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

WILL UMNO SURVIVE OR DIE?

TWINKLE-TWINKLE LITTLE STAR,
HOW HAS UMNO BEEN THUS FAR?




It’s now a struggle of life and death in Umno. Eight days after Pak Lah announced his new and trim cabinet, a third deputy minister resigned, the second from Sabah Umno. It is causing people to ask which way the monsoon is blowing. To all and sundry, the rival multi-ethnic Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) is, in fact, merely like an extension of Umno Sabah.

Pak Lah has lost confidence and the central power is collapsing. But in the party he is chief, a position of necessary deference in the patron-client culture Umno now entails.

But something must be done to secure the party from ruin and Tengku Razaleigh, once before a contender for party number one, is now leading the pack to contest Pak Lah as Umno president, with the former premier’s son, Mukhriz Mahathir, as flag-bearer in the mutiny for the bounty.

Meanwhile, in Trengganu where a stalemate resulted after the regnant refused to accept Idris Jusoh as Menteri Besar, Pak Lah’s resistance in the conflict with the ruler crumbled on 26 March, the former Menteri Besar falling victim. He has since announced the BN fully supports Ahmad Said as MB.

A specter is haunting Umno, casting a shadow the likes of the Angel of Death. Even as the party is becoming progressively a tragic comedy, some want the lame leader and his deputy to remain at the helm for yet another year before allowing for the party’s Supreme Council election.

It would be like putting the party into deep freeze, the DNA recoverable to revive it like in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, but of a pygmy.

The party elections should have been held last year. It was postponed by Pak Lah with the backing of his deputy, Najib Tun Razak, and the party’s Supreme Council.

While Umno is still the largest single winner in the recent elections, the BN it leads, having lost the two-third majority in parliament, is looking like Humpty Dumpy and waiting for the great fall.

In one terrible sweep of the People’s temper the BN lost four states in the recent elections, while in Kelantan the Islamic Pas strengthened itself beyond belief.

From a majority of one in the state assembly the Pas rose to the heights of 38 in a field of 45, leaving Umno and the BN cast in crystalline despondence with only 6 seats, the remaining one given to the PKR.

The leader’s head must roll, but with Najib Tun Razak having to take cover behind the number one from the mob in the wake of the Altantuya-Razak Baginda murder trial, it would take a general rebellion in the dazed party to oust the duo from the helm.

A challenge against the two top posts will damage party unity to a degree, whatever will be the outcome.

Can the behemoth regain cohesion after the battle for control is the big question. It is however foregone. The battle is on if Pak Lah refuses to quit.

The BN did not simply lose power. The central authority is in a shamble. Pak Lah was successfully challenged by two Malay rulers of the federation who rejected the Prime Minister’s decision to retain Shahidan Kassim in Perlis, and Idris Jusoh in Trengganu, as Menteri Besar.

The events crystallized the resolve of the minority in Umno to contest and unseat both the number one and the number two in the party.

Party insiders say 12 Umno divisions in the Razaleigh-Mukhriz pact shall move to demand for an Emergency General Meeting to be held on May 11 and for the party elections to be held later this year.

The Umno Supreme Council has decided on 27 March the party election will be held in December, a move some see as buying time. Nothing was said about the Emergency General Meeting Razaleigh had asked the party divisions to demand.

The party divisions are moving as Razaleigh intended. The first of these, the Cheras Umno division, has done it. Unconfirmed reports say the Puchong Umno division will soon do the same.

The plan is to contest against Pak Lah and Najib in the party. The hope is for the 12 in the pact to snowball and strike home the message for the party members to chew and digest that this time the party must either change the leadership or ignominiously die like a drowned sewer rat in the next general election.

Some party bigwigs not only want the elections delayed but are again wishing away the right of members to contest against the top two. That was done in 2004.

Pak Lah and Najib suspended democracy in Umno, denying members the right to contest the number one and number two positions in the party Supreme Council and in the Wings. Tengku Razaleigh hobbled on merely a single nomination for president as a result.

