act he can do and Pak Lah has cleverly turned over Internal Security to Syed Hamid Albar with the new cabinet, just when many had voiced the worry the heat would be brought to the height of a senseless crackdown after the “tsunami” the people unleashed on the BN in the elections.

Syed Hamid had been implicated in the attempt to sell about two billion cubic meters of sand to Singapore in the early days of Pak Lah’s premiership which was refused by the Johor state government. It was rumored his brother had obtained the required permits for the transaction. He denied the rumors.

Police Professionalism

The police must be quickly reminded of the dire need for professionalism or the only recourse the people have against a police state is to apply peaceful non-cooperation.

The means of active non-cooperation the people had used against Idi Amin “Dada” of Uganda should also be brought to mind.

Pak Lah should consider the fact the Pakatan Rakyat took more than 49 percent of the popular vote while it only takes three percent of the population to actively apply non-cooperation for the central authority to breakdown and bedlam ensues.

That three percent is now certainly there. He should not even think of trying. A country cannot be staked in a gamble such as that. The chips are down and he will have to go. We are feeling the heat of that.

Meanwhile, in the contest for Umno president, Tengku Razaleigh’s division in Gua Musang passed a resolution on 3 April to demand the party hold an Emergency General Meeting to consider the options open to rehabilitate Umno after the colossal loss in the 8 March elections.

Party sources say Tengku Razaleigh can already count more than 36 divisions (bahagian) on his side. If he is stumped this time as they did to him in 2004, Tengku Li can still become Prime Minister if he is able to withdraw from the BN 35 MPs and he joins the Pakatan Rakyat.

Mahathir, I am told, has gathered to himself one party division (Cheras) and more than 60 branches (cawangan). But he can talk. [To be continued. Stay in touch.] --- a. ghani ismail, 3 April, 2008

TYPHOON TROPHY HAS BEGUN IN TRENGGANU

FLAGGING-OFF THE TYPHOON TROPHY IN TRENGGANU –

TIME FOR A SEA-TIGER

No sooner had he arrived in his home state, Sultan Mizan of Trengganu, who is presently the Malaysian King, was reported to have said Islam [in Malaysia] had become a confusion after Dr. Mahathir had taken power over it [in 1988], and he wanted the power back.

He was obviously referring to Pak Lah’s lovey-dovey hand-on-the-shoulder stunning exhibitionism with James Bond’s woman, Michelle Yeoh. He did it before the camera during the 2007 Monsoon Cup, which would have been as good as unbuttoning his fly in public. He could not be bothered with the local culture, just as he couldn't be bothered with the floods in Johor that took 17 lives in 2006.

The public lovey-dovey display was unacceptable anywhere in the Islamic world, the episode becoming the centre-spread in the Pas’ tabloid, Harakah, during the recent elections.

Michelle isn’t quite the kind of celebrity that would fit into the culture zone of the first Malay state in the peninsular to have received Islam. The religion had reached Trengganu in the 14th century, long before Paremeswara married the Muslim princess of Pasai in 1409. The world’s best Qur’an reader for many years (until she chose to retire) had come from Trengganu.

Pak Lah, having attired himself as the leader of “Civilizational Islam” (Islam Hadhari) which Mahathir launched in 1999, should have known better.

But something vicarious could have been lying hidden in the “Nice Guy”, “Mr. Clean” and the “pious Islamic scholar” people did not know about and had discovered with the Monsoon Cup. To all appearances, he could not keep his hands off her.

It was conduct unbecoming of the Imam of Islam Hadhari, especially after his loyal Menteri Besar, Idris Jusoh, had churned for the state’s slogan, “Trengganu Bestari, Islam Hadhari” (A Knowledge-based Trengganu [and] Civilizational Islam]. It has now become a suicide bid.

The regnant refused to swear-in Idris for a second term and chose instead, Ahmad Said, nearly an unknown but better than the notorious.

Much money from the state’s oil royalty had gone to waste in the Monsoon Cup caper, an annual event that was believed to have been used to siphon off a lot of money from the state’s coffer, the beneficiaries of which were identified personalities closely related to Pak Lah. The people now want them proven corrupt and locked up.

