Dr M’s Malay Ultra Redux
By Din Merican
May 19, 2008
The wheel has come full circle for Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. He began his rise up the UMNO hierarchy as an agitator for Malay economic and political rights. The role took him all the way to the top of the greasy pole, as Benjamin Disraeli elegantly put it, as President of UMNO and Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Four decades on, and a mere five years after the conclusion of his overly long tenure as Prime Minister, the Tun has begun a sure descent into what I believe is certain political infamy by reprising the role that won him his spurs an aeon ago.
Dr. Mahathir’s tirade at a gathering of UMNO’s disaffected in Johor Baru last Saturday was a crass regurgitation of all the hoary, old and discredited chauvinism that has brought ignominy to leaders from Henrik Verwood to the present Robert Mugabe. It was a performance that is a reminder of the wisdom of Santayana’s dictum: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Dr. Mahathir characteristically did.
You would think that an ex-Prime Minister of Dr. Mahathir’s stature would refrain from dredging up figments of the chauvinist imagination at a time when the Malaysian polity is trying to undo damage visited upon it in the 22 years of his prime ministerial tenure. Some pundits interpret the 12th General Election results as an exhilarating repudiation of race-based politics. It was precisely this politics that Dr. Mahathir sought to resurrect in Johor Baru, flying in the face of Santayana’s wry caution.
It was also this kind of politics that had led UMNO to its present moribund state. Dr. Mahathir, paradoxically posing as self-anointed savior of UMNO and the Malay race, is accelerating the party’s demise through reviving issues now horribly passé.
Dr. Mahathir sallies forth, egregiously flailing away at targets within UMNO and without, in an attempt to rescue his sinking political legacy. That legacy took a severe body blow when the Royal Commission on the Lingam video clip released its findings late last week. It held that Dr. Mahathir has issues to answer in the whole affair of a conspiracy of judge-fixing and, by extension, case-fixing.
It was one finding that I had not expected from this panel of inquiry headed by the former Chief Judge of Malaya, Tan Sri Haidar Mohamed Ali, whose conduct in the series of events that led to Tun Salleh Abas’s sacking as Lord President two decades ago was, to say the least, less than edifying.
I had expected — given the refusal of Haidar and company to give a hearing to certain material witnesses whose testimony would have immensely aided the inquiry — that the panel would reprieve Dr Mahathir.
Why? Because Dr. Mahathir is the teflon politician: no dirt can attach to him because he has a ready answer and a facile riposte to every occasion of suspected wrongdoing. It is not as if he is infallible; it is just that given his reading of his circumstances, he always had a justification for his actions. Like Charles de Gaulle, he is Malaysia in the same way the Fifth Republic’s president was France—so complete was the identification of his self-interest with the national interest.
They say it’s the last 50 metres that separates the men from the boys. It simply means that when it is crunch time, men of steel and endurance come out on top while the others are reduced to bit players and also-rans. In political terms, this translates into how you conduct yourself when you have your back to the wall. Do you stoop to being a demagogue, or do you rise to a level of nobility and become, well, a statesman if you like?
This is crunch time in the life of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. When most people who have been some people would have retired to complete their memoirs, or potter around in the garden, or loll on the sofa with grandchildren, this octogenarian is flailing away – at his successor’s patent failings, and now at the revenant ghost that has haunted the national psyche for the better part of 2 decades.
Like Banquo’s ghost, memories of the 1988 judicial impeachment of Salleh Abas have hovered over the political establishment, a source of recurring discomfiture to those who man the ramparts of the justice system.
When it occurred, the impeachment was viewed as a momentous event that only the naïve expected would evanesce from the collective memory. Others, more worldly and attuned to the boomerang characteristics of similarly seismic episodes, felt that Salleh’s extirpation is a suppurating wound that would have to be exorcised or the system risks developing gangrene.
When reverberations from that episode blew to gale-force proportions in the case of the Ayer Molek share transfer episode and in the bizarre coincidences in the holidaying of a former Chief Justice in New Zealand, both occurring in the mid-1990s, observers were led to surmise that Justice N. H. Chan’s epigram “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark???; was prescient.
The Salleh Abas imbroglio simply would not go away so that the Lingam video clip showing a senior lawyer brokering judicial appointments on the phone and unveiled by Anwar Ibrahim in September 2007, was like the discovery of the murder weapon far from the scene of a hideous and puzzling homicide.
It has turned out to be a truly fortuitous bit of evidence that has unraveled murky episodes in judicial-legal circles. And what is Dr. Mahathir’s reaction? You would have guessed it: blackmail.
Note other aspects of his reaction. He wants the findings to lead to his prosecution so that he can tell in open court what he knows about judges who lobbied for promotions. Never mind that judges who did so are inherently suspect and for that reason, not worth a damn. To Dr. Mahathir, such behaviour is now a weapon in his arsenal against anticipated charges.
To Dr. Mahathir, other people’s weaknesses and failings are objects for manipulation, not occasions for their summary disqualification. As ever, his feel for the principle behind a thing is flexible. So much for the exponent of Asian values and erstwhile critic of western decadence.
For him attack – no, a preemptive strike – is the best form of defence. Never mind also, if the man who will determine whether there will be charges is Attorney General Gani Patail, about as credible an arbiter of such affrays as Myanmar’s junta is of the validity of the recent referendum on that country’s future constitution.
In paraphrase of Professor Henry Higgins, how do you resolve the problem of Dr. Mahathir? Frankly you cannot; because he is like that episode in the fabulist fiction of the great Argentine storyteller, Jorge Louis Borges, about a headless labyrinth – it has no core and it represents the height of decadence.