As the melodrama unfolds and the deputy transport minister, Ghapur Salleh, tendered his resignation, political watchers gravely ponder on the possibility in Trengganu of a walkout by a dirty dozen from Umno to form the new government with the Pas eight, which gives the 20 a clear majority in the field of 32.

Pak Lah has kneeled before the constitutional monarch to save his skin, but not before slurring the sovereign. He had said the regnant had made an illegal move.

Then the Umno state liaisons secretary, Wahid Rosol, was reported to have said the remaining 23 Umno state assemblymen were directed by Pak Lah to boycott the swearing-in ceremony at the palace that had been scheduled on 23 March.

The dye could have been cast. The new Menteri Besar, Ahmad Said, is already installed and he can cast the required spell to dissolve the state assembly and force another state election, no matter the change of mood Pak Lah has announced. The Pas will make a clean sweep of Trengganu should that happen, giving six states to the Alternative Front.

It is the king who will call the shots. Pak Lah must now beg for the sovereign’s mercy to keep Trengganu with the BN.

What will Umno decide? Will most members still want to sink and swim with Pak Lah and Najib?

How will Najib decide? Will he do as he did in 1987 when the party was split in the middle and he was with the ‘B Team’ until the arithmetic favored him?

At the last moment he swung to ‘Team A’. With 26 delegates’ votes he had in his grip he tilted the scales conclusively in favor of the ‘A Team’, led by Mahathir, the incumbent president.

Najib was very calculative. Mahathir won against Tengku Razaleigh by 43 votes in 1987. The party lay dead on the judge’s bench in court in the following year, but regained life as Umno (Baru).

It is a matter of life and death for Umno once again. It’s a simple decision to either go for change at the top or to conserve the lame.

A seer is required to peer into the crystal-ball to see and tell Pak Lah what lies in the near future for him and his silenced son-in-law, Hairy.

For Najib, the job is that of a magician the likes of David Copperfield. He should decide to come out loud behind Razaleigh or find the means to vanish before the mob that’s waiting to clobber him as soon as the Altantuya-Razak Baginda trial is done.

But it is now about how Umno will behave that is the focus of attention, the party being quite uncertain about what it should do in the uncharted waters. It has begun to show split-resolve and looking at the way the opposition to Pak Lah and to Najib is shaping, an effective mutiny is clearly being brewed.

Umno must either resolve as a whole to remove Pak Lah (and Najib unless he joins the rebellion) or the party will bleed to death, members crossing over to the parties in the Alternative. This is a do-or-die resolve that Tengku Razaleigh and Mukhriz are leading, insiders talking about “a circle” having formed months before around the elder duo, Tengku Razaleigh and Mahathir.

They concluded they have to aggress now to save the party or Umno will surely be damaged beyond repair.

But it is looking like Umno must be ready to sustain some injury one way or the other, seeing there is little cohesion other than what arises from the patron-client grip. Without any clear moral function, coherence can only edge on the ethnic temper. What is the winning remedy the duo proposed?

Why can’t Umno begin to think in terms of opening the party to the PKR like it is an extension of Umno Sabah and for Anwar Ibrahim to be reinstalled where he belongs in Umno?

Many questions need to be asked. Until the Umno Supreme Council agree to the Extraordinary General Meeting to be held on May 11, the pressure from the divisions, it is believed, will continue to crush Pak Lah. --- a. ghani ismail, 26 March, 2008

CENTRAL AUTHORITY BREAKS DOWN

SYSTEMS PARALYSIS - BACKBONE BROKEN

Breakdown of the central authority is something Malaysia has not been prepared for. If this happened in Indonesia, Thailand or in the Philippines, the army would have taken over and possibly return power to a civil government a few months after applying the remedy. In Malaysia rulers are the Colonel-in-Chiefs and theoretically may takeover and perform the required therapy. But it has never happened before and in a first time the medicine can cause more complications than the disease itself.