But Sultan Mizan’s remark about the bedlam resulting from Mahathir’s takeover of religious power from the states went further than the Monsoon Cup and the alleged embezzlement.

Mahathir’s infamous knockout of the Lord President and three Supreme Court judges in 1988 gave him greater influence over the Judiciary than any previous Prime Ministers had had. Then in the same year he complemented that with the constitutional amendment now known as 121 (1A).

The amendment virtually sqwarked the nation into two legal and judicial systems and as a result, while Mahathir became a dictator, Muslims and non-Muslims in Malaysia rued the evil of the near-absolute power he enjoyed.

Many persons were sent directly into detention camps and were wasted for years in them for practicing or teaching ‘deviant Islam’. Religious rehabilitation centers were built and many young persons were thrown into them for years for petty offences like being caught eating in a public place in the month of Ramadhan, or for buying the Digit Lotteries.

Muslims are free to eat and drink in the restaurants and food-stalls in Mecca and Medinah or anywhere else in the world during Ramadhan. This law and many like it occur only in Malaysia.

Mahathir progressed from dictator to ending his career with the great Putrajaya few approved and which plopped the residence of Prime Minister, Seri Perdana, into an obvious feudal setting, in isolation from his ministers and minions cast by a lake he crossed with umpteen bridges people can hardly understand what they were for.

It does seem like he had built for himself his own Camelot where he intended to remain all his blessed life but failed.

It is clear Sultan Mizan had flagged-off in Trengganu the Typhoon Trophy in place of the Monsoon Cup, which has surely come to an end.

In the twists of the unfolding plot Mahathir called for a foreign accountant firm to be hired to audit the spending of Trengganu’s oil revenue. His foes replied they want him scanned for financial traffic of similar sorts when he had been PM.

It’s a setting for carnival time. One or the others may, in fact, run themselves into goal.
Mahathir cannot champion anti-corruption, surely. He is himself popularly known in Malaysia as the Father of Corruption. Never was Malaysia as corrupt as she had been under his 22 years at the helm.

It has apparently become worse under Pak Lah but the rot quite certainly started with Mahathir.

He is proud to have made a few billionaires and several hundred millionaires among Malays. But most of these have merely become rentiers.

He succeeded to industrialize Malaysia, mainly with the help of the Japanese who now number more than 1,600 companies. He also succeeded to provide Malaysia with a broad-based economy that has been able to withstand severe downturns of the world economy. But morally he eroded the social resistance to the degree even the judiciary became corruption-pliant.

Mahathir has disqualified himself as a fighter against corruption and is merely observed as clowning. He has failed to keep the loyalty even of his protegé, Zainuddin Maidin, who he nurtured as a close aide from a newspaper stringer to become editor-in-chief of the leading Malay newspaper, Utusan Melayu, and then to the heights of Minister of Information.

The man swiped him several times since and recently held him also accountable for the BN crash on 8 March in which the former journalist was unseated in Sungai Petani, Kedah.

Tengku Razaleigh, a noble Kelantan prince who had been Malaysia’s Minister of Finance, is in relative terms, whiter than white, and when he lost to Mahathir by 43 votes in 1987, instead of ranting and cursing himself out of breath the man fasted for three months (or more) and prayed to his Lord so much he showed a mark on his forehead from the frequent prostrations.

I asked him then whether he was sure he was not overdoing it.

He told me in reply his mother had taught him when the time comes for him to take the taste of a fall, he must remember he has a Friend in God and ‘ He is your only reliable Friend. Hold fast to Him and perhaps one day what is yours that you seek will find you instead.’

I had been a witness to that good news that had secured him in his worst hours and he should now rely on God again. This time he will probably win.

But the important thing is not about that. Instead it is about what he will do with the acquired power and the distribution of that power. Will he promise us a mature democracy with the cherished freedoms and rights?

Will he promise us on his honor to rid us of all the oppressive laws and provide for us social justice?

What are his promises to us he must quickly say. It takes a first drop to release the forces for an ocean to flood the valleys and the plains. ---- a. ghani ismail, 1 April, 2008