Prime Minister, Pak Lah, is obviously lame, confidence in him plunging below zero after the colossal loss at the polls and a next-to-nothing cabinet he pulled from a disused hat.
Failing to perform from the start, he was a PM that never should have been. He is remaining number one merely because of a very loyal number two who is himself losing his worth.

In Perlis the ruler sidestepped the former Menteri Besar Pak Lah wanted to retain and in Trengganu the regent installed the palace’s choice as Menteri Besar who, alas, failed to divide the BN’s assemblypersons, even by a count of two. They have since sacked him from Umno.

But the job is done. The new Menteri Besar can perform his duties and according to legal experts, he may appoint members of the opposition Pas as his Exco and even dissolve the assembly to call for fresh state election.

Outside the circle of BN diehards, the people are grateful to the palace for what it has done. The Anti-Corruption Agency should be immediately moved once reports are lodged to enable action.

On Pulau Man off Kuala Trengganu, Idris Jusoh, the former Menteri Besar, built an assortment of mosques to attract tourists, one of which he dubbed the “Crystal Mosque”. Built of glass, it now serves to remind him never to undress inside it or visible in the view from the palace would be a help of rubbish.

Backbone

Umno was and remains the Barisan Nasional’s backbone. While inside the party an attempt to change the leadership and to rehabilitate the party is being made by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, in the ganglions of the beaten nervous system arise some who still want to deny due democratic process to the contenders as it had happened before.

Pak Lah and his deputy, Najib Tun Razak, suspended democracy in Umno during the 2004 Supreme Council election, denying the members the right to contest any of the number one and number two positions in the party.

More than fifty party elders appealed to Pak Lah to restore and to safeguard democracy in Umno after the election was done. The effects of the deed were severe.

That the Kelantan prince was able to get merely one nomination was one result of the upbeat game of the powers in Umno. The other was wholesale corruption.

Many candidates for number three downwards openly paid delegates thousands of Ringgits each for their votes, making the Umno election and Umno divisional behavior pliant because of simple corruptibility. How can such a party secure the national interests?

The late Ghafar Baba, formerly party deputy president and Deputy Prime Minister, was moved to suggest the positions of party president and prime minister should best be auctioned at the next Umno Supreme Council election, which is scheduled to sit at any time this year.

In Kuala Muda at the border of Penang and Kedah, fishermen sell their catches by the tradisional Bisik (whisper) method. Buyers whisper into the ears of the fishermen the price they are willing to pay for a given basket of catch, which is possibly the best means of auctioning the Umno presidency.

Led by Pak Lah Umno had become larger and larger a farce. To make matters worse, Pak Lah had declared openly his willingness to entertain all of Singapore’s demands, meaning he would dump the half-built Scenic Bridge and forever deny Malaysia her right to use the Tebrau Straits for shipping.

He declared he was willing to let Singapore Air-Force to use Malaysian air-space, and he would sell Singapore about two billion tons of sand to further the island-republic’s land-reclamation programs.

Umno had stood firmly against the sell-off and the beginning of the end of the Prime Minister’s as a wholesale outlet had begun. But four years later Umno is feared morally loose and compromising, suggesting the rot that had eaten into the party had been spreading fast.

He then cast his glance to Kuala Trengganu and there his son-in-law, Hairy, was said to have presided over the big splashes we know as the Monsoon Cup, costing RM 550 million at least for the first two seasons. The monies came from the states oil royalty.

The rest we already know. His friend, Patrick Lim of Penang, after becoming richer quickly in Trengganu was set to become the developer of the richest land he harvested in Penang, now assumed jeopardized after the DAP-PKR landslide in the island.

Umno had been neither vigilant nor aggressive to protect the national and state’s interests in what had transpired. It continued to have a strong voice in Johor but in Trengganu it slumped before the Monsoon Cup "pirates". That was the essential message of the Trengganu regent.

It is clear a lot of people are together with the palace and hence, what should be inside the rehabilitation package Tengku Razalegh is offering would be ultimately critical in deciding the outcome of his venture.

Dr. Mahathir

Dr. Mahathir has since endorsed Tengku Razaleigh’s mission, but should Mahathir at all be involved seeing he was single-handedly responsible for the gross corruption that overwhelmed Malaysia? He is believed to have even suffered the highest in the judiciary to corruption.

Malaysia had become steeped in corruption beginning with Dr. Mahathir’s regime. It was only a matter of time before the “progress” rubbed into Umno. It hit an all-time high in the 2004 Umno Supreme Council election.

Once the party succumbed to that level and style of materialism, it was time for the rot to bring the whole house down. What happened at the polls on 8 March was, indeed, Le Fall.

Tengku Li’s bid may be considerably weakened by Mahathir’s backing. There are not many in and outside the party who wants Mahathir. Since his retirement, he won popular attention solely because he was useful to rid the country of Pak Lah.

Now that it is assumed accomplished, Mahathir has begun once again to rise as a sore thumb whose prints are showing in the Royal Commission’s enquiry into the misconduct at the highest levels of the judiciary.

It was Mahathir who ruined the Malaysian judiciary.

Everywhere I went people, and especially the younger sets, do not want any part of Mahathir. Even the Scenic Bridge they reject, saying he wanted it built because he had a pocketful of the proceeds.

The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Mahathir.

Umno and the BN will have to take cognizant of the change in attitudes that swept them like a tsunami. Next time it will be predictably the Mother of all Storms that will knock them down flat on their backs, once and for all.

It is looking that simple. Recovery and rehabilitation is inconceivable without reinvention, and a certain moral purpose. The exercise must have the energy to cleanse the party of corruption and the residing arrogance.

The party has lost its moral function and without a sense of moral purpose, it will never gain the trust it would need to recover. It is as simple as that.

Burying the head under the ground like the ostrich is funny to children, surely, but fatal to voters who now know what they can inflict upon the rich and mighty by the collective strength of that simple People’s Cross they make on the ballot paper.

The People have spoken. Malaysians clearly want a leadership with a moral function and able to uphold the Principles of State that are unique and necessarily so because of the nations plurality.
Malaysia was built upon a commitment to a Social Contract that was based on simple trust and on the assumption the contract shall be applied for the betterment of every community and of every individual citizen, no matter his/her ethnicity.

The BN, especially under Pak Lah, has veered from this and as a result, the coalition had become more and more a weird oligarchy of families enjoying the pleasures of power at the expense not only of the people, but of the nation as well.

Umno needs to be reinvented. But people do not want Mahathir. His son is something else. He cannot be his father’s keeper and he has a substantial number of well-wishers.

Tengku Razaleigh, on the other hand, is a bright number, a man that has seen both, good and bad times.

The other bright number is Anwar Ibrahim, made of steel, albeit now reinforced in an America foundry, but furnishing an answer and a certain direction in the geopolitical and economic “Great Shift” - the extensive historical exercise that is turning Europe into the greatest military oligarchy history has ever known.

With the Lisbon Treaty of December 2003 the EU will be an imperial giant if nothing is done to withdraw it from the commitments it has made. Through it Pak Lah was secure in somnolence. We cannot do that even if we wish for such a special talent.

We need a leadership and a party that are conscious of the gigantic changes that are happening in the world and we want persons who can make us all aware of the implications the events will impact us with.

We need a leadership that can lead us through the processes of change, of modernization, of development and of integration, a leader who has a clear view of the future.

It is certain about half of Malaysians and of the Malays have agreed we do not need to be looking back at the horrors of rampant corruption and of power abuses. We want to be a mature democratic society and for that we need our liberties.

Who are you to say “No!”? You are centrally a broken individual. You now need the cooperation of the Alternative or you cannot even dream of amending the least substantial law in parliament. ----a. ghani ismail, 24 March, 2008